It seems likely that the Movie and Music industry hired hackers to take down a P2P company with a denial of service attack that shut the site for three days. The only problem was that the site. Revision3,  was not a pirate site and was completely legitimate.

Revision3 Chief Executive, Jim Louderback, said that the company lost tens of thousands of dollars of advertising revenue in the attack. However, it traced the attack to a company called ArtistDirect, which acknowledged to Louderback that the IP address generating the packets belonged to a Los Angeles-based subsidiary called MediaDefender.

MediaDefender hires out its services to the music and film industry to 'protect' studios and labels from P2P piracy. One of its favorite techniques is decoying and spoofing, in which they send blank files and "data noise" that make it hard to find files.

MediaDefender Chief Executive, Randy Saaf, said that Revision3's tracker has been used to index pirated content for at least four years.  The company had run an open tracker that had links to a lot of pirated content on it. However, the site only ran an open tracker during the five weeks leading up to Memorial Day, as it wanted to stablize one of its servers.

MediaDefender's attacks increased as Revision3 tightened up its security. Saaf said that MediaDefender did not know it was targeting a legitimate company. All it saw was a public tracker with links to pirated content. He admitted that from now on before they launch a hack attack on a public tracker they will at least try and pick up the phone and find out what is going on.

More here.