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.) But pay particular attention to this snippet:

Revision3 runs a tracker expressly designed to coordinate the sharing and downloading of our shows. It's a completely legitimate business practice, similar to how ESPN puts out a guide that tells viewers how to tune into its network on DirecTV, Dish, Comcast and Time Warner, or a mall might publish a map of its stores. But someone, or some company, apparently took offense to Revision3 using Bittorrent to distribute its own slate of shows. Who could that be?

Now we know. And just who is MediaDefender? (Check out the archive of news articles that company collected on its Web site. For some reason, I doubt the collection will be updated to feature MediaDefender's latest exploits.) In a 2005 profile, Ars Technica said the Santa Monica, Calif., company made its living poisoning peer-to-peer networks. The hyperbole is understandable as MediaDefender plants fake files or decoys on peer-to-peer systems

But let's not lose track of who's really calling the shots. The power brokers in this novella work out of offices at big record labels and movie studios and MediaDefender is only a bit player, doing their bidding.

"It's absolutely not our policy to overwhelm any servers or do any DoS attacks," MediaDefender CEO Randy Saaf told my colleague Elinor Mills this afternoon. "We post fake files. In our mind, we were not targeting a legitimate company. All we saw was a public tracker with pirated content."

In other words, Revision3 was collateral damage. Sorry for taking you down, but that's the necessary--albeit inadvertent--price we pay because others simply refuse to play by accepted rules. Or something corny like that.

[gerrrg]

Speaking of torrents, that's how NIN distributed their FLAC files for free...I wonder if Trent Reznor had any problems because of MediaDefender?

[BFeely]

Reznor probably had no probelms because he was smart enough to post his torrent on the indestructible Pirate Bay.

[The_Decider]

Not too likely since NiN is not under contract with any record company. RIAA, and thus MediaDefender has no claim on either Ghosts, or The Slip. Trent is the only copyright holder, and he released his work under a CC license.

[Penguinisto]

This will be interesting indeed... the FBI is already in on the investigation. I'm kinda hoping MediaDefender and (maybe?) the RIAA get nuked from orbit on this one. It's one thing to protect one's own content through civil means. It's another when the corp becomes a pack of script-kiddies and a DDoS-launching 'tards in the process. It's either gross incompetence (which means there's one big fat reason to have their 'evidence' dismissed), or criminal intent. Either way, they're screwed. I for one cannot wait for the discovery phase of whichever court (civil or criminal) sees this baby.

[fuzzyCWD]

civil or criminal? why not BOTH? let the FBI take them AND the RIAA et al to CRIMINAL court as conspirators and let revision go after them for financial losses.

[Lerianis]

fuzzyCWD has it right. Let them be reamed for both criminal and civil charges. Anyone with a 3rd grade education today knows that a DDoS attack on ANYONE, regardless, unless it is done by a police organization, is a no-no.

[BillDemp]

It's time to look for replacement companies for big media. If Amazon, Google, or Apple started online record labels tomorrow, I think the old ones would go under in a year. Nobody wants to buy anything from the old companies because all they do is screw us over. Online companies have a much better understanding of today's digital world. They also understand they need to attract customers, not repel them. The old media companies just don't get that concept.

[Lerianis]

They get the concept, but the fact is that they want you to pay NUMEROUS times for things and be locked into coercive DRM schemes, and buy numerous copies of things for numerous products.