Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Poisoning a P2P network, and entrapment, are not a wise means to fight piracy - or a good way to treat your customers. It's sort of like fighting an insurgency, what you should do is deal with the root causes, rather than try to blow shit up and put everyone in jail.

Running such an underhanded and unpopular organization does have drawbacks of course. Sometimes those drawbacks manifest themselves as your own internal email being hacked and released. A group calling themselves "MediaDefender Defenders" has put the internal MediaDefender data on, you guessed it, P2P networks.

And, what do the glorious email messages (and other content, such as VOIP data, which is also being released) reveal? Well not only are the MediaDefender guys doing exactly the wrong thing to help any "media" associated industry, they are also apparently handing over data to the government (at the very least the New York state Attorney General). They seemingly allowed access to their P2P tracking files, to the AG's office.

There is a ton of great/horrible stuff in the leaked information, in addition to the government angle. For instance:

MediaDefender charges $4,000 for one month of protection for an album, and $2,000 for one month of protection for a track. Clients are also given access to MediaDefender's reports and statistical analysis. In the contract, the company claims that it "will perform Services against approximately twelve million" file-sharing users at any given time and will target the fifteen most popular P2P networks. Targeted networks include FastTrack, Gnutella, IRC, Usenet, DirectConnect, eDonkey, MP2P, Kademlia, Overnet, BitTorrent, SoulSeek, and Shareaza.

Again, this is how the media companies think they should treat customers? Rather than lowering prices and dropping DRM, attracting more customers by providing what those customers want, they instead think paying huge amounts of money for a service such as MD, baiting customers into stealing songs, poisoning networks and machines, suing people, and pissing off customers further by colluding with the government, is a better approach.

Really, read the aforelinked Ars article. amazing story.

Or, if you are so inclined, go to the source.