• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, May 30, 2008

Popular Internet TV company Revision3 has accused an anti-piracy outfit of crippling the site with a denial of service attack.

Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback said the copyright enforcement company MediaDefender flooded Revision3's servers with requests over the weekend, essentially shutting Revision3 down and depriving it of at least 250,000 page views and the associated ad revenue. Revision3 offers a slate of original Web video programs, including the popular Diggnation, a show about the top stories each week on the Digg.com social news site. Diggnation had posted its most recent weekly episode shortly before the attack started.

Louderback, former editor in chief of PC Magazine, believes MediaDefender launched the attack in a misguided attempt to frustrate pirates who appear to have in the past harnessed Revision3's server.

"If we're doing something that is possibly helping people to share copyrighted stuff, we would shut it down in a second," he said in an interview Thursday. He added that he couldn't fathom why MediaDefender didn't ask the company about the situation in advance. "It's really scary--you're guilty until proven innocent. Why didn't they just let us know?"

Revision3 uses peer-to-peer technology to distribute legal, professionally produced programs. From the beginning of April until last week, the company used a tracker that was open to outside users.

MediaDefender discovered the tracking server and suspected that copyright infringers were also harnessing it. MediaDefender then used it to plant phony videos and music online--a technique the company deploys to frustrate copyright infringers.

Last week, when Revision3 realized that outside parties were using the tracker, the company closed access to it. Shortly after that, the denial of service attack started.

In a blog post that went live Thursday, Louderback said he spoke with Ben Grodsky, vice president of operations at MediaDefender, and that Grodsky acknowledged injecting torrents into Revision3's tracking server, but denied deliberately shutting down the site. "Grodsky admits that his computers sent ... packets to Revision3, but claims that their servers were each only trying to contact us every three hours. Our own logs show upwards of 8,000 packets a second," Louderback wrote.

Denial of service attacks are illegal in several states, including California, where Revision3 is headquartered. Louderback said he's considering sending MediaDefender a bill for lost ad revenue the company suffered during the outage.

MediaDefender did not respond to repeated Online Media Daily telephone calls before deadline.