No Defense for MediaDefense

06-02-2008 | 08:33 PM EST

When a couple of teens recently knocked Comcast.net offline, the FBI went into overdrive to bring the criminals down. When a systematic attack by the recording and motion picture industries' corporate goons-for-hire brought down a large new media company, the FBI says we're dealing with a "gray" area of the law. And, when some of us hear about these stories, we just hope that more people finally start to care.

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing communications protocol. That means, it gives individuals the ability to easily share electronic files of any sort with each other over the Internet. Scientists and other researchers at universities throughout the world use it to share academic information, large corporations use it to share data throughout multiple offices, musicians use it to provide their music to the public, and, yes, media pirates use it to illegally trade movies, music, and other things that aren't licensed to be freely traded in that way.

One corporation that's been very successful at using BitTorrent as the centerpiece of its business strategy is San Francisco's Revision3 which describes itself as:

"the first media company that gets it, born from the Internet, on-demand generation. Unlike aggregators, mash-ups, and user-generated video sites, Revision3 is an actual TV network for the web, creating and producing its own original, broadcast quality shows."

The content is "aired" to viewers via the BitTorrent technology and is supported by advertisers ranging from Sony, Netflix, Dolby, Microsoft, IBM, and HP to Southern Comfort, Virgin America, Verizon and FX Networks. Over Memorial Day Weekend, 2008, though, the Revision3 broadcast went silent.

It seems that in an effort to stop some illegal trading of files that found their way onto Revision3's BitTorrent network, MediaDefender, Inc., an anti-piracy solutions provider contracted by "every major record label and every major movie studio, video game publishers, software publishers, and anime publishers" (according to their website) took it upon themselves to initiate a Denial of Service attack to shutdown Revision3. In very simple terms, a Denial of Service (DoS) attack is a way of overwhelming a computer on the Internet with so many requests, that it can't possibly respond to them all. As a result, people who are trying to reach the service are denied access. Interestingly, Denial of Service attacks are even listed in a CNN article as a tool of the cyber-criminal trade.

The details of the attack are listed in full detail on Revision3's website, so I won't go into them here. On a side note, the write-up on Revision3's website is a rare instance of something very technical being written clearly enough that any lay person could understand. I highly recommend reading it.

What I want to point out here is the very scary precedence this sets. In short, this is a case of vigilante justice at the hands of the big media conglomerates. They perceive a threat to their money-making models, they hire a company like MediaDefender to dole out their own brand of heavy-handed justice, and then they use their corporate and political sway to spin the whole thing as an honest mistake and necessary in the battle to ensure their intellectual property and copyrights aren't infringed upon. In my mind, this isn't even a matter of the restrictive versus non-restrictive licensing debate that so much of this blog is based on. I don't have a problem acknowledging that the licenses that govern some of the movies, music, and other digital content that was being traded did not allow for that type of sharing and re-distribution and, as such, it was illegal to trade it. But, I absolutely don't think that gives any content owner carte blanche to take the law into their hands. As Revision3 rightly asks, why didn't MediaDefender just give Revision3 "a quick call or email?" And, as other people around the Internet have rightly asked, what if MediaDefender's "honest mistake" had shut down the flow of medical data or something else where lives were at stake? Do we really want to allow corporations to do whatever they want in the pursuit of preserving their antiquated business models, copyrights, and bottom lines — no matter who gets hurt in the process?

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