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.
A director from Norway, whose movie credits include the critically acclaimed Agent Cody Banks as well as the unforgettable, One Night at McCool's is thrilled someone thought so highly of his latest work as to pirate his latest oeuvre, Long Flat Balls 2. (Unfortunately, I missed the classic which preceded it.)
Torrent Freak offered a translation of the comments made by the director, Harald Zwart, to the Nettavisen.no:
"I think it's perfectly fine that some people choose to post the movie online. It shows that people are interested in it. In the IT society of today it's naive to think that this wouldn't happen. We consider it a huge compliment. After all, what has happened is that someone has smuggled a camera into a theater and then recorded the whole movie."
OK, whatever. To each his own, I say. And I'm obviously having sport at Zwart's expense. He's not going to be confused with Bergmann or Felini but he is signed up to do a Pink Panther sequel in 2009.
Then while eating lunch, a colleague pointed out this commentary by Mike Masnick at TechDirt and I laughed so hard I nearly passed a cheese sandwich through my nostrils:
"While the folks back in Hollywood have acting (sic) as though people with camcorders were a huge threat to the movie business, it appears that some folks outside of the Hollywood machine recognize that it's not such a bad thing at all...In fact, it appears his only real problem is that the quality of recording isn't so great, though he notes that hopefully this will drive more people to the theater to see a better quality version. It's nice to see more folks in the movie business recognizing that unauthorized copies aren't the end of the world.
As TechDirt is wont to say, that is straight from the, "exception-which-proves-the rule department." Pierre-Joseph Proudhon would have loved that business model. Since it's so uncool to be proprietary anymore, I'm sure the blog's everythingshouldbefree-meister won't mind a mild rewrite of that terribly tendentious lede. To wit:
"A Norwegian master of B moviemaking is thrilled someone would actually invest the time and effort to rip off one of his schlock extravaganzas so that the Porky's crowd won't have to do without this spring...and so on and so forth."
Ah, now that's more like it. Though back in the real world, I very much doubt most directors would be sanguine to learn that a goofball had ripped off their latest film. Unfortunately, creative people are unfairly paying for the sins of their corporate masters.
There is a history to overcome. The movie and recording industries have been so willfully stupid about coexisting with new technology for so long that you knew this was coming. Truth be told, it's hard to feel sorry about the extent of the popular blowback, even when it reaches such silly extremes. What's more, Schumpeter was right about capitalism's creatively destructive tendencies and Hollywood will have to figure out how to survive in a new era where technology can be its best friend or worst enemy.
So far the recording moguls have made nearly all the wrong moves. Maybe their cross-town neighbors will have better luck.
Add Japan to the ranks of countries cracking down on illegal file sharing over the Internet. The Yomiuri Shimbun is reporting that the country's four Internet providers agreed to disconnect Internet connections "of users found to repeatedly use Winny and other file-sharing programs to illegally copy gaming software and music."
The four organizations include the Telecom Service Association and the Telecommunications Carriers Association. About 1,000 major and smaller domestic providers belong to the four associations, which means the measure would become the first countermeasure against Winny-using rights-violators used by the whole provider industry.
They organizations plan to launch a consultative panel, possibly in April, together with copyright organizations including the Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers and the Association of Copyright for Computer Software. They will then begin making guidelines for disconnecting users from the Internet who leak illegally copied material onto the Net.
The number of users of file-sharing software such as Winny in the country is estimated to be about 1.75 million, with most of the files exchanged using the software believed to be illegal copies.
A brief six-hour survey by a copyright organization monitoring the Internet found about 3.55 million examples of illegally copied gaming software, worth about 9.5 billion yen at regular software prices, and 610,000 examples of illegally copied music files, worth 440 million yen, that could be freely downloaded into personal computers using such software, the sources said. In other words, this survey alone, uncovered damages amounting to 10 billion yen.
Two years ago, a major Internet provider tried to introduce a measure to disconnect users from the Internet whenever the company detected the use of Winny or other file-sharing software.
Can't say that this comes as a shock. The reaction against illegal file sharing, which began in the United States, has spread to Europe, and now, Asia. Chalk it up to a super-effective lobbying effort by well-organized copyright interests representing software companies, music labels, and the film industry.
Will this hold up in court? I don't know much about Japanese civil law so if anyone out there has more information, I'd love to hear more. On the surface--and admittedly, I don't have more facts other than the initial wire report--this sounds like a classic overreaction. But that's been the main theme in the conflict between the establishment and new technology threatening to undermine its business model.
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