Miivi - Tevine

MiiVi - The video download site meant for busting pirates

MediaDefender, known for its questionable acts against piracy (i.e. creating fake torrents for harvesting IP addresses, creating similar video upload/download services), has just launched “Miivi”. This somewhat innocent-looking site is actually a trap to bust copyright infringers. While copyright-infringers are themselves breaking the law, MiiVi is actually tempting users to download such illegit content. MiiVi acts like a video upload/download site, except with a catch. They have rigged the site into recording everything you do. No matter how bad “piracy” is, there have to be better ways than this…

Fortunately or unfortunately, many internet users have got hold of that word. How? MediaDefender apparently didn’t mask their domain registration, and it is a direct tell-tale sign that MediaDefender is up to something again. The online buzz has led to MiiVi being widely notorious despite being out there for a few months. Some have even deliberately uploaded as much legal content as they can find to the servers, hoping it would crash under such stress (and strangely, the plan may actually have worked, as the site went down after getting DDos attacks from normal visitors when word got round in popular sites like Digg).

Currently, MiiVi has been temporarily silenced due to immense traffic from popular sites. The domain’s DNS records has also been altered to make it seem like the domain is not owned by MediaDefender.