After declaring their own war on BitTorrent, players from the porn industry have been debating The Pirate Bay’s calls for police action after major media companies tried to illegally sabotage their operations. Surprisingly there are huge divisions, with many players openly supporting the operators of the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker and some are even donating.
MediaDefender’s email and anti piracy tool leaks gave the world a unique insight into the workings and the effectiveness of their BitTorrent decoy operations. So how effective were they? And which sites were best protected against these fake torrents? Let’s find out.
The MediaDefender-Defenders have released the source code for the “trapping” and decoy software that MediaDefender uses to spread fake files on P2P networks.
Buried away in the leaked MediaDefender emails is the End User License Agreement for MiiVi. Like most EULAs it’s long and boring but this one has a sting in its tail. If MediaDefender catch you engaging in copyright infringement with the MiiVi app, they state in black and white that they will report you to the relevant authorities.
It turns out that P2P is not only an enemy for the major record labels, it’s also an excellent marketing research tool. In fact, MediaDefender is using piracy to help labels increase profitability.
The leak of MediaDefender’s emails caused quite some controversy, Ironically, in a recently leaked phone call, a New York attorney and MediaDefender discuss the security of their email-server. Whilst there is some initial confusion as to where the leak may have originated, they eventually write it off as some technical problem.
When TorrentFreak reported that Media Defender (MD) was behind the video site MiiVi, they cast doubt on us. Now, in what is surely the biggest BitTorrent leak ever, nearly 700mb of MD’s emails have gone public. When MD’s Randy Saaf found out we rumbled MiiVi he said, “This is really fucked.” This is too, but much more so.
