MobiTV is the mobile TV provider for Sprint, which costs $20 a month. They'd keep content they charged you for protected, so freeloaders couldn't swoop in and pick up the same streams, right? Wrong. By punching in qtv.mobitv.com/sprintTVlive.mcd, anyone with the right phone can access the streams. That info was posted on Howard Forums, and now MobiTV is claiming that posting that information violates their intellectual property rights. So they're trying to shutdown Howard Forums entirely. Clarification: Sprint tells us that they had "nothing to do with this situation."

Howard Chui, the site's founder has always complied with requests to pull down bootlegged software, so he's not a willy-nilly copyright violator. It's kind of like the HD DVD key debacle last year, except the stench of bullshit is even stronger, since we're just talking about a frickin' URL that MobiTV and Sprint didn't take even the most basic cautions to protect. We hope Howard prevails over their ridiculous takedown request. [Yahoo!]

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