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Internal Emails of An RIAA Attack Dog Leaked
qubezz writes "The company MediaDefender works with the RIAA and MPAA against piracy, setting up fake torrents and trackers and disrupting p2p traffic. Previously, the TorrentFreak site accused them of setting up a fake internet video download site designed to catch and bust users. MediaDefender denied the entrapment charges. Now 700MB of MediaDefender's internal emails from the last 6 months have been leaked onto BitTorrent trackers. The emails detail their entire plan, including how they intended to distance themselves from the fake company they set up and future strategies. Other pieces of company information were included in the emails such as logins and passwords, wage negotiations, and numerous other aspect of their internal business."
They didn't just distance themselves from the company, they were going to relaunch it under a totally new name/look while still making sure it couldn't be tracked back to them. Doesn't this constitute entrapment?
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
It is big. But I doubt there will be any sensible outcome. What will likely happen is that this will be talked about for a couple of days, soon enough some other story will come along, and people will forget all about it.
nothing can cover it up
Read radical news here
its a very nice business model they have, one arm of the company spreads/facilitates illegal downloads the other arm collects protection money from media companies
them media companies are the bigger fools for doing business with this crowd, mediadefender's whole business model depend on piracy always being there
One would imagine it would be extremely hard to get any of this into evidence. But might it be used to lower MDs credibility with a judge, so that the judge would force a discovery?
Haven't you heard of http://www.7-zip.org/? Or am I just misunderstanding what your saying?
If the emails were obtained by hacking somebody's GMail account -- as seems to be the case given the comments on the torrent file -- then they were obtained illegally. The RIAA's lawyers would immediately cry "illegal search."
IANAL, so I'd like to hear from somebody with real law experience either confirming or denying this, but that's my gut feeling.
Somewhere along the way, or maybe it has been this way the whole time, people started using laws as ethics. Most people seem to think that if something is illegal then it must be wrong and if it's not illegal then it's probably fine.
I don't think anyone here is jumping for joy that a gmail account got hacked. Instead I see a bunch of people jumping for joy because a company that is seeming violating the law might actually have to suffer for its actions.
I think what happened here is for the greater good. Sometimes breaking the law draws attention to a problem few realized existed.
Quite succinctly put. Specifically with regard to music, I find major fault with those who seem so up in arms about artists losing money due to p2p or torrent sites. Being a musician, I understand quite well that true artists do not create their music for money. Those who do are not musicians, they are simply business people hijacking an art form for personal profit. If we did away with copyright, and instituted a system such as the one you have mentioned, music would not disappear. Rather, as an art form it would become confined to those who love it for what it is.
Creating music is not a chore. It is something done out of necessity, more often than not. I liken it to an addiction, complete with withdrawal symptoms if neglected. In short, if a system like yours was implemented, music would not cease to exist. On the contrary, the trash would be weeded out and we would all be better off for it.
"We may face a scorched and lifeless earth, but they're accountable to their shareholders first."
These people aren't suing anyone. They're not the most professional of orginizations, but they're not evil either.
So far, all they really do is make is more annoying for people to share priated movies/music/games.
Hardly worth "link them to child porn and prostitution"
People like you disgust me.
As an artist, I knew you would understand.
It kills me everytime when I hear some suit-clad MBA blather about "music industry" and its "products". Art "industry" isn't. The notions of "industry" or "commerce" are the very anathema of art. Art, as I am sure you know very well, is an intrisic desire of an artist to share his vision of the world, his insights and his feelings with others. Artists receive pleasure from satisfying their desire to express themselves and are, if they are indeed artists, pleased if many, many people enjoy their art for what it is.
Kitsch manufacturers and peddlers on the other hand, see their "art" as means to an end: to get rich quick. To them, making of their "art" is akin to manufacturing some throw-away plastic doo-dad on an assembly line. They do not produce art, they produce a "product". And they are of course in full agreement with the various pointy-haired MBAs and "intellectual property" lawyers: the sucker, otherwise known as the "consumer", must be made to pay, or else their scheme would not work.
You are of course completely right that the creation of art would go on in the absence of these conmen, as it went on throughout the recorded history of humankind, and even before it - as the drawings on cave walls testify, looong before the self-appointed would-be "captains of industry" appeared on the scene.
And of course I concur that if the vulgar profit motive were to be removed, the only people left to create art would be ... artists. Artists who, I am sure, given the modern dynamics of instant communication and easy money transfers, would receive enough donations to make a very comfortable living, enabling them to focus on their creative urges, but who would not become mega-millionare "wonders", whose wealth seems in reverse proportion to their talent and in direct proportion to marketing and media manipulation by their "handlers".
You're right about this, of course.
Where I work, we have developed a very big and very successful web site over the past 10 years. We're an old school company, but we've managed to move 50% of the business to the web, no thanks to marketing (clueless) or anything like. In short, we are one of the biggest successes the company has had in it's 30 year history.
Well, they reorganized, and they hired an MBA type to run the web division, who knows nothing about the web. Nada. But instead of asking for advice for people older and more successful, he simply talks out of his ass. Worse, when there is a genuine concern over the technology, he asks questions in front of the clients, but he doesn't actually ask them to get the correct answer, rather he asks them to show the customers how smart he is.
And so when I will answer his questions, he simply cuts me off. Now, fortunately, I do not work directly for him, but my colleagues do and they are terribly frustrated by arrogance, ineptitude, and most are transferring away.
The really funny part is he came from a company with a well publicized failure to move a significant portion of the business to the web, and now when he comes to a company that is successful, he needs to leave his mark. And it won't be a good one.
So this does not one any good, because what he'll do is stay for a year, and move on, and somehow take credit for a website that was successful when he was still boozing it up at a University. The company's success is irrelevant to him, because the damage he causes certainly won't be on his resume, and we'll be f*cked.