In a dim-lit office just a short drive from the film and music studios of Southern California, Randy Saaf’s staff are fixed on a bank of computers, which they use to go about their business: preventing Internet piracy.

Major studios have enlisted Saaf ’98 to protect their clients—and thus studio profits—from those who might take advantage of pirated songs, movies and other material. As chief executive officer for MediaDefender, a Marina Del Rey company that he founded in 2000, Saaf is clearly succeeding, having earned contracts with most of the major players while garnering a market share of roughly 75 percent.

Saaf’s name may sound familiar. He has testified before Congress on Internet piracy three times, appeared in a “60 Minutes” segment on piracy earlier this year, and has been a prime source for other leading news organizations. In essence, at 29, Saaf has become the  guru of Internet piracy prevention.

Realizing Potential: The Fresno native, who is also a Harvey Mudd College trustee, attended the University of California, Irvine, after graduating from high school, then transferred to Harvey Mudd College in order to more closely interact with faculty, whom he described as “super available.”

“Harvey Mudd College is all about the undergraduate experience,” he said. “The reason to go to Harvey Mudd College is for the professors, who want to spend time with you. Professors at some colleges get their satisfaction from winning a Nobel Prize, but at HMC they get their satisfaction teaching.”

Saaf graduated with a B.S. degree in engineering, and after spending less than a year with defense technology giant Raytheon, he enrolled in the UCLA School of Law. A year later, he left, deciding law wasn’t his calling.

After his short tenure at Raytheon, where he worked closely with airborne signal processing—systems that extinguish incoming missiles much like his company extinguishes efforts to download pirated material—Saaf began looking to the future.

“I knew in college that I wanted to start a business, I just didn’t know what that business would be,” he said. “I came to realize early on that I liked engineering, but that as an engineer I wasn’t going to realize my full potential.”

Saaf graduated shortly before the Napster phenomenon, through which peer-to-peer (p2p) networking—largely music piracy—entered the consciousness of most Americans.

“Back then, hardly a day went by when you didn’t hear something about Napster,” Saaf said. “Some Raytheon former associates and I started wondering how we could create a business around Napster. It occurred to us that what makes the peer-to-peer networks powerful isn’t just the fact that millions of people are trading music. It’s the fact that these networks are self organizing, and therefore very hard to police.”

Countermeasure King: Enter MediaDefender. Employing a Raytheon radar concept called “electronic countermeasures (ECM),” the company was born.

When two planes are in a dogfight, they employ counter-measures—they have a battle of the radars, and the radars are used to jam and counter jam each other. The plane with the better radar usually wins the dogfight.”

In short, Saaf’s technology is battling Napster, Kazaa, Morpheus, Grokster and the other p2p networks much like two fighter planes might battle in the skies. It’s a never-ending engagement, but much of the time he emerges victorious—until a way around his fixes is developed, then, it’s back to the drawing board once again.

Stopping Copies: Perhaps most compelling is MediaDefender’s effort to stop pirates from copying movies for mass distribution. Every year, pirates who leak movies onto the Internet cost the studios hundreds of millions of dollars. A case in point is “Star Wars: Episode III–Revenge of the Sith,” which turned up on the Internet the day it was released.

“The p2p technology changes very fast,” Saaf said. “That was the impetus for this company, that we could develop technology that would hinder piracy. We are the technology solution.”

“Our primary customers are the movie and music companies, but we get involved with any kind of content that people would love to own but hate to pay for: software companies, video game companies, television studios. Any kind of content that you could imagine digitizing and wanting to own.”

Saaf is ably assisted by a staff of about 35, who constantly work to keep a step ahead of Internet pirates. To that end, they’re on call 24 hours per day, because pirates never sleep. MediaDefender has to be at the ready when needed to develop new solutions for its clients.

When prodded, Saaf offers a short demonstration. Logging on to file-sharing network Kazaa, he double-clicks on the Roy Orbison song “Only the Lonely.” The tune, which MediaDefender has not been contracted to protect, downloads immediately. He then clicks on rocker Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl,” which fails to download. Other Stefani files also will not download—the result of MediaDefender’s efforts.

“The easiest way to disrupt a mass distribution system is to put out a lot of phony files,” Saaf said. “You create decoys. We do this on a massive scale with our own proprietary software. That’s one of a suite of technologies that we provide.”

No End in Sight: There are others, and there will be more as time passes. As Saaf notes, there is no end game. Piracy will never be eradicated, only hindered momentarily. At the end of the day, if Saaf and his staff have done their best to hinder the piracy of their customers’ material, then they will be happy.

Paradoxically, at the end of his own day Saaf doesn’t turn to music to wind down.

“I like movies, but I don’t really listen to that much music,” he said, laughing. “I guess that’s kind of ironic. This job will really eat at your love of music.”

He also stays active in the life of Harvey Mudd College as a trustee, a position he has held for the past year. That position enables him to maintain contact with what he considers a great college.

“At Mudd, you get to see and experience and be thrown into many challenging situations, and you learn to adapt to them. That was very useful to me. What we [MediaDefender] have done, no one else has ever done before. Mudd is a very good school for preparing someone to do something that no one has ever done before.”