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 Revision3 shows, including "Diggnation," a spinoff of the Digg news-sharing website.
Saaf said that Revision3's BitTorrent tracker was a well-known guidepost for pirates and that MediaDefender had been planting misleading information there for months.
But Saaf said that his company had no problem with Revision3 as a whole and that the shutdown resulted from technical glitches on one or both sides.
Many Internet television companies, along with more traditional media producers, use BitTorrent to save money in distributing their material online. Louderback, a former editor in chief of PC Magazine, said Revision3's copy of the tracking software was initially configured to spread only company-produced video.
But that setup was unstable, so a few months ago a Revision3 staffer began allowing the tracker to help searchers find any sort of file.
When Revision3 noticed pointers to copyright-protected works appearing last week, it changed again and installed a "white-list," blocking all traffic except that coming from a list of approved computers.
That's when MediaDefender's system went haywire, Louderback said. When MediaDefender's attempts to connect and plant misleading information were spurned, it began trying constantly. The thousands of requests per second crashed Revision3's network.
"Normal behavior, if you don't get a response, is you wait a while," Louderback said. "At the very least, it was a pretty poor implementation and pretty grossly negligent. What if these computers had been at a hospital?"
Saaf said such a problem had never occurred before, and he suggested that Revision3 might have made its own technical misstep.
But if the case is isolated, it's unfortunate for MediaDefender that Revision3 was the victim.
"Diggnation" and other Revision3 shows are popular among technologists who already dislike MediaDefender. And stories that mention "Diggnation" or Digg tend to show up high in Digg's rankings.
A blog post about the situation by Louderback was the highest-rated Digg story on Thursday evening, with many of the hundreds of comments encouraging Revision3 to sue.
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joseph.menn@latimes.com
