MPAA Dummy Site Snares Pirates
July 05, 2007 | by Nick Mokey
MiiVi.com captured information about online pirates by offering links to pirated movies and a program that searched users' computers.
Online pirates had better watch where they click, because bait has been set for them. The site MiiVi.com, which offered offering links to pirated movies, was recently unmasked by Pirate Bay as a front for the Motion Picture Association of America to gather information on would-be pirates, possibly for future legal action. MiiVi was run by MediaDefender, the company charged with the legwork of tracking down illegal file sharers for groups like the MPAA and RIAA. Like many BitTorrent hubs, MiiVi offered links to download pirated movies, but with the obvious catch that information about downloaders could be logged. The site also offered a program that supposedly sped up downloads, but would instead search a user’s computer for pirated content and report back to MediaDefender. The site’s ulterior purpose was discovered using a WHOIS domain lookup, which showed that MiiVi.com was registered with MediaDefender’s California address. Soon after news of the site spread in the file-sharing community, it apparently went dead. It isn’t yet clear how much information MediaDefender managed to drag in with MiiVi before the group’s cover was blown, but the domain has been registered for nearly five months, since February 8.
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John on Jul 5th, 2007 at 8:40 AM:
You'd think they'd be smart enough to hide their real info when registering their website! Apparently they changed the WHO IS info yesterday...
This cat and mouse game is getting old, it should dawn on them that consumers will always remain one step ahead of them. Sure they may catch a few losers but now there's so many options for sharing stuff. There's thousands of blogs that link to uploaded albums on rapidshare.com/megaupload.com, and as for filesharing apps, now there's encrypted file sharing apps (like http://www.gigatribe.com )which prevent randoms from spying on your exchanges. Even allofmymp3 managed to outsmart the legal beagles!