So, who has heard about Media Defender?
 

To catch you all up on the drama, Media Defender is a company that record labels paid to create chaos in the file-sharing communities in order to prevent piracy. While the notion of preventing piracy is a noble cause, their methods were quite unsound. They set up their own file sharing site called MiiVi with the sole intention of diseminating false files and trapping users who shared their own legitimate files. They were under contract with several large record labels and even the government.

And a couple days ago, thousands of their internal emails and even a phone call with a lawyer were LEAKED onto the internet.

http://jrwr.hopto.org/

There are juicy bits, but the link above doesn't call attention to anything in particular. Let's see some blog articles:

http://torrentfreak.com/mediadefende...leaked-070915/

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...t-project.html


So on one hand, you have a company that uses underhanded tactics to make money and screw people over. On the other hand you have a community of people fighting back and violating this company's privacy.

I love a good bloodbath, but I find both sides to be unethical. That makes it hard to see the truth in this. Its a soulless company, but many details of a personal nature were leaked too.

While no one can deny that it's not fair to publicly leak sensitive information - I hope that the guilt the leakers felt was rather pale in comparison to those of the Media Defender employees when it came time to cash their paychecks.

I skimmed the emails and to see that they actually leaked full albums, movies, and even video games with the sole intent of luring people in to bust them is ridiculous. It makes you wonder if the artists, screenwriters and directors, and gaming companies knew that their media would be leaked. However, it doesn't make you wonder at all why people would rather risk going to jail than give money to such an industry.

The fact that the music industry needs to be revamped is almost as obvious as the fact that these mega-companies waste their time and their efforts by suing a small fraction of the people illegally proliferate copyrighted media. And while they can continue on with lawsuits, DRM schemes, and companies like Media Defender - they'd much better off if they came up with new ideas on keeping the industry profitable.

Seems to me like they got exactly what they had coming to them.

Apparently this doesn't interest many people here.

http://www.miivi.org/
Well what do you know? Meganova relaunched it!

I'm kinda surprised, I expected this to be a large thread based on some of the downloading questions in the past.

I personally know nothing about it, so for once I have no opinion either way :eek:

I am right there with Ustwo (for the second time in 24 hours).

Add to this, the fact that I don't practice piracy so I am really out of the loop on this.

I'm not surprised that they would attempt to poison p2p networks, the MiVii thing is laughably funny though. It's even funnier that the emails show that the RIAA and MPAA were involved not with just bagging downloaders, but also trying to determine what singles to release based on what was pirated the most.

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/200...-e-mail-s.html

If that's not hypocracy, I don't know what is.

What's really interesting is their efforts to report users to the New York state attorney general and were working on efforts to allow the AG's office to access MiVii's servers remotely.

i've stopped sharing files after various virii (morpheus, e-mules and bit torrents, limewire, etc) ruined my computers....now i just burn friend's cd's....

one answer

peerguardian 2

puts media defender's servers on a blocklist.


pretty much they were fucking up my entire household's bandwidth because I grabbed a torrent for a season of battlestar galactica. so I had some pissed off wow addicts to figure out the problem for. apparently they piggyback my request to download data as an invitation to flood the hell out of my IP address with bunk garbage data to my torrent program.. Problem is it was coming so fast and from so many computers that it was overloading the router as long as my IP still showed up on the DHCP table.


another link to toss into this thread

http://atunu.blogspot.com/

Yup, peerguardian is helpful. Even more helpful is using "private" trackers. Thanks to some good, private trackers, I've been exposed to far more interesting music, television, and movies than I would have been otherwise.

It's not that I don't find this stuff interesting, I just don't have much to say on it. Sadly, none of the stuff revealed in the leak is surprising to me :(

I believe this is the specific entry Shauk means to reference: http://atunu.blogspot.com/2007/09/ho...nsthis-is.html

eh. I have been reading it since it broke. It's just as much non-news as Paris Hilton. It's actually kind of boring. Maybe the story will start to get more interesting soon.

I read a bunch of those last night. The only thing I can add is Dylan seems to be a fuck up and they mock him frequently.

I lol'd

They just got slapped in the face again. The source code for all their anti piracy software was leaked and is showing up on all the torrent sites for download. Wonder if they will ever be able to recover. I hope they dont.

I can sympathize with content producers desire to protect their property, but the way they keep going about it is just unacceptable. From companies like media defender to sony's drm rootkits their tactics cause more damage than the pirates. If any individual had bundled a rootkit with a peice of software like Sony did with a few cd's, they would be behind bars right now.

This sort of entrapment is exactly why I abandoned P2P (for any reason) years ago.

It's not worth the havoc that is wrought on your hardware, or the chance that someone will sue you.

Eh, if you're moderately smart about it, p2p isn't really the big scary place a lot of people think it is. If you use Limewire, on the other hand, it's a fucking jungle.

I could not agree more.

I absolutely believe that most people want to pay for their music/movies/games. They just don't want to be ripped off or fucked over by rootkits and DRM.
I download movies and such through bittorrent, but the second a DRM free decently priced legal alternative shows up, I'll stop. I doubt I'm alone on that one.

My problem is not the bigness or scariness.

It's that ( 1 ) you have no idea if the file you're getting is what it claims, and ( 2 ) it's impossible to do it with even a reasonable degree of anonymity.

None of us know what laws covering old records will be passed (especially in the States), but should they pass retro-active ones, anyone that used P2P may find themselves on the wrong end of a RIAA suit.

Not true if you use the right tools/sites. I haven't gotten a mislabeled file or trojan or virus in yearsThis is true, but the odds of being "caught" are pretty slim. Private trackers, in particular, while not immune to the **AA, are less likely to have **AA agents on them. I've never heard of someone getting sued because of a file they downloaded off a private tracker.This is why a lot of sites don't keep records for very long. If a law passes regarding access to old records, and those records only go back a week, it'll suck but it won't be terrible.

I'm not saying that you won't get sued by any means, just that if someone takes the proper precautions the chances are pretty low. To tie this back into the thread, using MediaDefender as an example, they were dealing with public trackers. And even then, it should be common sense not to download something that just came out off a public tracker.

Absolutely. The fact is, media has been pushed on us so much that it has lost its worth to us, and our interest in paying for it reflects that. Music is everywhere, all the time - it's nothing special anymore, and it's generally just background for most people. Paying any more than $1 a song seems ridiculous in that context. There are so many television channels and television shows, and so many ads, people aren't interested in paying much for that either. $2 an episode is about the highest price reasonable IMO. The problems the entertainment industry faces have been caused by themselves: they've saturated the market and reduced the value of their products (shitty TV (not all by any means, but most), shitty movies (again, not all but most), shitty music (particularly the stuff that gets the biggest market push), and tons of ads. They've devalued their own products, and now they're paying the price because consumers aren't willing to pay the prices they demand, especially if there are limitations on what the consumer can do with their purchase after making it.

The Pirate Bay files charges against media companies

when i first saw this thread, i had no idea what it was about. now, i do know what it's about - but i haven't had time to dig into it yet. i've stopped my torrent activities for a while, for various reasons - none of which is fear of lawsuit or guilt over downloading media. just time time time.

wow, well, i hope they can prove those emails as admissible evidence. I guess by law Media defender would have to turn over their records identifying thier clients if there is reasonable suspicion.

They've been pissing me off because as much as I hate to admit it, these guys are actually proving that their anti piracy method works. I'd almost request for my ISP to set up a firewall in between me and al of the media defender IP's because they've been absolutely destroying my router with their flooding nonsense. Again, bringing me and my 4 roomates to an entire halt to the point that I have to reset the router and change our IP as well.

I got into this debate with a friend serveral years ago over a couple of lunch time cocktails. She thought that sharing of music files ala Napster, et al was perfectly okay. Her point was that she could loan me a CD that I hadn't paid for. I countered with yeah well I could also go to the library and check out virtually any Jazz artist's CD that I wanted and rip that for my continued listenting pleasure but the real difference is when you look around this restaurant and walk up to anyone and swap CD's with people you do not know then there's real and tangible loss in it for the music makers and the record labels that produce them. Multiply that ability to extend to virtually anywhere in the world where the internet has reach and it's fairly easy to see that the labels and musicians stand to lose countless amounts of money through copyright infringement.

I don't agree with Media Defender's tactics but on the other hand I don't agree with free file sharing. Media Defender's approach seems to border on entrapment ala the methods used by vice to catch would be solicitors which isn't exactly ethical.

The bottom line for me personally is that I don't engage in that behavior so I don't anticiapte ever running into Media Defender (or Vice -- just to be clear! ;) ). I can't tell you the number of times I have avoided bad behavior and never been hassled by authorities...

It pisses people off.

Must be a good thing.

well, you gotta wonder why this behavior spread like wildfire to begin with. If you think artists are making what they are worth from the record labels, you'd be talking about the very small handful of "super" stars who wind up on every magazine cover. Those people represent the whores of the media pimps, known as the record labels.

The problem people had is that they would shell out 20 bucks for a cd based on the 1 song impression that MTV, and a lot of marketing dollars gave to them as to this artist and their talent, to find out the other 9-15 songs were utter and complete garbage. This is the one-hit wonder phenomenon.

I don't know about you but I'd say since the days of vanilla ice, and snow, and milli vanilli etc... and the advent of music piracy, the one hit wonder phenom seems to have died down in it's popularity.

Now, I agree that you should support the artists you enjoy, and if I had my way, i'd donate my money straight to the artist via paypal and then go download thier music for free. I don't agree with the middleman promo bullshit and it does nothing but clog the flow of music down with politics and greed.

<-- has next to nothing in the way of MP3s, owns hundreds upon hundreds of records (yeah, vinyl) although I used to be a hardcore 15 year old who'd download everything he could even THINK of, not out of desire to hear the music, but simply to "have" more than the other person.


thats the other thing here... I honestly think that people who download HOARDS of music, i'm talking thousands of hours of music, aren't hurting the music industry. They wont even consciously listen to this music anyway. They more than likely toss it in thier terrabyte hard-drive array and add it to the playlist that is still playing shit from 1991.

(this is why I quit downloading music. I never fucking listened to it. I listen to what I buy.)