Given what is going on now in the P2P (peer to peer) world, it's a wonder how the old, pirate Napster ever got shut down by The Man in the first place.
The law, which is always a few years behind technological developments, is really struggling with P2P networks that allow you to download music for free. Judges frequently find that the sharing networks cannot be held accountable for what their users do - as in the unsuccessful case taken against Kazaa in Australia. It's worth remembering that P2P services themselves are legal, but the sharing of copyrighted songs is not.
The P2P networks always have a cheeky legal defence to the ready. One of the most popular networks, eDonkey, says it is doing absolutely nothing wrong. "Our technology is just that," says their president, Sam Yagan. "It's just a piece of software that allows users to store information and share files with each other regardless of the type of file they're sharing. Just like a Xerox machine or a VCR allows people to manipulate their media, so does our file-sharing software."
Given that the music industry ran into a PR disaster when it began to sue individual downloaders - in the US a 12-year-old girl was dragged into court for downloading some rap tracks - the focus has now changed to the uploaders.
Just as Xerox cannot be held legally responsible for what type of material people choose to photocopy on one of their machines, so the P2P networks march happily along. The frustration felt by the music industry has just taken a new, and some might say, sinister turn. The fight has become dirty.
Welcome, please, the "black helicopters" of the music industry. It's not something they talk openly about, but it is known that the major labels have been using the services of a small company called Overpeer. Based in New York, Overpeer uses spoiling tactics against the P2Ps by creating fake files that swamp the networks with useless content - white noise or a repeated music sample.
Overpeer's CEO, Marc Morgenstern, says: "What we do is make the P2P experience more frustrating and much less rewarding. Someone clicks on our file, expecting it to be a pirate file, but instead they encounter a decoy file. This is a file which may contain an audio sample or a game demonstration but does not contain the content that's expected".
Madonna patented an early, unsophisticated version of this, when her people somehow got into the P2P networks that had advance and illegal copies of songs from her last album before it was officially released. When people clicked on one of the songs, all they heard was Madonna herself, saying: "What the fuck do you think you're doing?".
Overpeer don't advertise how much they charge, but it appears they're doing very well out of their loading of thousands of fake files onto P2P networks. Morgenstern says "it's just desserts for people who illegally trade copyrighted works for free".
There have been allegations that some companies are going beyond putting spoilers on the networks and are now adding Trojans - spyware, adware and other types of nastyware. And the war is escalating: some P2Ps, wary of the damage being caused to their networks, are now making available an installation so you can check the integrity of the file you are downloading.
New advertising campaigns will warn P2P users of the risks of downloading viruses which may be hidden inside the files they are trying to copy. All of which shines an even brighter light on the legal sites, where you know what you're getting and you're free from any potential nastyware problem.
But is this the right way to go about it?
bboyd@irish-times.ie
