mediadefender

Collateral damage in the war on piracy

MediaDefender is rightly taking its lumps in the court of public opinion after being fingered as the culprit behind the Memorial Day weekend denial-of-service outage at Revision3. But this is just a sideshow in the bigger battle waged by big copyright holders against illegal digital file sharing.

And as we're learning, things are getting out of hand.

Revision3 happened to use a BitTorrent tracker for perfectly legitimate content distribution. But BitTorrent has also figured in unauthorized sharing of copyrighted movies, TV shows, and music. So MediaDefender went on a fishing expedition. (Read Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback's full description here.) … Read more

The most crazy tech story since the HP pretexting scandal

This is one of the more bizarre stories to hit the tech world since the Hewlett-Packard pretexting scandal.

Check out the post from Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback detailing the inside story of the denial-of-service attack which crippled his company's servers over the Memorial Day weekend.

Revision3 tracked the attack back to an Internet address belonging to a subsidiary of Artist Direct, called MediaDefender. And it admitted as much when confronted with the evidence. I'll let Jim take it from here:

So I picked up the phone and tried to get in touch with ArtistDirect interim CEO Dimitri Villard. … Read more

Web Sheriff doing it different than MediaDefender

The names of some of the top antipiracy companies--MediaDefender, Web Sheriff and MediaSentry--evoke the images of muscle-bound, caped crusaders who swoop in to rescue copyright content from masked Internet bandits.

It appears now that the kryptonite for some of these companies is hackers. Just more than a week ago, someone swiped 6,000 of MediaDefender's e-mails and published them on the Web.

In what has turned out to be an embarrassing revelation for the company, the correspondence shows that the firm employs controversial methods to fight piracy, such as honeypots, decoys and denial-of-service attacks.

But John Giacobbi, president of … Read more

MediaDefender is wake-up call for entertainment sector

The irony of the MediaDefender case is that while one segment of the entertainment industry huddles with FBI agents over the theft of e-mails, another segment has acknowledged purchasing stolen e-mails.

In court papers made public last month, the Motion Picture Association of America disclosed that it paid a hacker $15,000 for private e-mails belonging to TorrentSpy, a BitTorrent tracking site. The MPAA, which said it was unaware that the e-mails were stolen, has accused TorrentSpy of encouraging copyright violations.

Then came startling revelations about the tactics employed by MediaDefender, an antipiracy company that tries to thwart illegal file … Read more

Report:MediaDefender e-mails leaked to Web

MediaDefender, a company that offers to protect copyright content from illegal file sharing, saw private internal e-mails leaked to the Web over the weekend. The e-mails appear to reveal some controversial tactics used by the firm to fight piracy.

The e-mails indicate that MediaDefender, which works closely with the music and movie industries, may have been secretly behind MiiVii, a Web site that promised to enable people to upload and download copyright movies, TV shows and music, according to a report Sunday evening in The Wall Street Journal.

The e-mails indicate that the site was a ruse. The MiiVii software … Read more