Antipiracy agency MediaDefender strongly denies recent claims that it set up an entrapment scheme in order to catch so-called pirates downloading illegal movies and software.
Earlier this week, the Motion Picture Association of America and antipiracy agency MediaDefender were allegedly caught red-handed when Internet sleuths traced a “fake” BitTorrent site back to the two groups. But MediaDefender told Ars Technica that the story has been blown far out of proportion and was started by sites like The Pirate Bay and TorrentFreak in order to slam MediaDefender’s organization and software.
The soap opera that the entire brouhaha revolves around started like this. A web site called MiiVi allegedly offered full-length motion pictures for download and offered to install special client software on the user’s computer to help speed up the downloads. However, the software did a little more than that: it also reportedly performed searches of the user’s computer for other illegal software and reported its findings back to MediaDefender. Acting on a tip from The Pirate Bay, the online publication ZeroPaid began an “investigation” (a followup to Torrent Freak’s article) and found that MediaDefender didn’t make much of an effort to hide who was behind MiiVi. The whois records for MiiVi were clearly registered to MediaDefender with the company’s address in California and administrative contact information within the company.
The initial article by ZeroPaid was picked up among members of the tech web immediately, which must have caused MediaDefender to realize that torrenters were a little brighter than they had previously thought. Shortly thereafter, the name in the whois record was changed, although MediaDefender’s postal address remained intact. As of today, all of the whois contact information has been removed and it instead reflects anonymous Domains by Proxy information set up by GoDaddy. Since the MiiVi site’s public exposure, it has since been taken down and replaced with a parked GoDaddy page.
MediaDefender’s Randy Saaf told Ars Technica that while the company does own the domain to MiiVi, the story itself was completely made up. “MediaDefender was working on an internal project that involved video and didn’t realize that people would be trying to go to it and so we didn’t password-protect the site,” Saaf said. “It was just an oversight from that perspective. This was not an entrapment site, and we were not working with the MPAA on it. In fact, the MPAA didn’t even know about it.”
If this is true, why did MediaDefender immediately remove all contact information from the whois registry for the domain? Saaf said that after everything hit the fan, the company decided to take everything on the site down because it was afraid of a hacker attack or “people sending us spam.” Yes, spam.
The MPAA’s Elizabeth Kaltman also chimed in to say that they had no involvement with MiiVi: “The MediaDefender story is false. We have no relationship with that company at all,” she told Ars.
We may never know MediaDefender’s true motive behind MiiVi, but Saaf insists that it was nothing more than an internal site for research and development purposes only. If true, however, does this mean that MediaDefender could be looking into such a scheme in the future? Our Magic 8-Ball says “Reply hazy. Ask again later.”
Without a doubt, however, something isn’t right with this story. If anyone has a copy of the application that was originally hosted on MiiVi, we’d love to get a look at it.
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With their ongoing failure to find evidence in The Pirate Bay server seizure fiasco, the Swedish Police now seem to be resorting to any methods they can to disrupt the activities of the popular torrent site. Their latest effort appears to be an attempt to block access to the site, at least by Swedish nationals, through putting the site on a child pornography blocklist.
Piratebay administrator brokep got wind of this addition to the blocklist, which is maintained by the police, and which Swedish ISPs voluntarily use. He said in a response:
“If the police would find anything wrong – shouldn’t they first contact us, then bring us in for questioning regarding the content, ask for our help or bring us to court for our wrongdoings? By not acting this way it’s very clear what this is all about. It’s all about quieting a voice that is really uncomfortable for them since they don’t have any legal standpoint in doing it. It’s sabotage, it’s abuse of power given to them.”
This is not the first time, either; back in June, there were problems with an overzealous addition into the very same filter, with the site kopimi.com – after some discussions with the police, it was removed from the filter.
However, unlike kopimi, The Pirate Bay is not yet in the filter. Any entry into that list, would probably be updated at the various ISPs during the next week. The latest information, however, is that in a draft version of a press release from the police on this subject, they state “it’s not decided that we’ll put The Pirate Bay in the list – if the content is still there next week we’ll put them there”. In response to this, brokep states “So, come on! What content are you talking about? Still not a single contact attempt from the police”.
Rick Falkvinge, leader of the Swedish Pirate Party said in a response to the news: “This is a devastatingly ignorant abuse of the trust relationship between the Internet world and the Police that was created in order to stop child pornography. This is not worthy a democracy governed by law. The people who have made this decision cannot remain in our judicial system.”
The lack of clear, logical procedures based upon facts seems to be endemic when it comes to the Internet these days. In many cases, things are blown out of all proportion, in order to enact some changes on the internet, a system which was designed to be as resistant to any efforts to disrupt, and remove the information available on it as possible. The perversion of lists like these, removes the credibility of the lists, by making the contents of them ripe for suspicion.
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A court decision reached last month but under seal until Friday could force Web sites to track visitors if the sites become defendants in a lawsuit.
TorrentSpy, a popular BitTorrent search engine, was ordered on May 29 by a federal judge in the Central District of California in Los Angeles to create logs detailing users’ activities on the site. The judge, Jacqueline Chooljian, however, granted a stay of the order on Friday to allow TorrentSpy to file an appeal.
The appeal must be filed by June 12, according to Ira Rothken, TorrentSpy’s attorney.
TorrentSpy has promised in its privacy policy never to track visitors without their consent.
“It is likely that TorrentSpy would turn off access to the U.S. before tracking its users,” Rothken said. “If this order were allowed to stand, it would mean that Web sites can be required by discovery judges to track what their users do even if their privacy policy says otherwise.”
The Motion Picture Association of America, which represents Columbia Pictures and other top Hollywood film studios, sued TorrentSpy and a host of others in February 2006 as part of a sweep against file-sharing companies. According to the MPAA, the search engine was sued for allegedly making it easier to download pirated files.
Representatives of the trade group could not be reached for comment.
The court’s decision could have a chilling effect on e-commerce and digital entertainment sites, said Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He calls the ruling “unprecedented.”
EFF, which advocates for the public in digital rights’ cases, is still reviewing the court’s decision, but von Lohmann calls what he’s seen so far a “troubling court order.”
This is believed to be the first time a judge has ordered a defendant to log visitor activity and then hand over the information to the plaintiff.
“In general, a defendant is not required to create new records to hand over in discovery,” von Lohmann said. “We shouldn’t let Web site logging policies be set by litigation.”
Many Web companies keep visitor logs, which can include Internet Protocol addresses, as well as other information. Some choose not to record this data, including EFF, von Lohmann said.
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