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Links: Patent Awarded for P2P Spoofing
Posted by Steven Wu on Monday, May 10 @ 01:23:51 EDT File Sharing
Wired has a story about a recently awarded patent for dampening filesharing by spawning lots of fake files:
A computer science professor and graduate student have been awarded a patent for a method of thwarting illegal file sharing on peer-to-peer networks by flooding the network with bogus files that look like pirated music.

The software creates bogus files with attributes -- such as file names and description tags -- that make them look like the real thing, but they are in fact white noise, low-quality recordings or advertisements to buy the song. What's more, the software sends out thousands of decoys to frustrate P2P users with fruitless downloads.

The patent can be found here (#6,732,180). I guess this'll work for software like Kazaa; I'm not sure if it'll be effective for newer methods like BitTorrent (though I guess somebody could spit out fake torrent files throughout the Internet).
 
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Prior art? (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Tuesday, May 11 @ 13:33:51 EDT
This type of spoofing has been taking place for several years now. Remember the noise about the RIAA wanting a special vigilante law? Their PR spin was that it was to allow activities like this. Of course that was a lie since a) they were already doing this apparently without legal difficulties and b) the law allowed much more offensive actions like removing files and software or flooding network connections.


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