Piracy - 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.

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Posted on 4 July

Media rights technology sues Microsoft, Apple and others for not fully enforcing DRM

Posted by multippt

While Microsoft and Apple (and other companies) has started measures to enforce DRM (Digital Rights Management) in their products, the Media Rights Technology (MRT) is attempting to sue them, for not using enough DRM.

Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, and Real develop media player softwares, and even gadgets. These software can be used to play digital music streams and files. However, when one uses them for streaming (e.g. Radio stations and Podcasts), such streams are not protected by any DRM encryption, and hence, anyone with a stream ripper can rip off segments of the stream. MRT claims that these companies should have used one such DRM technology, called the “X1 SeCure Recording Control”. Guess who’s the maker of that technology? That’s right, it’s MRT.

So in other words, they are suing those companies for not using their products. How “sweet”…

The subject of DRM has been a rather rough topic, with half of the people agreeing or are against it. While DRM is designed to be protecting the rights of music artists, it is killing the right of the users using digital music. DRM basically enables the user to play the copy of the protected music, on a specific device. So, what happens if the user wants to listen it on something else, like an MP3 player? That’s right, they need to buy the song for that particular device. Imagine buying at least 2 copies of your legally owned music. In addition, it is difficult to recover lost DRM files (or backup DRM-protected files for future use). It is received a significant amount of criticism, especially amongst hard-core music listeners.

Tags: Apple, DRM, Media, Microsoft, Piracy

Posted in Security

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Posted on 12 May