Media Defender backtracks on 'entrapment site'

THE MOVIE industry's private dick division has denied that it set up a P2P site designed to catch people pirating.

Media Defender admitted that it set up a site, called MiiVi, which looked exactly like a P2P site but claimed it was never meant to go live and was not designed to entrap pirates.

According to Ars Technica, Media Defender claimed the story has been blown far out of proportion and was started by sites like The Pirate Bay and TorrentFreak. MediaDefender's Randy Saaf told Ars Technica the story was "completely made up".

Well, not completely made up. He said Media Defender was working on an internal project that involved video and didn't realise that people would be trying to go to it and being a security company it didn't password-protect the site.

Saaf said that it was not an entrapment site, and Media Defender was not working with the MPAA on it. He claimed that the MPAA didn't even know about it.

However Ars asked theme why MediaDefender immediately removed all contact information from the whois registry for the domain if the site was so innocent. Saaf said that it was afraid of a hacker attack or people sending it spam.

It is not clear what Saaf was planning to do with all the details of would-be P2P users who might have logged into the site while it was accidently online or if anything was collected.

More here. µ