MediaDefender

The Culture of Ownership: (by Molly Wood of CNET)

Over the past weekend, the online video network Revision3 fell victim to a distributed denial of service attack that took down their entire site and even crippled their internal email servers. And upon investigating the source of the attack, they discovered it had originated from MediaDefender, an antipiracy “defense” firm (owned by digital media entertainment company ARTISTdirect) that claims to use “non-invasive technological countermeasures employed on P2P networks to frustrate users’ attempts to steal/trade copyrighted content.”

What they really do is poison peer-to-peer networks with blank files, decoy files, and use what amount to targeted denial-of-service attacks to prevent users from accessing, uploading, or downloading files that Media Defender has been hired to protect. And what they did in the case of Revision3 was inject a bunch of torrents into a Rev3 p2p server that the company uses to legally distribute its own video files. And the way they injected these torrents was by exploiting a vulnerability in Rev3’s server configuration. And when Rev3 stopped its servers from pointing to MediaDefender’s faux torrents, the MediaDefender servers went DDoS nuclear. So, first they hacked Revision3, and then they trashed the place, all in the name of copyright “protection.”

And later down the page:

"YouTube says a Viacom victory, then, would make it unsafe for any online service provider, be it an ISP, a video upload service, or simply a website operating forums, to keep running in an even remotely open fashion, for fear of massive copyright infringement liability, and that safe harbor unquestionably applies to them. In fact, they say, “YouTube fulfills Congress’s vision for the DMCA.” On the other hand, Viacom claims YouTube is not the type of service provider meant to be protected under safe harbor."

I read about the DDos attack on Revision3, and then in a later blog entry I read about the attack on ISPs, and my excessive associative brain put the two together and I came up with this:

It is trival to put MediaDefender out of business. All that is required is for every ISP to agree that these guys are slimey weasels and to stop selling them service. One or more ISPs out there are helping MediaDefender by providing them service. The RIAA and related goons want ISPs to shut down (or at least fink on) random subscribers who might be downloading copyrighted material without permission. (Lots of people download copyrighted material with permission. A side question - how does an ISP know what the context of the download is?)

Anyway, the RIAA is out to make life as an ISP miserable. It seems only fair that the ISPs return the favor. In fact, I would suggest that whoever is providing Internet services to any record company just stop right now. No email, no web service, no torrent attacking, nothing!

Let the record labels live without Internet service for a month or two and then we'll see where the power lies. Can you imagine the screaming? And yet those same bastards will happily cut off service to anyone. Fuckers.

______________________________________
Buy Nano-Plasm Soft Cover
© 2005-2008 Stephen Clarke-Willson, Ph.D. - All Rights Reserved.