Antipiracy group suffers email leak

For several years, MediaDefender has made a name for itself waging war against intellectual-property pirates on behalf of the movie and music industries. Now, hackers have gone after MediaDefender itself, posting what they say are employee emails on the Internet purporting to expose embarrassing secrets about the entertainment industry's efforts to battle piracy.

Santa Monica, Calif.-based MediaDefender, a unit of ArtistDirect Inc., hires itself out to clients such as movie studios and record labels to help impede file-sharing piracy of their content. Among the services it offers are "decoying" and "spoofing" -- flooding the Internet with fake files that mimic real content to make it difficult for pirates to find the real thing. It also offers "leak alerts" that tell the studios and labels which of their products are circulating among Internet pirates.