MediaDefender is a company that is ostensibly meant to help companies manage their intellectual property by tracking and trapping pirates. Practically, this amounts to spending obscene amounts of time uploading fake torrents to file sharing networks and creating anti-piracy honey pots. Ironically, tons of internal emails have been leaked to BitTorrent. Not to mention a few phone calls.

Industry insiders, please stop wasting shareholder money on companies like MediaDefender. Instead, take this into consideration. Piracy will end when distribution models align with the following points:

1. Your average web user is only willing to spend about $.20 for a song.
2. It costs almost nothing to distribute an mp3. If you offer songs at commodity prices you could substantially increase revenue without increasing costs. The first major that realizes this also gets a nice, big shot of positive PR.

Of course, you could also join the ranks of other great ideological wars (read: Drugs and Terror), your call.

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