You may have heard that years of Media Defender emails have become publicly available. Media Defender, a company which uploads and shares fake media files on various file sharing networks to try and reduce piracy, is the RIAA/MPAA’s first line of defense in their fight against illegal file sharing. And you, as a college student, are probably one of their targets.

Media Defender recruited heavily at Harvey Mudd, and also tapped university pools for interns. The best way to fight a young generation of file-hungry students is clearly by hiring some of them to turn against their peers and protect big-media. Their concern with educational institutions seems limited at best. On April 12th, Media Defender president Randy Saaf asked:

Universal is curiouse if we have any historical data over the last 3 months that show whether .edu IP addresses on p2p have gone down. They want to see if their lawsuits are getting students to stop using p2p (take a moment to laugh to yourself). Let me know if anyone has any ideas.

So, Media Defender understands that it can’t win against University students well supplied with bandwidth and torrenting knowledge, and it doesn’t seem to care. Other emails suggest that .edu ip addresses comprised 2.5% of their Gnutella network monitoring in April, but only .65% in July. Either way, .edu is a small fish in Media Defender’s pond.

Does this mean you should relax? No. Media Defender is still out there poisoning a shared resource, wasting bandwidth, and trying to bait Americans into downloading “fake” files. Even if they don’t care about you as a University student, and aren’t trying to sue you (see RIAA and MPAA for that), they’re still just making filesharing a less efficient environment. Blocking their ips is a good way to start; reading more about the leaked email is another trail to follow.