This has been out for at least a week now, but I thought that I'd share it with anyone here who hadn't heard about it yet.

MediaDefender, a company contracted by the MPAA and RIAA to help curb online piracy, has suffered a humiliating breach of information security. It seems that an employee forwarded all of his company e-mails to a gMail account, which was then accessed by a group called the MediaDefender-Defenders. So, now there is a 700MB file containing hundreds of sensitive internal e-mails floating around the internet, especially on BitTorrent, one of the very networks the MediaDefender was regularly attacking.

Here's an excellent article from Ars Technica that goes over the basics of wheat MediaDefender is, and highlights some of the juiciest parts of the info. You can also download the whole archive from most any BT tracker.

Wow that is a tremendous step backwards for the fight against internet piracy. I wonder if that employee kept his job...

Magic 8-Ball Sez:

Ah, the Magic 8-ball knows all.

All hail Magic 8-Ball!

Don't forget the second leak! In some ways it is even more nasty. It consists of a bunch of recorded phone conversations. Here are a couple of highlights from a conversation between Ben Grodsky of Media Defender and the New York State General Attorney's Office courtesy of Bruce Schneier: The guy has absolutely no idea what he is talking about.

You can visit http://www.mediadefender-defenders.com/ to see all the leaks in convenient HTML format

Strrike three, you're out!
MDD has now leaked the complete uncompiled source code for MediaDefender's anti-piracy toolkit. Linky

Goodbye fight against internet piracy! And goodbye MediaDefender. I bet...uhm..that guy obviously, well not obviously, probably...uhm...lost his job.

thought this was interesting
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070...-mail-leak.html

From perusing some of the pirate sites - that all seem to link to each other - and from the rampant paranoia and "conspiracy" accusations being made, I see nothing but a bunch of criminals trying to justify their criminal behavior.

I've never used warez or even a P2P app ,which in them selfs I don't see any problems , but are easily abused. For me I think the question is , Is it ok to break the law to enforce it ?

That's an oxymoron. If that's the case, they would go by which is less wrong and/or whats for the "greater good" but who determines what that "greater good" is?

Regards,
TheYoda

the P2P that is, not the warez

Aye, There's the rub...

I am all for respecting copyrights. However, I think the main reason TPB and MDD do what they continue to do is to prove the point that copyright laws are overprotective and unfitting for the Internet. The DMCA needs revised and so does several other foreign and International Laws. If you watch the movie Good Copy Bad Copy (which is mostly about copyright) and StealThisFilm. There main point in StealThisFilm is that with the booming of the Internet the major coproations have to invent a way to keep customers not sue there existing ones.

The same genre (teenagers-25) that download music and movies is also coincidentally the same generation that buys the most movies and CDs (or Internet music).

I believe if you could buy any movie and any song; irregardless of how old it is. For a reasonable price ($.50 to $1.25) for a song and no more than ($4.99) so you can copy it do a DVD and watch it in a DVD-player or watch it unlimited times on your computer. I think that would be fair. I would be more than happy to purchase media in this form. However, like most people will say; this will allow the pirates to create more copies. Well let's put this into perspective. If you can offer a legal approach to the source at reasonable price then more will come flocking. Look at batteries. You can buy cheap ones (heck, sometimes you can get them for free with combo deals) or you could forged over a little more for a rechargeable battery. You'll never have to buy a new one (unless you loose it; or delete the media). If you have the flexibility of a rechargeable battery, would you be more prone to buy it over the cheap battery?

Also as for copyright laws, I think they show remove the "lifetime of author + 100 year" control on it. That's ridiculous. After the author dies, who is to collect the royalty? the family? by that time, whatever was the "creation" of the author, will most likely be unheard of. I think it should be reduced to the practical 30 years. One generation. After that, turn it over to the public domain. Most items in the public domain now, aren't in as high of a demand as what isn't in the public domain. Mostly because nothing "cool" or "hip" is in the public domain. Which with current trends, after 30 years most songs become forgotten. Look at the Beatles, they were around in the 60s, and do you see there music sales soaring? No, almost everyone has a copy by now (whether legal or not) and listens to that.

Anyways, that's all I got right now.


btw: I'm happy those e-mails got leaked. Serves both parties right, TPB is legally operational in Sweden; and using USA courts to fight a foreign company is like taking Osama Bin Laden to court in Pittsburgh, PA. As for the copyright holders, they should either give customers an easier way to purchase games through them.

Heck if a company for once would release a game as a torrent and you buy access to the tracker; they would be rich. You couldn't connect to the tracker to obtain the file from anyone unless you paid let's say $29.99 for the game. Disable DHT and Peer Exchange, as for someone leaking it to another torrent you could set it up as a private torrent. As for protecting the content, create a three tiered encryption...*


* - you buy a serial number enter it into the game; go to the company's website; they will generate a new key for you to submit to the game. You enter both the First Number and the Second Number into the game; then you call up the company Hotline to get the third number. Which the third number will have no mathematical reference to either the first number or the second number. The software would then connect to the Internet to verify that all three numbers match; or call the company to verify it.

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Another idea to thwart pirates would be to allow pirates to purchase the illegal content from the providers (without receiving the data) for the same price as it would cost in the store<== only for American Pirates. This would allow a customer to prove he purchased said material. As for preventing it to be spread on the Internet, allow them to spread it. Because it would in turn make the new pirates (in America) come back to purchase it. Therefore, if they are ever caught up in a legal battle where there computer is taken away (in a CSI, murder, civil lawsuit etc.. not always the RIAA/MPAA) one could prove they own the material.

This post has been edited by yano: Sep 26 2007, 09:34 PM