One of the most popular Internet-based television networks was shut down all weekend, a casualty in the entertainment industry's fight against pirated material.
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 Thursday that the culprit was MediaDefender Inc., 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.
The outage demonstrated the pluses and minuses of Internet television. It hit not long after Friday's weekly post of new episodes of the two most popular shows, "Diggnation" and "Tekzilla," foiling some weekend viewers. Even though Web shows are less reliable than conventional TV, they are archived and available on demand, so viewers who miss an episode can easily watch it later.
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 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.
