A couple of weeks ago a new torrent site (Miivi) appeared which offered full length movies among other illegal wares, and offered to install client side software to help speed up downloads. The software was designed to search the user's computer for illegal wares and report the findings back to 'home base'.

Some did some snooping around and found the site's domain belonged to Media Defender, an anti-piracy company which has affiliations with the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America).

The most obvious clue was the publicly available who-is information which indicated mediadefender.com and miivi.com belonged to the same company. But before anyone knew it the who-is record was changed, which is very suspicious indeed. As of today the who-is information has been wiped.

A few days later and a true testament to the power of 'spreading the word', mivvi.com went offline leaving nothing more that a courtesy holding page by the domain registrar.

Now Media Defender have come forward claiming they never deliberately set up an entrapment site. Randy Saaf at Media Defender told Ars Technica:

"Media Defender 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...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."

If this were really the case, why would they have had the who-is records changed? Media Defender answered this by pulling out lame excuse #32761: they were afraid of a hack attack and people sending them spam.

Sigh.