a dog-eared town

In my earlier story about the media enabler company, Media Defender, they had set up a fake website hoping to induce people to commit copyright infringement. Well they obviously noticed the traffic from digg and /. because they yanked the website down. They also changed the WhoIs information to hide who own the site. Of course at this point it’s moot but what’s really funny is their “excuse” for the site.

MediaDefender’s Randy Saaf told Ars Technica that while the company does own the domain to MiiVi, the story itself was completely made up. “MediaDefender was working on an internal project that involved video and didn’t realize that people would be trying to go to it and so we didn’t password-protect the site,” Saaf said. “It was just an oversight from that perspective. This was not an entrapment site, and we were not working with the MPAA on it. In fact, the MPAA didn’t even know about it.”

That’s such a baldfaced lie it’s impossible to not laugh in his face. IF it truly were an internal project, why buy a domain? Why set up a domain website? I’m pretty sure Microsoft and IBM and Oracle all have internal projects. I’m pretty sure they never see contact with the public facing internet. So obviously this wasn’t just an internal project. Wouldn’t happen, no way. You just wouldn’t even buy the domain. It’s an internal project, why buy a domain?

But the lies keep getting better.

If this is true, why did MediaDefender immediately remove all contact information from the whois registry for the domain? Saaf said that after everything hit the fan, the company decided to take everything on the site down because it was afraid of a hacker attack or “people sending us spam.”

They took down their site because they were afraid of spam. Did their corporate site stay up? Why yes it is. Do you think their corporate site has spam? I bet it does. Yet again, they lie.

Again I wonder about the copyright infringement. Even if it was an internal project, as a company, they would still have to get a release from the copyright holder for their project. It’s one thing to be at your personal residence and make a copy, it’s another thing to use that movie in a corporate setting. It’s still not allowed. I won’t be holding my breath waiting for them to get sued over their violation.