It is a nightmare scenario for any company. Your firm's dirty tricks are aired for world to see when months of your company?s private e-mails are posted to the Internet.
That's exactly what happened to MediaDefender who suffered a very public humiliation earlier this month when a hacker(s) broke into a MediaDefender employee's GMail account and posted nine months of company e-mails outlining the firm's nasty and deceitful anti-piracy practices.
A group calling itself MediaDefender-Defenders claimed responsibility for swiping the e-mails and making them publicly available. "By releasing these e-mails we hope to secure the privacy and personal integrity of all peer-to-peer users," MediaDefender-Defenders said.
The group first made the e-mails available as a digital download on peer-to-peer networks. Now the e-mails are available on multiple Web sites in an easy-to-read HTML format.
Who's the Bad Guy?
I'm having a hard time choosing who to side with. Hacking someone's e-mail account is bad enough. But MediaDefender-Defenders took it one step further releasing 6000 messages of a private company's e-mail to the Internet.
However, the more I learn of MediaDefender and its business practices the less sympathy I have for it.
MediaDefender business is to protect unauthorized downloads of content owned by record companies and Hollywood film studios. It protects copyrighted content from being illegally swapped online by intentionally seeding peer-to-peer networks with bogus decoy files designed to frustrate illegal file swappers.
According to e-mails leaked to the Internet MediaDefender even went so far as to create the Web site WiiVii.com that would pose as a pirate site that offered downloads of copyrighted movies and music but would actually track users who accessed it, then report their IP addresses back to MediaDefender.
Either way you slice it, both MediaDefender and its nemesis MediaDefender-Defenders are up to no good.
What Comes Around Goes Around
Despite its righteous rhetoric, MediaDefender-Defenders aren't the most righteous guys around. Sure, it fought the good fight to "secure the privacy and personal integrity of all peer-to-peer users" as it states. But I'm hesitant to put MediaDefender-Defenders on a vigilante pedestal.
Right now MediaDefender-Defenders seems like a creepy version of Charles Bronson's thuggish vigilante character in Hollywood movie Death Wish. The difference is MediaDefender hadn't broken any laws that I'm aware of.
If MediaDefender-Defenders is supposed to be celebrated than what for? Is it really that it secured the ?privacy and personal integrity? of people who use peer-to-peer networks to rip off Hollywood and the music industry?
I'm even more disappointed with MediaDefender.
MediaDefender's tactics are very shady. The company's Website has no qualms in referring to its "practical, proven methods to thwart Internet piracy." Practical and proven perhaps, but they are hardly ethical.
The MediaDefender e-mails even discussed the possibility of infecting the computers of P2P users with crap-ware that would turn unsuspecting users PCs into zombies to upload decoy files to file-sharing networks.
Cold War Gets Frigid
Does neither side have concern for online integrity?
So who wins in the end?
P2P users are elated with MediaDefender-Defenders' actions. I can only imagine MediaDefender is only committed now to dreaming up new more dastardly ways to hurt file swappers. Neither side has much concern for its means to an end.
Goes to show how far the middle-'men' (between actual content creator and consumer) are prepared to go to protect their profit margins... rather than embrace progress and alter gross profit systems. If the middle'men' would concern themselves more with -mass- distribution violations (which unregulated p2p nets 'can' be)and less with individual consumers (meaning no lawsuits and no consideration of compromising consumer PC's), we'd -all- be better off. The content distributors (middle-'men') should be promoting extremely inexpensive subscription p2p nets with 'some' advertising... (like the concept of broadcast tv/radio) ...to appeal to the mass p2p/sharing users. But that would require the distributors to think and adapt... and be reasonable.
While the RIAA and MPAA have a right to legally protect their content from being freely distributed, using the sort of tactics which MediaDefender, BayTSP and Macrovision use against P2P users is over the line. They have to know by now that they will never be able to stop illegal file-sharing, nor can they even slow it by any meaningful measure. Their clients are simply throwing money away in the sort of fashion one might use a thimble to empty an ocean of water. Right now, a new means of public file-sharing is already being developed which will not expose the IP addresses of P2P users and will likely be out by the end of this year (at least that's what the geniuses behind it claim). Also, it won't be effected by the current methods of curtailment employed by MediaDefender. Just as Apple thwarts unlocking iPhones, the battle will never cease. In the end, the tactics being used make the public perceive coporations as "Borg" -- scorned and deserving of attack. This is ust the beginning.