Saturday, July 7, 2007

MPAA & MediaDefender Respond to Exposure of Fake Video Download Site

Via zeropaid.com -

In the latest twist to the ongoing saga concerning the now defunct fake BitTorrent video download site MiiVi.com, the MPAA denies any involvement with the company behind it, and MediaDefender calls it an "internal R&D" site "that involved video" and had "nothing to do with antipiracy."

Yep, that's right MediaDefender calls it an "...internal project that involved video" and "had nothing to do with anti-piracy."

So let me get this straight. A company who bills itself as the "...undisputed provider of choice for most global content owners, and has retained a dominant position in the P2P (Peer-to-Peer) Anti-Piracy Industry" and also has "...been contracted by every major record label and every major movie studio, video game publishers, software publishers, and anime publishers" claims that creating a site that offered full-length movie downloads of Batman Begins and 300 was merely part of an "internal R&D" project? Moreover, the MPAA is also claiming that it has "...no relationship with that company at all?"

In an interview with ArsTechnica, MediaDefender's Randy Saaf says that "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. 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."

Ars points out that if it was merely an "internal project" then why did it then remove all contact info from the whois registry for the domain? Apparently because of hackers and spam. 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.'"

According to an interview in an article on Computerworld, Saaf also commented that "...the decision to take down Miivi was made because of the reactions generated by the blog postings, particularly after it appeared on sites such as Digg," and that "'People started to hack us. It started to become a big mess. It became like a 'let's torch them down' mentality out there.'" Hmm, I wonder why.

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I would suggest to keep any future "internal R&D" sites strictly internal and off the internet......as the internet isn't very "internal" and I am quite shocked that MediaDefender isn't aware of this well known fact......lol

1 comment:

  1. Or perhaps this is a new insight into how the MPAA thinks. They consider the internet "internal" and therefore everything on it belongs to them.
    It would explain a lot.

    ReplyDelete