If you have all been keeping up with the whole MediaDefender fallout you might have heard about this story. It seems like Interscope Records are using P2P networks as marketing tools. Some more outrageous emails have been uncovered from the MediaDefender debacle, but in an email transcribed from an Interscope Records exec to a MediaDefender employee asking if a new single of their artist was gaining traction on P2P networks. They quote saying:

“Nicole from pussy cat dolls has a single called “whatever u like”. It’s not selling well on itunes or playing that great on radio. A song called “Baby Love” just leaked (I don’t know how long ago). Interscope wants to know if Baby Love is picking up steam on p2p. They need to make a decision by early next week on whether they should switch to this song as the single. Please get me a score comparison on Monday for these two tracks. Also, please put beyonces, fergie, gwen, and nelly furtado singles as comparisons.”

We are fairly certain other record companies are doing this as well, they leak a song and they want to see how well it performs in an open market. So P2P users and networks are being used as a tool, providing record companies with valuable marketing information. It seems a little hypocritical if you ask us. So while innocent people are being sued by the RIAA, record companies are doing the same thing P2P users are doing and more. It sure tells you how much they love an artist when they leak tracks for them.  The war continues….

So this is a self proclaimed week called “A Geek Week in Piracy and Online Freedom”. Meaning this entire week is dedicated to online piracy and your online freedoms. So we start with an article that has been spreading around the web like wild fire. It first shot up from TorretFreak’s site. If you have not read the original article we will bring you up to speed in the next paragraph, or you can head over to our good friends over at TorrentFreak.com.

Well it all started when a group called MediaDefender was caught setting up a shell website called called Miivi.com, this site was intended to look like a fake p2p movie downloading site that offered blockbuster movies to download for free. The main reason for this website was to collect IP addresses of users downloading from their fake website. By collecting these IP addresses they eventually would send copyright infringement letters to your ISP. This obviously sounds like entrapment, plain and simple. We at The Geekery think this is extremely wrong, and incredibly unethical, as well as illegal. But online entrapment is a very gray area. A company like MediaDefender says tactics like this are honeypots not entrapment. Honeypots are not illegal, depending on what you collect, this is all true. So this is a very gray area, but none the less it is very unethical.

So various parties figured out that MediaDefender was behind this scam of Miivi.com and they ousted them, one of those parties was Ernesto from TorrentFreak. After so many diggs about miivi.com being fake they took the miivii.com site down. At that time if you were to run a Whois the owner would come back being a man named Randy Saaf, a MediaDefender employee and the registrars email address was to a @mediadefender account. Interestingly enough a Whois report for miivi.net which is obviously different from the .com shows it being registered to a Jonathan Chang, with a physical address of a Popeye’s chicken in Santa Monica, Califonia. So obviously these people at MediaDefender like to play games with people.

So some people decided to play some games with MediaDefender. A group called “MediaDefender Defenders” in essence hacked the companies email, SQL, VOIP servers and started collecting a little data of their own. Once they felt they had enough info to prove MediaDefender of entrapment they decided to turn up the heat a little more. So what do all black hat saints do when they feel an injustice has occurred? They release their findings out to the BitTorrent world! In what has been described as “The Biggest ever BitTorrent Leak ever”, which we certainly agree it is.

So now the juicy stuff begins. At first we did not comprehend all the data that was just lumped right in front of us. So we will cut out the boring stuff and go straight to the guts of this matter. Now to be respectful of our friends out in the blogosphere we are not going to copy and paste all of these emails that we did not discover. So to get straight to what you want to see go here, it’s a link to some of the emails that are absolutely amazing to read. The lengths these crooks go to catch someone sharing a file are mind blowing.

Now to add to the confusion and the cool factor of the story, the MediaDefender Defenders released a phone conversation involving a New York attorney and MediaDefender employees regarding a child pornography case. “Their job is to identify child-porn images and report the IPs of the offending computers back to the government. A tricky project since it would mean that they actually have to download and rate the illegal content.”

In addition to all of this they also leaked an enormous MySQL database; this database shows tracking and decoy file information for the Gnutella network which is used by P2P clients such as LimeWire, and Bearshare.

So far MediaDefender Defenders are ahead at this game; this obviously creates a huge problem for MediaDefender. I really don’t think even the word “huge” can describe it. This is company ending “huge” in the form of bankruptcy.

We assume their will be many updates on this situation throughout this week, so stay tuned. Once again we thank TorrentFreak.com for breaking this situation wide open to the public. People need to see these scam artists at work.