MediaDefender BitTorrent Craziness




This is crazy. For all you people in the media, take note:

The Biggest Ever BitTorrent Leak: MediaDefender Internal Emails Go Public

What this article says is that there is a company, MediaDefender, that has as a goal to mess with BitTorrent servers and their ability to transfer large files (like media files, music and movies) easily over the internet. Its clients, as I understand it, are the MPAA and RIAA, famous for suing single mothers for allegedly infringing on copyrights.

The article also explains that it was suspected that the company, MediaDefender, setup a fake site to lure people into infringing on copyrighted materials, so that they could be tracked and prosecuted. In a nutshell, entrapment. MediaDefender denied this, but somehow 700MB of their emails were leaked onto BitTorrent itself, which go on to explain their plans to do just that.

This is big news and reveals how desperate the situation is getting. I can only imagine how Lawrence Lessig feels about all of this. He realized that the copyright laws in the United States are outdated, and fought hard to have them changed, but lost, and the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act was put into law, furthering this outdated mechanism for protecting copyright owners - quite ineffectively I might add.

You can also see how copyright is becoming a big issue for YouTube in the situation of the Creationist Scientific Evangelists battling it out with many YouTube members over what is considered infringement and what is fair use.

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