MediaDefender

» see mediadefender.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Nobody signed up for MediaDefender. You met its work in a folder, halfway through an mp3 that turned out to be twenty seconds of the right song looping into hiss, on a connection slow enough that the download had cost you an evening. Somebody was being paid to put that file there.

The company was founded in Los Angeles in 2000 by Randy Saaf and Octavio Herrera, and the pitch was mechanical rather than legal. Instead of suing the people downloading, it would degrade the network they were downloading from. Fake copies, corrupted copies, files that connected and then stalled forever, all seeded in enough volume that the genuine file got buried under its own imitations. By March 2007 the operation ran around sixty employees and two thousand servers in California with nine gigabits a second of contracted bandwidth, on retainer for Universal, Fox, HBO and Paramount.

ARTISTdirect bought it on 1 August 2005 for $42.5 million in cash, which was the high point of the whole story. Everything after that is a security company failing to secure itself.

The Turkish end of this was the internet cafe, roughly 2002 to 2005, where downloading mp3s was most of what the machines did between counter-strike rounds. Nobody in there had heard the name MediaDefender. Plenty of people in there had opened one of its files, sworn at it and deleted it, which is the closest the company ever came to a mass audience.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the decoys ~

The technical term the industry used was interdiction, and it covered a family of tricks. Publish thousands of files with the right name and the wrong contents. Publish real-looking torrents whose peers never actually send data. Sit in a swarm advertising pieces you have no intention of uploading. None of it stopped anyone determined, and it was never supposed to. It was supposed to raise the cost of a casual download high enough that some fraction of people gave up and bought the thing.

In July 2007 TorrentFreak worked out that a new video sharing site called MiiVi.com belonged to MediaDefender, traced through the domain registration during a transfer. MiiVi invited you to upload video and offered a download client that scanned your machine for copyrighted files and reported what it found. The site came down within days of being named. The internal emails that surfaced two months later confirmed both the ownership and the reason it was pulled.

~ the year the mail came out ~

On 14 September 2007 a group calling itself MediaDefender-Defenders posted roughly seven hundred megabytes of the company's internal mail to BitTorrent trackers. It was 6,621 emails covering nine months of operations, and it came with the source of a decoy system called TrapperKeeper plus an audio recording of a twenty-five minute conference call between company staff and the New York Attorney General's office. Everything a firm that fought file sharing did not want public was published using file sharing, and it propagated exactly as well as the studio releases they had spent seven years poisoning.

The intruder turned out to be a high school student living with his parents, who found a hole in the firewall at the end of 2006 and sat inside the mail and phone systems for months while the company's revenue was still near sixteen million dollars a year. ARTISTdirect later put the direct cost of the breach at no less than $825,000. The indirect cost was the client list learning, in the clients' own words in their own quoted messages, how the work was actually done.

~ the last name change ~

Over Memorial Day weekend in 2008 the video network Revision3 went dark under a flood of SYN packets running at up to eight thousand a second, and the addresses belonged to MediaDefender. The company said it had been trying to reach a tracker that Revision3 ran for its own legal downloads, and that the traffic escalated after Revision3 closed the tracker to outsiders. It was a bad look for a business already famous for one.

Saaf and Herrera were gone by early 2009. That April the company bought the MediaSentry unit off SafeNet for $936,000, most of it a note rather than cash, and on 18 August 2009 ARTISTdirect chief executive Dimitri Villard announced that MediaDefender and MediaSentry would both trade under a new name, Peer Media Technologies. Nothing about the work changed. The point of the exercise was that two names had become unusable in front of customers. Peer Media's own website went dark around May 2013, and by then the labels had mostly stopped paying anyone to break file sharing, because streaming had done what nine gigabits of decoys could not.

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