And We Would Have Gotten Away With It, Too, if It Weren’t for You Meddling Domain Registrars
UPDATE: Below is an early version of a post that was later updated to include comments and clarification from MediaDefender.
If you’re going to create a honey-pot Web site with which to bust movie pirates, it’s probably not wise to register its domain under the name of your antipiracy company. Otherwise people might think your company is, you know, run by a bunch of idiots.
And some would argue that’s the case with antipiracy solutions provider MediaDefender, which has been outed as the proprietor of a bogus torrent site called MiiVi.com. Launched earlier this year, MiiVi claimed to offer “fast and easy” downloads of first-run movies via a software client. But according to reports, the client’s real purpose was to scan the contents of the hard drives of those who used it for pirated material and report back to MediaDefender.
A sly plan, but one that suffered a great deal in implementation. You see, when MediaDefender registered the MiiVi.com domain in March, it did so under its own name–a Maxwell Smart-ish misstep for an outfit that claims to be the undisputed leader of the peer-to-peer antipiracy industry.
