The Office of the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California is considering formally filing criminal charges against key employees at MediaDefender who were involved in launching a Denial of Service attack against a BitTorrent tracker maintained and ran by Revision3, the San Francisco-based site that produces and distributes the popular DiggNation show and others via the BitTorrent protocol.

MediaDefender, of Santa Monica, Calif., holds some 2,000 servers with a 9GBps dedicated connection and it regularly uses special tactics to fight piracy. The company describes itself as a provider of anti-piracy solutions.

According to federal law the launching of a denial of service attack is a felony punishable by a term in federal prison and to include fines and restitution. Why the music and motion picture industry would hire another company to carryout overt illegal Internet attacks like this is unknown.