MediaDefender and the Streisand Effect

Foldarn writes "It looks like MediaDefender, in an effort to quell the explosion of negative publicity over its leaked email archive, has instead done the opposite (also known as the Streisand Effect) and spread it even more widely. Ars Technica is reporting that MediaDefender has sent scary-lawyer letters to two popular BitTorrent sites, MegaNova and IsoHunt, demanding that they remove the offending content. Both sites have responded with derision. Also, Ars notes that MediaDefender seems to be behind a DDoS attack against the site that originally leaked its email." Final word to Ars's Ryan Paul: "MediaDefender's entire business model has been based on recognition of the inescapable fact that litigation cannot stop the spread of content on the Internet, so it is ironic that the company has turned to legal threats."

Comments

They wanna play the legal game huh?

[morgan_greywolf]

Well maybe someone should turn them in to the FBI for violating federal computer crime statutes.

what is their business model?

[Anonymous Coward]

quite interesting looking through some of the threads - a lot of work is done to produce GeoIP reports (i.e. working out countries where trackers are located)..

• is this to produce marketing output for the film studios?
• or is it to direct litigation effort at certain countries?

i.e. how do they make their money?

it gives an interesting top 10 of the complete turkey films that people can't even be bothered to track.

Torrentspy E-mails

[Anonymous Coward]

The courts recently ruled that the MPAA did no wrong when obtaining Torrentspy private e-mails: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/31/1334245

How is this any different aside from the fact that it is now the torrent sites gaining access to "Big Business" e-mail? Oh, right...

Re:people never learn

[dougmc]

Censorship is not possible on the Internet, period. Censorship of certain things is not easy on the Internet, but it's not impossible. If there is something that has a severe penalty for having, and few people want anyways, and even having it has a really strong stigma against it, it's effectively censored even for those who do want it. Case in point? Child pornography. Yes, there's some on the Internet, but it's very effectively censored. And the few cases where it can be found on the Internet, it's generally either 1) very carefully hidden and protected, 2) very obvious, because it was posted to `frame' somebody else (and therefore removed quickly), or 3) only marginally child porn, if it all. A picture of your six month old daughter taking a bath is not child porn, but people have been arrested for things like that before.

But of course, none of this helps Mediadefender. But don't go pretending that Internet censorship is impossible, period.

US disrespected

[wytcld]

Meganova's response says. "In case you haven't noticed, this site is located in Europe (I hope you can point it out on a map) where your stupid copyright claims have no base."

Can we see a connection between the official US government disregard of "silly" things like international treaties against torture, and now this disrespect by some Europeans of claims based in US law? Europeans just aren't following the US example any more. For instance, to the EU, Microsoft is officially an abusive monopoly; in the US they've been given a pass. So it's not just European individuals, but top government bodies which no longer respect US sensibilities and precedents.

Between Media Defender and Media-Defender Defender, both sides are playing dirty. That's far worse for a "legitimate" corporation to do than for a loose confederation of mostly teen hackers, so in a sane world Media Defender would be stripped of its corporate charter and dissolved. But the US has tried to establish as its new norm that there is no law for corporations, no punishment for their harms to society or nature. The blowback from this, from regions of the world - especially the EU - that still have norms of law applying to all (except French leaders while in office, but that's another story), will be major.

Re:New leak!

[Shining Celebi]

Can someone explain why the IP addresses are showing up as belonging in weird countries such as Algeria and the Philippines?

So they aren't as easily identified. If you read through their emails, you find a lot of talk about them getting hold of a lot of different IPs from all around the world.

Re:Are they the good guys or the bad guys?

[orclevegam]

So now, they have known copy-righted works being purposely distributed on those networks which chose to ignore the legal legal remedy that is necessary before a massive lawsuit puts the file sharing networks out of business.

A network can't go out of business. The company hosting a network can, or the company hosting the software for the network, but not the network itself. P2P by its very nature will not die without major government intervention, and even then it won't until the internet is behind lock and key that the government controls. Worst case scenario, all the public P2P networks switch to a darknet style of operation.