MediaDefender – an organisation purporting to assist copyright owners in protecting their identity and intellectual property rights online – has made an interesting new move into the industry of lies, corruption and entrapment.

Miivi.com – a website owned by MediaDefender – offered full movie downloads and the software to enable unwitting users to transfer them to their computers. This was nothing more than basic, probably illegal, attempted entrapment, with MediaDefender’s motives behind the scam are clearly to lure the sites’ visitors in and encourage them to do something illegal. Very naughty indeed.

The site has now been taken down.

MediaDefender is described as:

“… the acknowledged P2P industry expert, and has been called upon to testify in front of US Congress several times. MediaDefender has also partnered with law enforcement to crack down on internet child pornography rings.

We are not here to say that a crack down on such material is a bad thing – any attempt to stop it should be applauded – but using similar tactics on casual file sharers is arguably a step too far.

One cannot help to view this kind of action as double standards by those fighting the P2P file sharing community: they consistently tell us that their position is the morally righteous one, and that theirs is indisputably the moral high ground. This is clearly rubbish and the industry’s copyright ‘champions’ prove this time and time again by using every dirty trick in the book to attack and hurt P2P sharers.

sharers new to the scene, or those naïve enough to accept such trojan horses. The hardcore file sharers would have seen this coming a mile away and steered well clear. Arguably it should be those ’serious’ sharers that the industry’s ‘policing’ should be affecting; instead they’re going for the easy pray and with it political and media approval.

Sort out the industry, we say. Fight the right battles, do the right thing, then P2P will not be such a ‘problem’.

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