These “Media Defender” people seem to have been in the news a lot of late.
I’m perplexed at the “value” they bring to the media companies. Their whole reason to exist seems to be to introduce fucked up versions of movies and tv episodes and music into the various peer-to-peer systems, in order to decrease the value of such systems.
They appear to be gleefully ignoring the elephants in the room which are (respectively) the technical and social sanity checks provided by (a) file hashing, and (b) feedback.
For example, let’s imagine I want to download the latest version of Americas Funniest Videos Of Muslims Making Baby Jesus Cry, and I see two files being shared, each called “BabyJesusCry-S03E04.PDTV.XVID.AVI”. One of these has an overall file hash that’s different from the other. So now I can tell that ONE of these is different from the other, despite the filenames being the same, so MediaDefender or some other nub has messed with it.
Now we check the seeds and downloads, and the feedback, on each file.
One will have feedback like “LOL FAYKE WTF? WANKERS”, and maybe 45 seeds and 200 downloads. The other will have feedback like “Good Rip! PDTV does it again! You can really clearly see the Tears on the cheeks of the Christ Child! AAAA+++ WOULD BLASPHEME WITH AGAIN” and have 2734 seeds and 123439 downloaders.
It’s _not hard_ to tell which is the fake and which is not.
MediaDefender are causing, AT BEST, a slight irritation to pirates. At worst, you don’t even know they’re there. I wonder how much money they’re being paid for this?