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After kicking out founders Randy Saaf and Octavio Herrera earlier this year, MediaDefender’s parent company ARTISTDirect acquired one of RIAA’s former partners, the anti-piracy tracking company MediaSentry. Now the spoofers and the spies have been combined and are trading under a new name – Peer Media.At the beginning of April 2009, ARTISTdirect, the owner of infamous anti-piracy spoofing company MediaDefender, announced that it had acquired SafeNet’s anti-piracy tracking company, MediaSentry. The acquisition cost them $936,000, comprised of $136,000 in cash and an $800,000 one year note.Now, following an announcement by ARTISTdirect CEO Dimitri Villard, it seems that the sullied names of both MediaDefender and Media Sentry will be consigned to the archives as the company rebrands the pair under a new name: Peer Media Technologies.Despite the hacking chaos that all but destroyed Media Defender’s business, coupled with the controversy when Media Sentry’s investigative tactics were deemed illegal in several US states (and was promptly dropped by the RIAA), ARTISTdirect is still touting the pair as a force to be reckoned with – albeit with a new coat of paint and a new name.“The combination of MediaDefender, the leader in Internet Piracy Prevention (IPP) with Media Sentry, the leader in business and marketing intelligence derived from P2P channels, creates a true powerhouse in the field of intellectual property protection,” says a notice on Peer Media’s shiny new website.CEO Dimitri Villard also announced that he had hired ex Macrovision and Blackwave director Terri Denver as head of worldwide sales at Peer Media.According to ARTISTdirect, the rebranding and consolidation of MediaDefender and Media Sentry under the Peer Media banner will benefit the customer base “by offering higher quality products than either company did previously.”Services being offered by Peer Media include spoofing and decoys on file-sharing networks, sending cease and desist notices to ISPs to forward to their customers and sending the same to file-hosting sites carrying copyright content. Other services include monitoring networks for leaked movies and music, and assessing demand for media by monitoring what file-sharers do on the Internet.
