Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Tue, 4 Jan 2011 12:51:26 PST Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110104/02223912507/limewire-seeking-all-recording-industrys-secrets.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110104/02223912507/limewire-seeking-all-recording-industrys-secrets.shtml lost its lawsuit in a big way to the record labels (as pretty much everyone expected), the ensuing legal fight has remained quite interesting. We've already covered the surprising move by the judge to try to explore the "real costs" of file sharing to determine damages, and in response, it looks like Limewire is trying to drag tons of other companies into the fight. Limewire is claiming that just relying on the recording industry's own documents concerning "costs" and royalties isn't enough. This makes sense, given RIAA accounting practices. However, its efforts to get others to jump in may be pretty difficult as well. A court has already rejected a request to subpoena MediaDefender, one of the industry's favored "anti-piracy" outfits, and another court is reviewing Limewire's request to compel Amazon to hand over royalty information. The indications are that it's also seeking (or will seek) similar info from Apple. While I doubt the courts will let Limewire go through with most of these subpoenas, if they do happen to get the info, we could see quite the airing of dirty laundry and details concerning various music licensing deals -- which is the last thing the RIAA wants to see happen.

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]]> not-backing-down-easily http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110104/02223912507 Mon, 22 Sep 2008 13:04:00 PDT Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080922/0312572327.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080922/0312572327.shtml serious trouble lately -- and it appears that one quiet side aspect of its business is now being exposed as well. While the company tries to position itself on the side of good, claiming that it's fighting evil "pirates" and even helping law enforcement go after criminals, TorrentFreak has uncovered that the company has quietly been making a bunch of money by running some porn sites on the side, while also uploading files to file sharing networks pushing people to other porn sites, hoping to cash in on affiliate fees for getting people to sign up for porn subscriptions. It sounds as though everything the company is doing is perfectly legal, but it seems to tarnish the company's desired image in certain circles as being an upstanding citizen just trying to prevent piracy.

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]]> just-on-the-side http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20080922/0312572327 Thu, 29 May 2008 13:27:00 PDT Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080529/1253131258.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080529/1253131258.shtml 2000) with the business proposition of basically helping big entertainment companies disrupt any sort of unauthorized file sharing. In the early days, that just meant putting up spoof files to annoy people. But it's become a lot more sophisticated since then -- including tricking people into downloading spoof files with malware that actually scans your computer for infringing files. Then, of course, there was the infamous attempt to create an entire fake honeypot file sharing system to try to catch people for unauthorized file sharing. The company has also been accused of a variety of different denial of service attacks against sites it believes are promoting file sharing. On the whole, pretty much everything the company seems to be associated with would be considered dirty tactics. What's amazing is that in pulling all these dirty tricks, MediaDefender never seems to get in much trouble for it. However, it may have picked the wrong target this time.

Over the weekend, there was a lot of buzz about the fact that online video company Revision3 was taken totally offline thanks to a denial of service attack. As a whole bunch of you are sending in, Revision3's CEO has now put up a post explaining how it was actually MediaDefender that very obviously launched the denial of service attack on Revision3. There are some details missing, but effectively what has been pieced together is that Revision3 uses BitTorrent (properly and legally) to help offload the bandwidth costs of distributing its videos (this is exactly what BitTorrent was originally built to do). MediaDefender, however, used a backdoor into Revision3's BitTorrent tracker to inject its own nefarious torrents -- basically piggybacking off of Revision3's tracker. Revision3 noticed the backdoor and closed it -- at which point, MediaDefender's system started flooding Revision3's servers with over 8,000 pings per second (MediaDefender claims it should have been once every 3 minutes).

So, it doesn't appear to have been a malicious attack by MediaDefender on Revision3 -- just a sneaky, poorly implemented one (which, at this point, seems par for the course on just about everything MediaDefender does). And, in doing so, it took a totally legitimate business nearly completely offline for a few days, and doesn't seem particularly apologetic about it. And these are the guys that the entertainment industry trusts to save it from the "evils" of unauthorized file sharing.

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]]> how-friendly-of-them http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20080529/1253131258 Mon, 17 Sep 2007 00:46:34 PDT Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070916/210351.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070916/210351.shtml trick users into downloading some spyware that could then be used to send details back to the entertainment industry for use in various lawsuits. After the news broke, MediaDefender denied that this was the intended purpose of the project, and said it was just an internal project that was accidentally made public. Speaking of internal stuff accidentally made public, late Friday the news began to spread that a bunch of MediaDefender's internal emails were now available on file sharing systems, and looking through them seems to indicate not only that MediaDefender was spending an awful lot of time on this fake site (called MiiVi.com) but even after it was exposed, the company was still working on it, while trying to find a new name that wouldn't be connected to MediaDefender. Of course, we should point out that hacking MediaDefender to get its internal emails (and phone calls, apparently) is not very smart. It makes MediaDefender start to look like the victim and opens up a very real (and reasonable) possibility of a lawsuit against whoever got (and then leaked) the emails. MediaDefender was a company that would have collapsed on itself eventually anyway. There's no reason to help push them over the edge -- especially using illegal or unethical means.

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