SubscribeThe Media Defender Story
Posted in Internet, News on September 28th, 2007. By Eduard F. Vinyamata.
Media Defender is a company that “has been contracted by every major record label and every major movie studio, video game publishers, software publishers and anime publishers”. Their mission is to fight Internet piracy using what they call a “technological approach”. For different reasons, they’ve been on the news since last July. The following is summary of who they are and what they’ve been up to until today.
Media Defender’s main strategy was to:
…insert promotional material into the decoy files, and then planting those files prominently on file-sharing sites, record labels and other marketers can turn what is now an antipiracy tool into an advertising medium.
That’s how an article of the Wall Street Journal titled “Record Labels Turn Piracy Intro a Marketing Opportunity” defined Media Defender a year ago. The truth however is that Media Defender’s core business was not so much turning piracy into an opportunity, or even prosecuting and gathering evidence against file sharers. They where based
“on recognition of the inescapable fact that litigation cannot stop the spread of content on the Internet”
So they fought Internet Pirates by basically using illegal means.
For example, early this year Media Defender launched a video sharing site called Miivi.com, later on it was found that the site was created to trap up loaders of copyrighted content. Mivii could have even been used as a way to turn users’ PC’s into drones for Media Defender activities.
We actually highlighted one of this activities on a past “Links of the Week” post. Record Labels contracted Media Defender to learn about the popularity of certain songs and artists to be able to take informed decisions on their ongoing promotional campaigns. A great use indeed of file sharing sites unless the information was gathered by using unsuspecting file sharing users PC’s as data gathering drones.
So much is known about Media Defender’s activities thanks to a a group called Media Defender Defenders. Over six thousand emails from Media Defender were made public on the 14th of September. They contained information detailing how Media Defender not only polluted file sharing sites with fakes but used denial-of-service attacks, industrial sabotage, hacking and spamming. This would turn out to be but just the first of Media Defender leaks.
And for all those illegal activities, The Pirate Bay is now filling charges against Swedish media companies involved with Media Defender. The following quote from a senior member of the porn industry, discussing with his colleagues what side to take, sums up the situation pretty well:
“…what the thepiratebay is doing in their country is legal, and what the movie companies are doing in the country of thepiratebay is ILLEGAL, so there is a good chance this will be a pretty damn good fight”
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