Anonymous Hacker Group Attacks BMI Website

Members of Anonymous protest in Madrid, on February 13, 2011.

JAVIER SORIANO/AFP/Getty

The hacker collective Anonymous has attacked the website of copyright collection agency BMI as part of Operation Payback, their ongoing crusade against "copywrong." BMI have temporarily taken their website offline in response to the group's denial of service attack, and have issued a statement noting that the hackers were not able to breach their security and that it will resume its services to artists, publishers and licensees shortly.

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Anonymous also released a statement, asserting that their hostile action was motivated by what they believe is the film and music industry's abuse of copyright law for their financial gain. "No company shall take advantage of our government to churn profits and censor information in any form," the message reads.

Photos: Random Notes

This is only the latest attack in Anonymous' Operation Payback campaign. The group has previously targeted the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, Websheriff and the British Photographic Industry, among others. More recently, Anonymous has focused its aggression on companies such as Visa, MasterCard and PayPal after they made it more difficult to donate to WikiLeaks. Those attacks were largely unsuccessful, which could have something to do with them returning the Operation Payback project to its roots in attacking pro-copyright companies.

Anonymous revives Operation Payback, wages war on "copywrong" [Ars Technica]

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Song Stories

“Baby Got Back”

Sir Mix-a-Lot | 1992

While watching a Budweiser commercial during the Super Bowl, Sir Mix-a-Lot thought the skinny female models in the ad didn’t represent reality. So he wrote this ode to ample bottoms, featuring its famous to-the-point lyric: “I like big butts and I cannot lie.” MTV banished the video, featuring shaking booties and sexually suggestive fruit, to 9 p.m. or later. “I thought my career was over,” he told Rolling Stone. “Then I called Rick Rubin, and I told him the video was banned, and he was like, 'Great!' We sold another 2 million records.”

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