Mediadefender

Jeg har lige læst en interessant artikel om californiske firma Mediadefender, som lever af at blokere og korrumpere ophavsretsbeskyttet indhold på P2P netværk. Et filmstudie, for eksempel, køber en "beskyttelsespakke" til en bestemt udgivelse, som så kører i de første par måneder hvor filmen eller pladen høster størstedelen af sin indtjening. Idéen er simpel - i stedet for at forsøge at fjerne indholdet eller lukke samtlige netværk ned - sender Mediadefenders mega-badass-servere en mængde henvendelser ud til de "gode" fildelte filer, så de bliver sværere at komme til. Samtidig med at falske filer spredes (så brugeren, der leder efter f.eks. en bestemt film, bliver træt og giver op) gennem en 9 gigabit internetforbindelse (!).
"the goal is to make files hard to find for a short period of time so that studios, music labels, and artists can make money from selling the legitimate product. (..) MediaDefender counts every major music label and most studios among its clients, with the notable exception of Disney", skriver Ars Technica.

Mediadefenders teknikker:

Decoying. This, in a nutshell, is the serving of fake files that are generally empty or contain a trailer. The goal is to make legitimate content a needle in a haystack, so MediaDefender works hard to ensure that its copies of files show up in the top ten spots when certain keywords are searched for. Everything about the file is tailored to look like the work of pirates, from the file size (movies are often compressed enough to fit on a CD) to the naming conventions to the pirate scene tag. With massive bandwidth and plenty of servers, the company has little trouble in getting these decoy files to appear at the top of search results, but decoying has a down side: the bandwidth. Because MediaDefender actually serves these large but bogus files, it incurs a significant bandwidth bill by using this technique.

Spoofing. Spoofing sends searchers down dead ends. MediaDefender coders have written their own software that interacts with the various P2P protocols and sends bogus returns to search requests, usually directing people to nonexistent locations. Because most people only look at the top five search results, MediaDefender tries to frustrate their first attempts to download a file in hopes that they will just give up.

Interdiction. While the first two techniques try to prevent searchers from locating files, interdiction prevents distributors from serving them. The tool is generally used when media is leaked or newly released; the goal is to slow its spread in those crucial first days. MediaDefender servers attempt to create constant connections to the files in question, saturating the provider's upstream bandwidth and preventing anyone else from grabbing the data.

Swarming. Though he acknowledges the BitTorrent networks can be hard to disrupt, Lee points out that MediaDefender can use "swarming" to make life more difficult for users trying to download copyrighted content. BitTorrent works by using a hash file to reassemble a file from many pieces, each of which may have been downloaded from a different user. MediaDefender simply serves up its chunks of these files, but instead of providing the proper data, its chunks contain static or nothing at all. BitTorrent will discard such junk data, but a flood of it can slow a user's download to a crawl.

Jeg kan ikke lade være med at beundre MediaDefenders hacker-agtige tilgang lidt - det virker forfriskende i modsætning til de velkendte retsager og top-down strategier fra industriens side - og udfordrer også fildelernes intelligens og dovenskab. Men ikke overraskende er der brudt krig ud. Forleden lækkedes et halvt års interne emails fra MediaDefender og det er nok ikke det sidste vi hører til den sag. Indtil der kommer en billig, DRM-fri, måde at downloade film og TV-serier på lovligt, vil det blive ved. Det kommer til at tage LANG tid i Danmark.