Fight back against the RIAA!

To the Recording Industry Association of America, sending threatening messages to online music swappers is a potentially effective way to educate the public that trading copyrighted material is wrong. But to security geeks in the file trading community, the technique is just another volley in the electronic war with peer-to-peer opponents... and a rather trivial one at that. On Tuesday, the RIAA began using the messaging capabilities built into Kazaa and Grokster to send thousands of identical instant messages to music swappers, warning that trading copyrighted songs is against the law.

"It appears that you are offering copyrighted music to others from your computer. Distributing or downloading copyrighted music on the Internet without permission from the copyright owner is ILLEGAL," reads the canned message. "When you offer music on these systems, you are not anonymous and you can easily be identified."

It's not an entirely empty threat. A recent court decision upheld the recording industry's right to compel an ISP to identify a file-swapper. And companies catering to the music and motion picture industries have streamlined the process of scanning p2p networks for copyrighted works and noting each user's Internet IP address, by which they might later be identified. But the copyright cops aren't the only ones watching the p2p networks. Sophisticated users are looking for the tell-tales signs of spies, and noting their IP addresses as well. "There are people monitoring the networks for political reasons, like the RIAA, and there are also people monitoring the networks that are defending the networks," says Jorge Gonzalez, the founder of the p2p news site Zeropaid.com.

Those efforts have produced sizable lists of Internet IP address ranges purportedly used in anti-p2p operations by RIAA, the MPAA, and their equivalents in other countries, as well as firms like MediaDefender, MediaForce, and NetPD that specialize in catching pirates or disrupting file sharing through technical means.

Perhaps we can start messaging them back then!

View: Article @ Security Focus