Media Defender, a notorious anti piracy gang working for the MPAA, RIAA and several independent media production companies, just launched their very own video upload service called "miivi.com". The sole purpose of the site is to trap people into uploading copyrighted material, and bust them for doing so.

Media Defender is known for their shady tactics. Besides launching video upload services, they also trap people into downloading fake torrents so they can collect IP addresses, and send copyright infringement letters to ISPs.

Fortunately, most of the IPs of these fake BitTorrent trackers are already blocked by blocklist software like PeerGuardian. However, they still manage to collect the IP addresses of thousands of users who do fall for this trap.

And Now they try to do the same with their “fake” video download service. They have registered a new domain and launched a video upload / download site with a web 2.0-ish name: miivi.com. Miivi claims to offer hight speed downloads of blockbuster movies like “300” (don’t download), hereby luring people into downloading copyrighted content.

Apparently the cease and desist letters they send to P2P users and video sharing sites like YouTube and other are not enough. At the bottom of this article is a screenshot of the WHOIS info, it speaks for itself. No matter how wrong ‘piracy’ might seem to some people, this is NOT the way to fight it.

My suggestion is: upload and download as much legal content as you can, titled “THIS SITE IS A SCAM“, let’s see if their servers can handle the stress.

Update: Miivi is down now, seems like the plan worked….

Update: they changed their WHOIS info.