The antipiracy company MediaDefender was under attack long before hundreds of its e-mail were stolen and exposed to the Web.
One of the largest companies offering to protect copyright music and movies from online piracy, MediaDefender's credibility and competence are now being questioned following a security breach that led to more than 6,000 of the company's e-mail being posted to the Web. Industry sources confirmed the authenticity of the e-mail.
Besides casting light on controversial tactics employed by MediaDefender, the company's correspondence also show it was buckling under the weight of a mushrooming file-swapping community and growing skepticism from entertainment executives about the effectiveness of antipiracy services.
"We're still not seeing you guys perform well on Soulseek (peer-to-peer file-sharing community)," a Sony executive said in an e-mail that was viewed by CNET News.com. "Can you please investigate the problem and actually solve it (going on months now). In my most recent search I selected Beyonce('s) "Beautiful Liar" and was able to download almost everything.
"If you can't provide a good solution," continued the Sony executive, "we will either have to request serious credits or pull this network from your services. As it stands right now it's a waste of our resources at this level of protection."
So how did the file-sharing hunter become the hunted, apparently attacked by a group calling itself the MediaDefender-Defenders? Give credit (or blame) to a technology battle in which widely scattered file sharers are outmaneuvering entertainment conglomerates.
What MediaDefender and its ilk do for those big entertainment outfits is fairly simple, even if the technology is complex: they alert copyright holders if their content is circulating on the Web and send legal "takedown" notices to sites hosting unauthorized copies of films or songs. They also attempt to disrupt file sharing.
They've been around since file sharing hit the Internet, led by outfits such as the pioneering NetPD, which started tracking the IP addresses of people sharing music on Napster. Following Napster's demise, the next wave of less centralized file-sharing networks, such as Gnutella, led to a new breed of copyright protector.
"There was a period in 2002 or 2003 when the music industry really bought into the antipiracy business," said Eric Garland, CEO of Big Champagne, a company that tracks online entertainment. "MediaDefender emerged as the lead vendor. (Music executives) celebrated wildly when the Napster verdict came down, but were highly disappointed when the courts didn't save them. They believed that technology would be the answer. They really wanted that to be true."
Antipiracy's ups and downs
Seven-year-old MediaDefender thrived in those antipiracy boom years, Garland said. The company says on its Web site that it has worked for every major record label and movie studio. Last year, ArtistDirect, a digital-entertainment company, acquired the Santa Monica, Calif., company.
Some of MediaDefender's competitors didn't fare as well and buckled under the music industry's unrealistic expectations, Garland said. The antipiracy start-ups never promised to sweep the Web of file sharing, but that wasn't what the music companies wanted to hear, he said. File tracking became harder and harder while file sharing got better and better. When performance failed to meet high expectations, record companies became disillusioned. The music industry began setting performance targets and hiring companies to test efficacy.
"After the first blush of enthusiasm faded, the antipiracy companies began disappearing," Garland said. "The music...industry wanted a quick fix and there just wasn't any."
Some of the better known companies of that period, such as Reciprocal, Vidius, Overpeer, Ranger Online and NetPD, no longer exist as standalone antipiracy companies. A few shut down, others were acquired or changed models.
MediaDefender combats piracy with four different approaches, according to an item in the blog Arstechnica. Among them is a technique called decoying, which describes sending empty files that mislead file sharers into believing that they are downloading a movie or song file.
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