Initially MediaDefender, an anti-piracy organization that has been known to run fake BitTorrent trackers, had plans to use MiiVi.com for their video download site, but those plans were canceled after we posted about it.

It’s great to see that the name “Miivi” is changing into something positive now. The BitTorrent community can use another stable public tracker, especially now TorrentBox and PodTropolis have restricted access to its trackers to block peers in the US.

MiiVi.org describes itself as a tribute to the fall of MediaDefender and was registered by the people behind MegaNova. The Pirate Bay runs tracker.miivi.org which is a public BitTorrent tracker and EZTV uses tv.mivii.org for their TV-show releases.

Isn’t it ironic?

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

According to Wikipedia, a EULA or ‘End User License Agreement’ is a software license agreement which ‘indicates the terms under which an end-user may utilize the licensed software’.

The EULA usually comes either in paper form (with some software, game etc )and can be recognized as a booklet with tiny dense type with mostly legal terms only lawyers understand, or the digital type that appears when you install some software. Most PC users will be familiar with the box where you have to select ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to declare that you have read the mountains of legalese, understood it and are prepared to adhere to the rules.

It can be presumed that most people who are presented with EULAs don’t read them and it’s a safe bet that the people who installed MiiVi didn’t read its EULA either. Some may have – but most eyes would’ve glazed over after the first paragraph:

Miivi desktop application – License Agreement & Terms of Use

THIS VERSION OF MIIVI SOFTWARE AND ANY OTHER RELATED SOFTWARE, UPGRADES OR UPDATES AND ALL RELATED SERVICES (THE “PRODUCT”), ARE LICENSED TO YOU BY MIIVI INC. (“MIIVI”) SUBJECT TO THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF THIS LICENSE AGREEMENT & TERMS OF USE (THE “AGREEMENT”).
PLEASE READ THIS ENTIRE AGREEMENT CAREFULLY. BY CHECKING THE “I HAVE READ AND I ACCEPT THE MIIVI SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT & TERMS OF USE” CHECK BOX, OR BY INSTALLING OR USING THIS PRODUCT YOU AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO ALL OF THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT, PLEASE DO NOT ACCESS/USE THE PRODUCT, DO NOT INSTALL OR USE THE PRODUCT AND IMMEDIATELY DELETE ANY COPY OF IT FROM ALL STORAGE MEDIA.

Boring….but not if you skip through a little to a section in the ‘User Conduct’ section:

User Conduct. You agree to abide by all applicable local, state, national and foreign laws, treaties and regulations in connection with the Product, and your use thereto. You agree not to use, endorse, or in any other way allow use of the Product to:

[edited to remove non-relevant section]

(d) copy, reproduce, store, transmit, post, submit, publicly display or manage any material that may infringe the intellectual property rights or other rights of third parties, including trademark, copyright, patent or right of publicity;

In itself, this section is no big deal. After the ‘Grokster Decision‘, anyone getting involved with the marketing of media distribution software needs to be very careful that they are not seen to be encouraging piracy.

However, it’s a part of the ‘Measures and Enforcement’ section (in conjunction with the above) which grabs the attention:

Your failure to comply with any of the provisions mentioned under the User Conduct section or any other provision of this Agreement, automatically nullifies any obligation Miivi may have to contact you or provide you with any notice required by this Agreement or by law. You hereby agree, that if Miivi believes, in its own discretion, that you directly may be connected with such activities, Miivi may be required to disclose such a conduct and the suspected infringing user’s (i.e., your) Data or Information to the proper authorities.

So in it’s own words, if MiiVi believes ‘in its own discretion’ that a MiiVi user infringed copyrights of a third party – a civil offense even in the copyright-tough United States – the company would take it upon themselves to seek out the copyright holder and provide them with the MiiVi user’s information, presumably so that action could be taken against them. The fact that MiiVi would’ve been able to monitor for copyright infringements at all would be quite a surprise to the majority of its users. The rest would understand it would be easy – if an anti-piracy company was running the project.

Although there still appears to be no hard evidence that entrapping pirates was the sole purpose of the project, the fact that MiiVi is presenting itself as the copyright equivalent of judge-and-jury does not sit well.

If the wording said that MiiVi would take action if required by law (such as with a DMCA take-down request) it would be an irritant, but would probably be accepted as a necessary evil. However, this pro-active stance where one is reported to ‘proper authorities’ at the discretion of an unconnected 3rd party (over a civil issue), is something else entirely. Holding private data is a very serious business, so much so that handing over such information to a 3rd party in the UK and EU would probably constitute a criminal breach of data protection laws.

Finally, a statement in the EULA that is likely to raise a wry smile or two:

…..You agree not to use, endorse, or in any other way allow use of the Product to:

[edited to remove non-relevant section]

(b) harvest, collect, gather or assemble information or data regarding other users, including e-mail addresses, without their consent;

It seems that EULAs might be worth reading after all.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Last week we discovered that Media Defender actively tried to lure people into downloading blockbuster movies from their fake download site, Miivi.com. As expected, only a few hours after we made the news public the site was taken offline.

Media Defender later told Ars Technica that Miivi was an internal project to test out an online video project, but we know better. We’re convinced that they will try this, or a similar trick again in the near future.

Media Defender is hired by companies like the MPAA, BSA and RIAA to track down people who try to download copyrighted content. They record IP-addresses from BitTorrent trackers and other P2P networks. But they also utilize more proactive methods such as uploading fake .torrent files and setting up fake video download sites.

Luckily most BitTorrent site admins are aware of their shady practices and remove these fake files from their sites before they can do any harm. Pirate Bay admin Brokep offered his help to other BitTorrent admins to help them identifying and removing these fake files, he told TorrentFreak:

“Since the Miivi-incident we can’t keep quiet about them anymore. We want their employers to stop using them so they go bankrupt”

To our friends at Media Defender from all of us here at TorrentFreak… We’re watching you…

Update: Media Defender decided to redirect P2P.net to this article, thanks guys.

Whois Info P2P.net

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Fortunately, most of the IPs of these fake BitTorrent trackers are already blocked by blocklist software like PeerGuardian. However, they still manage to collect the IP addresses of thousands of users who do fall for this trap.

And Now they try to do the same with their “fake” video download service. They have registered a new domain and launched a video upload / download site with a web 2.0-ish name: miivi.com. Miivi claims to offer hight speed downloads of blockbuster movies like “300” (don’t download), hereby luring people into downloading copyrighted content.

Apparently the cease and desist letters they send to P2P users and video sharing sites like YouTube and other are not enough. At the bottom of this article is a screenshot of the WHOIS info, it speaks for itself. No matter how wrong ‘piracy’ might seem to some people, this is NOT the way to fight it.

My suggestion is: upload and download as much legal content as you can, titled “THIS SITE IS A SCAM“, let’s see if their servers can handle the stress.

Update: Miivi is down now, seems like the plan worked….

Update: they changed their WHOIS info.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.