[Air-L] Fwd: Miivi = Media Defender, Emails Linked Confirm Connection

Conor Schaefer conor.schaefer at gmail.com
Mon Sep 17 04:06:28 PDT 2007


Well, the term "pirate culture" is of course quite broad. I think that 
this news will be utilized by all sides toward different ends. The more 
pro-piracy parties in the Netherlands and Sweden will use this to 
justify their conviction that the big media corporations are nothing 
more than a cartel of swindling colluding suits whose last concern is 
what the market wants. This kind of cutthroat ethic pervades both sides 
of the battle, as the pirates by and large typically refuse to fight 
"within the system," and so big media responds by using likewise 
"unorthodox" methods.

I think that stateside, with the lobbying domination of the RIAA and the 
MPAA, this news will be either wholly downplayed or spun to make the 
pirates look like evil hackers pilfering internal documents. They'd then 
look like anti-American (as they are anti-collusive capitalism), and 
hopefully that would hurt their image sufficiently that it would hinder 
sympathy for them here.

I think it's a wonderful thing sociologically that the e-mails are now 
in the wild, although the use of them for study surely involves tricky, 
if not insurmountable, ethical complications. I'm reminded of when AOL 
inadvertently posted all those user searches on public servers. Within 
hours the whole package was on all the major torrent sites. And with 
that kind of redundant backup system, I don't think the data will be 
"disappearing" anytime soon!

The most important aspect to me of this event is that it demonstrates 
how fundamentally and systemically different peer-to-peer transactions 
are, and the threat--as well as, certainly, the benefits--to the 
business models of relatively traditional corporations. I don't at all 
think this will give such corporation pause in pursuing nasty methods to 
root out the pirates, though. It'll just motivate them to adopt even 
more of a black-ops atmosphere, and try to stay ahead of the pirates 
around the world.

Conor

Shira Chess wrote:
> Has anyone heard about this yet? Any thoughts on how this is going to
> affect pirate culture...?
>
> http://torrentfreak.com/mediadefender-emails-leaked-070915/
> "When TorrentFreak reported that Media Defender (MD) was behind the video 
> site MiiVi, they cast doubt on us. Now, in what is surely the biggest
> BitTorrent leak ever, nearly 700mb of MD's emails have gone public."
>
> "Just about every aspect of the company's operations on every file
> sharing network is revealed in the emails, including their fake eDonkey
> server and Soulseek activities, not to mention payroll issues and
> discussions about what to eat for lunch."
>
>
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