We, and other sites, already reported that there seems to be some polution going on on filesharing networks. What happens is that people download a song and end up with only a part of the song and the rest of the data filled with silence, noise or other trash.
While the record industry has never really admitted they were distributing these kind of files, they have now said they think it is a legitimate way of combatting piracy and other companies have said to be hired by the RIAA.
Record labels are reluctant to discuss spoofing, but their trade group, the Recording Industry Association of America, has called it a legitimate way to combat piracy. And at least one company acknowledges that it has been hired to distribute spoofs, although it won't say by whom. All of this suggests that the dummy files are part of a second front in the record industry's war against illegal music copying. For years, the fight focused on Web sites and their owners. Now it's starting to focus on the fans themselves. For the labels, any anti-piracy campaign that targets consumers is risky, since it could alienate many who also spend heavily on store-bought discs. But given a two-year slide in CD sales that the industry says has cost it billions, many executives and artists believe they don't have a choice. New file-sharing ventures sprout all the time, and 2 billion songs a month are now traded online, according to the RIAA, far more than during Napster's heyday. Meantime, sales of blank CDs, which can be used to copy songs on the cheap, are skyrocketing. So labels are racing to develop uncopyable CDs and '” if indeed they're behind the spoofs '” employing guerrilla tactics that complicate the unlawful uploading and downloading of songs. The labels are also supporting a bill, now under consideration in Congress, that would make it legal to 'impair the operation of peer-to-peer" networks, such as LimeWire. That could be done, for example, by overloading file-sharing services with so many requests that they slow to a crawl. |
If they just sue and hassle people without an alternative, they'll eventually lose.Like i've said all along adapt to the current situation or perish.
Source: MSNBC
