Words

A bad week for pirate catchers

Anime fans in Singapore have had a pretty bitter experience with the Odex saga. But really, if you found Odex’s operations spurious, then consider MediaDefender which surely must be the devil’s own.

Let me give a quick lowdown on MediaDefender, a rather notorious anti-piracy group working for the MPAA, RIAA among others. To achieve their noble aims, they do funky stuff such as creating fake (decoy) torrent files and spreading these on BitTorrent websites to collect and pursue IP addresses of those who fall for the fakes.

Vigilant knights don’t rest on their laurels and their next mission was the creation of a fake video download service. MediaDefender took the effort to register a new domain called MiiVi.com and build an attractive site offering high-speed downloads of blockbuster movies, all to bait people into downloading copyrighted content.

Really, how dare we netties makes such wild accusations about MediaDefender?

Because 700MB of their internal emails have been leaked, thanks to hacker group MediaDefenders-Defenders (g0tta love their name)! :D

It’s funny stuff if you read through some of ‘em. Here’s their Simpson’s Movie strategy:

# REMINDER: “The Simpson’s Movie” premieres this Friday (to Torrents).

* Decoy files are available in torrents MDfile server.
* Use Public Trackers for pre-Leak releases.
* Create two new trackers for this project.
* Ebert to inform Torrents of these new machines.
* Send a list of 5 release names from each torrent team member to Ebert.
* REMEMBER to input torrent file into interdiction if a real Leak is available this weekend.

Or how about their plans to generate traffic for MiiVi?

Dylan,

Another thing we can do to increase Google and other search engine traffic is to get more link-ins. At the next MiiVi meeting, I’m going to ask Randy for permission to incentivize people to link-in a MiiVi video on their MySpace. Colin is already doing this and it helps the word-of-mouth spread, even if the link-ins are nominal. I’m not sure what we could do in the link-in regard early on, but getting the cumulative ~1000+ MySpace friends of MediaDefender employees to see MiiVi link-ins can’t hurt….

Colin — start coming up with a list the list of keywords and descriptors for hidden metadata entries, per Dylan’s e-mail below.

Thanks,
Ben

Some of their daily work:

Somewhere in between collecting real torrents and posting decoys, post comments for these files on Piratebay, Mininova and Torrentspy.

All in all, the leak has been a vindication for detractors of MediaDefender. One can’t help but wish that something similar could happen over here on our shores, eh. :P