Quote: " Qui(s) custodiet ipsos custodes?"
- Satires of Juvenalis
The above latin quote means as much as... who guards the guards, who checks the checkers, who observes the observers. It was central to the Dan Brown book Digital Fortress, which was about cyberterrorism. This one isn't about cyberterrorism, but about mediapiracy, the illegal downloading of copyrighted materials.
The US company MediaDefender has a good history of protecting the rights, copyrights, authors rights and similar rights of developers and artists. They claim to actively combat piracy and defend the rights of those who make any form of media. Targets of MediaDefender are the popular torrentsites as the PirateBay and similar.
In 2007, MediaDefender started Miivi.com, a videosharing site to share videos (Whoa!). Catch was, anyone breaching copyright on the site would be registered! Yup, a tricksite to catch evil people uploading copyrighted content. A smart idea, until it comes out, of course. Miivi was shut down in July after a blogger discovered the devious trick. A scandal of the first class, yet MediaDefender denied any accusation.
If you thought the story ends there, think again. Thanks to the internet hacking group MediaDefender-Defender, run by the torrent-site PirateBay, suddenly the 700MB mail archive of MediaDefender containing all e-mails in the company was leaked to the internet. These thousands of e-mails contained information that, among others, directly links it to the Miivi-scandal. The mail archive, ironically, was spread over endless torrent-sites in a matter of hours. In an attempt to remove the evidence, or better said, damagecontrol, MediaDefender used lawyers to force sites to remove the download of the mail-archive. They threathened to sue and prosecute the hackers.
Quote: " "I am the CEO of MediaDefender. We have begun our civil and criminal investigations into the stolen emails from our company. We are meeting with the FBI on monday. Your IP address has been logged. I hope it was worth the thrill. "
"
Seeing the group is so obsessed with rights, it is odd that they also attempted to hack the torrent-sites hosting the emails with a great number of DoS-attacks, a common method to disable websites. Lesson one: Never try and hack someone who has proven to be capable of gathering 700MB of classified email. Ofcourse the torrentsites noticed and now several torrentsites have published letters similar to the following:
Quote: "There is no way you can stop this, your emails have been published on more then a centillion websites. And if there is anyone who is going to start a lawsuit it will be us suing you for attempts to sabotage the integrity of this site and many others."
As a final gesture towards the US company, a cooperation of torrentsites have registered the shutdown Miivi.com domain to make it yet another torrentsite.
...I guess MediaDefender needs a very good JuridicalDefender.
Being sued by a torrent-site. The world has gone mad.
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