• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, March 10, 2008

MobiTV appears to be backing off legal action against a popular mobile forum after hitting the site with a cease-and-desist letter last week for posting a Web address providing free access to the MobiTV programming.

The URL posted by a member of HowardForums.com allowed users to bypass MobiTV's paid front-end to access any of the site's streaming mobile TV channels via mobile device or PC without charge. The URL, initially discovered on a Sprint mobile forum, has been widely propagated for months, according to tech news site BetaNews.

The URL led to an XML file with Web addresses for watching MobiTV video channels.

HowardForums proprietor Howard Chui warned visitors to the site on Friday that it might be taken down for a time after receiving a letter last week from MobiTV's general counsel threatening further legal action if Chui didn't remove the URL and related links by 5 p.m. PST on Friday.

In a copy of the March 4 letter obtained by Broadband Reports, MobiTV General Counsel Andrew Missan alleged that posting of the MobiTV links on HowardForums constitutes "a violation and infringement of MobiTV's intellectual property rights, including, without limitation, its copyright, trademark, and trade secret rights."

The company began streaming video in 2003, and says its $9.99 monthly service now has more than 3 million subscribers.

MobiTV also sent notification of the alleged copyright violation to Global Net Access, the hosting service for HowardForums. But in a statement issued late Friday, MobiTV appeared to be moving toward a technical, rather than legal, resolution to the controversy.

MobiTV said it was "actively implementing additional security measures to address this unauthorized access as well as the isolated issue of certain content feeds posted on Howardforums.com and on other websites. It is our responsibility to ensure that our service and the programming entrusted to us by our content providers is protected at all times."

Furthermore, MobiTV said that its intent was only to remove specific information from HowardForums "and NOT to interrupt or shutdown the valuable service the entire site provides to mobile users around the world."

Chui had said he didn't plan to remove the URL in question because it was a publicly available Web address rather than the result of any kind of hacking.

In an e-mail from MobiTV posted by Chui on HowardForums last week, the company's corporate counsel had maintained that the URL wasn't publicly available, and that "the only way to obtain this url is through hacking/debugging."

But Chiu, who said his site has 800,000 members, disputed that notion. "No hacking was involved," he said in an interview Friday. "MobiTV could've added access control and people wouldn't be able to view it anymore. When I want to protect something online I put a password on it or encrypt it."

After speaking with MobiTV President and Co-Founder Paul Scanlan late Friday, however, Chiu said he felt reassured the company wouldn't attempt to have the site taken down. "Now I can go shovel snow," said Chiu, who lives in Toronto.