Revision3 is a media content provider. They produce such shows as Tekzilla, Diggnation, and Systm. Because they provide video in high definition, which requires a lot of bandwidth, they use BitTorrent as one distribution mechanism for their shows. Over the Memorial Day weekend, the Revision3 site was unavailable as a result of a distributed denial of service attack. It turns out the reason was their use of BitTorrent. And it wasn't the cracking community that brought them down. It seems that a company known as MediaDefender attacked Revision3's servers and left Revision3 unable to deliver content.

Who is MediaDefender, and why would they go after Revision3? MediaDefender, according to their website, provides “services that stop the spread of illegally traded copyrighted material over the Internet and Peer-to-Peer networks.” In other words, they prevent copyrighted material from being illegally traded over BitTorrent, amongst other things. Ars Technica has a good rundown of the company. 

We can be fairly sure that the attack on Revision3 wasn't intentional. It appears that MediaDefender detected a hole in the Revision3 BitTorrent tracker, and took advantage of it. When Revision3 tech staff noticed this hole, and closed it up, the MediaDefender servers tried in vain to reconnect to the Revision3 tracker. According to Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback on his company's blog, MediaDefender's servers were sometimes sending up to 8000 packets a second. It's no wonder, then, that Revision3 was effectively shut down. No one else could get to Revision3 because all of their bandwidth was eaten up by packets from MediaDefender.

Companies that produce media, such as the recording industry and the motion picture industry, have a right to defend their copyrights. Acquiring copyrighted material without paying for it is illegal, unless said material is meant to to be distributed in that manner (such as the content on Revision3). They have a right to prevent theft, which is a real crime. But they don't have a right to break the law in the process, and as Jim Louderback points out, launching denial of service attacks is a crime in the United States, no matter who you launch them against.

What's even worse, though, is that Revision3 was doing nothing illegal. BitTorrent is a technology they use to legally distribute their content. It's part of their business model. MediaDefender's denial of service attack was also a denial of revenue attack. If these early reports turn out to be true, MediaDefender prevented Revision3 from engaging in legal business activity and prevented them from reaping the rewards of that business. Revision3 also likely incurred costs related to diagnosing and fixing the problem.

There's a war going on, and it's a war against peer to peer traffic. Many Internet service providers are already shaping their traffic, and when BitTorrent traffic is going over their networks, it's usually the first thing they throttle. Companies like MediaDefender poison peer to peer traffic in an attempt to shut it down. To many people, BitTorrent is used exclusively for the illegal distribution of copyrighted material. This may be true in many cases, but it's definitely not true in all cases. People use BitTorrent to download Linux distributions (100% legally) and many people use it unknowingly. For example, World of Warcraft, a popular MMORPG, uses BitTorrent as a method to distribute updates to its client software.