Hola everyone!

It’s been awhile since I sat down and chatted with you all. But I have been tinkering away in the wizard’s lair trying to come up with a vaccine for all of these disgusting RIAA/MPAA employees, but to their luck they are some form of hybrid disease. So we have to stay vigilant in our quest to smite these foul creatures.

Enough with the wizard talk. Do you own an iPod, Zen, Zune or any device that you have to rip from a CD so you can play your purchased CD on that device? I know there are not that many people that own these crazy futuristic devices, but if you’re like me you like to stay ahead of the times. If your answer is “Yes”, then the RIAA thinks you are a thief. So I guess I should not come out and tell you about my laser disc copying cluster I have in the basement. Even if you make a copy of your purchased CD then they think you are stealing. So backing up your music is a definitely a no, no.

“After years of battling in court and close to 30,000 lawsuits, making a copy of a CD you bought for your own personal usage is still a concept that the recording industry is apparently uncomfortable with. During the Jammie Thomas trial this fall, the head of litigation from Sony BMG testified that she believed that ripping your own CDs is stealing.

When asked by the RIAA’s lead counsel whether it was wrong for consumers to make copies of CDs they have purchased, Jennifer Pariser replied in the negative. “When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song,” said Pariser. Making “a copy” of a song you own is just “a nice way of saying ’steals just one copy’,” according to Pariser. ” Via ars technica

All of this leaves me to believe that once again the RIAA is scum. It makes sense to come after the end user, the small guy. It’s not like they are going after the companies that are making these things possible, like manufacturers of CDRW/DVDRW drives. The small guy does not have the type of money to fend these bloodsuckers off, but the large manufacturing companies do. That question has always been lying back in my head, why don’t we hear about any lawsuits anymore about the RIAA going after the source of what they call
“destruction of their media”. It started with CDR technology and the actual media. Why don’t they go after Microsoft, Apple, and many others for creating ripping tools built in to their software?

Maybe they have in the past, but I could not dig it up. But now all we hear is the RIAA attacking the little people. We can’t really use that excuse for Grokster, and Napster, but the majority of these attacks are against the end user, never against big business.

But once again the RIAA tries to take us all down a peg. But soon we will overcome!

With our self pro claimed “Geek Week in Piracy” officially over, we have come to a lot of conclusions. One conclusion is that we could not cover enough info about this topic in a week. That’s why we have decided to at least touch on this topic once a week. So many thoughts and ideas are running through my head on what I can write to summarize these topics of online piracy, but one stands out more then the rest. Maybe it is because this question is what online piracy boils down to, that simple question of “is it wrong?” We can all justify things in life on some level, so the answer to that question will be different for everyone. Some people will come to the conclusion that paying $1.00 a song is too much money, or paying $15-$16.00 for an album with 11 songs is in it self thievery. Every explanation can be justified, so we have taken a neutral ground on certain topics within the online piracy world. Some content we feel people should rightly pay for, some content we feel is overpriced and people should pirate the hell out of it until studios understand that we should not have to pay the inflated prices to see certain flicks.

One thing we do not stand for is the way the RIAA/MPAA go after people about downloading content. They are the new Gestapo; they are hypocritical entities that have blatant disregard for laws that have been set into place to protect people. They blackmail and extort money out of innocent people daily. These corporations need to be stopped.

Another main conclusion we have came to is that “pirating” or “sharing” content will never stop. No matter what, even if albums are 50 cents people will always download music, movies, and software. The internet is our sea, and where there is a sea their will always be pirates.

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.

A quote from my good friend the Geek’s Henchman sums this week up, “They may take our internet lives but they’ll never take our internet freedoms!” With all of the new info and news about piracy this week we decided to put a hot spotlight on all the rumors, news, and information on how we all can defend our online freedoms. This idea came to us after reading about the whole media defender debacle. Now in the past we have blasted many companies and sites about disregarding freedoms of their customers and users which we think is wrong. We will continue to back the consumer, and continue to back the people.

So with that we give this week to you, the consumer. This whole week will be dedicated to piracy, and how we feel about. It will also be dedicated to how you can fight for your online freedoms. Now we fully respect the intellectual property of artists in the music, movie, and software industry, but what we don’t respect is how “private contractors” go about hunting down and entrapping people. These companies like the MPAA and RIAA are just that, companies, so many people think they are a part of the US government. They are not, people think this because the MPAA and the RIAA act like they own the internet, and they feel that they can create laws that are only sanctioned by them. They do have the backing of the US government because they have persuaded the judges of this country into taking freedoms and protection away from the consumer. In reality they classify themselves as non-profit trade association, which is  some what of a joke.

This week we will cover a lot of important pieces to this gigantic shell game the consumers and contractors play. We will touch on how ISP lie about what they watch you do and how they track your actions to simply protect themselves. We will touch on how you can protect yourself using P2P services like Bit Torrent. We will show how to protect yourself if you do by chance get a call or letter from one of these evil entities. Now we will never be able to match the funds that the MPAA and the RIAA have to fight back, but we can let everything be heard, and let our judges and elected officials know how we feel about it these issues. 

So we all here at The Geekery want you to sit back and just read, even if you do not agree on some of these controversial topics, its always good to hear all sides of the story.