Anti-piracy efforts blamed for crash of popular Internet TV network

The outage at Revision3, which features shows such as "Diggnation" and others targeted at techies, highlighted the risks of serious collateral damage in the usually invisible but bare-knuckled technological war between copyright holders and pirates.

The victimized company said today that the culprit was MediaDefender, a Santa Monica firm that distributes fake music and video files on the Internet in order to fight piracy. The shutdown resembled the denial-of-service attacks often used by cyber-criminals and other malicious hackers, but Revision3 and MediaDefender said the outage was accidental.

Computers at San Francisco-based Revision3, which attracts more than 4 million video views a month, began getting overwhelmed with Internet traffic midday Saturday and were mostly down until the middle of Tuesday, Chief Executive Jim Louderback said in an interview.

The onslaught kept users from getting to the ad-supported site and cut off employees from their own e-mail, Louderback said.

Such denial-of-service attacks aren't unheard of, and Revision3 initially suspected that people pirating copyrighted material were responsible. That's because the overwhelming flood of requests to connect to Revision3's network were fielded by a company computer that was using the BitTorrent content-distribution system to locate all manner of files, including Revision3's own shows and copyrighted material stored elsewhere. BitTorrent is often used to share copyrighted movies, TV shows and music without permission.

But in a bizarre twist, it turned out that anti-piracy forces were to blame. Louderback said about 90% of the connection requests that crippled the company came from machines controlled by MediaDefender, which is owned by publicly traded ArtistDirect Inc., a promoter of independent bands.

MediaDefender has been criticized for a controversial tactic: It places bogus files on peer-to-peer systems to frustrate people seeking movies, computer programs and MP3s of songs. Its clients include major record labels and movie studios.

MediaDefender CEO Randy Saaf said he was still looking into what went wrong. After Revision3 contacted Saaf's company, it stopped sending the connection requests and users could once again watch "Diggnation," a spinoff of the Digg news-sharing site, and other Revision3 shows.