Revision3 v. Media Defender: It’s Not Rev3’s Fight!
Jim Lauderback, CEO of Revision3, on the This Week in Tech podcast (episode 145) offered additional details and his general business philosophy in addressing the dispute with Media Defender and ArtistsDirect. This is an excellent episode of the podcast and is not to be missed by those interested in the Media Defender activity. The attack originated from several IP addresses and several machines all belonging to the same company; a company that decided it need not spoof (or hide) the origination of the attack. If the attack had come from one machine and one IP address the attack would be merely a Denial of Service attack. Since several IP addresses and machines were used the attack can be categorized as a Distributed Denial of Service attack.
Revision3, during the attack attempted to contact ArtistsDirect, but because it occurred over the holiday weekend no one was available. The attack was precipitated by Revision3 closing its tracker (through use of a whitelist) to ArtistsDirect/Media Defender. Why did Revision3 close the tracker. Well, according to Louderback they were informed that the Revision3 tracker was being misused, unbeknownst to the company, to index torrents for movies and music. A tracker is merely an index indicating that certain files are available for download elsewhere – and at no time was Revision3 hosting improper movie or music files. Media Defender used this tracker, without permission, to index the false files it places into circulation.
What brought this to Revision3’s attention was a forum post from a fan. That post can be found here. And just to be fair, a person claiming to be the poster has revealed this fact on his blog.
Jim Lauderback says that the tracker was open for only about 5 months before the whitelist was implemented. The tracker was previously “whitelisted” but to provide customers a stable bittorrent download the whitelist was disabled.
He estimated the damages to be up to about $100,000 with a loss of about 400,000 pageviews.
When asked directly if Revision3 will sue, Lauderback says no. That makes perfect sense – his company is not in the business of filing lawsuits. As a startup – and lets face it although Rev3 is very successful, it is still a very new company. A lawsuit would be a tremendous distraction for a new venture.
Not only does a lawsuit require the services of an attorney. The filing will generate an answer from Media Defender that will require Lauderback’s attention for decisions based the counter-arguments. Then will come the subpoenas, which will require quite a bit of staff time collecting the information (including server information) to respond. Then Rev3 staff will be subject to deposition – which will take hours per witness. On top of that Rev3 staff will have to be made available for Rev3’s own counsel to educate him on the technical aspects of the case in addition to their own recollection of events.
In short – to collect $100,000 – Rev3 will have to endure the staff and labor costs of pursuing the case that are likely to be several times larger than the amount they are attempting to collect. In short, it doesn’t make good business sense to sue.
In comments on DIGG to stories about the decision not to sue many people are disappointed that Rev3 is not using this as an opportunity to attack an unpopular company. Lauderback has correctly concluded that this is a rabbit-trail in a much larger competition between Old Media and New Media. Old Media is all about control and Rev3 is all about meeting customer expectations to view and listen to content when and where the customer wants.
Many are calling upon a lawsuit saying “It would be worth it for us; I’m sure a donation drive to the cause would be quite successful, and would bring a lot of extremely positive publicity to Rev3.” Such perspectives miss the point – Rev3 wants to be a growing IPTV network, not a plaintiff. To pursue a claim in court will distract the company.
Jim Lauderback is right – his company comes first. If the company is successful, that will be much sweeter than a $100,000 judicial award.
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Comments
Thanks. I agree – traffic is traffic. If you haven’t listened to the latest TWIT, you should. They talk about the forum post and the fact they had no idea the tracker was being used by others.
I did listen to TWiT, right after someone on my blog told me I was mentioned. It was awesome–I actually stayed up late to wait for the mention of me. 
Anyway, it was a pretty good episode, too.
It was a good episode. Of course, I generally like any TWIT episode unless it has Wozniak or Jason Calacanis.
Both have egos too large for the continental United States and have GRATING accents. Plus, Jason is usually wrong about everything.
Anyway, when I heard the podcast I decided to look for the forum page and I found your DIGG entry. I don’t know why it didn’t become “popular.” Most of my stories don’t become popular on DIGG either. I supposed I don’t know what it takes.
I know what you mean– I have never gotten a front-page story on Digg, but I’ve been using it since it was first released (although my account was deleted at one point, so I had to recreate it later. >.>)
As for Wozniak and Calcanis–I’ve never even heard of Calcanis, so I can’t agree there, but I like Wozniak regardless of his ego. I like the li’l tricks and what not he plays on people.
I’ve only had one item ever go “popular.” It was an excerpt from a podcast about gaming and a Sony fan upset about the PS3. It was hilarious.
Nice.. I’ll have to do something very “faux pas” to get front-paged. =\ I just need to think of something.. like.. insult Kevin Rose, and post it.
Very well written–I especially liked the part that mentioned me! Yay! Anyway, thanks for the pingback–traffic is traffic.
–NobleArc, The Lazy Canadian