The Washington Post has two articles on the copyright war today. One looks briefly at recent legislative efforts, including Berman's P2P hacking bill, CBDTPA, Biden's Anti-counterfeiting amendment, and legislative encouragement for DOJ to prosecute copyright infringement (Music Debate Heads to the Hill). The second, and more interesting article, deals with alternative strategies to defeat music piracy on P2P networks (A New Tactic in the Download War). Although the article doesn't provide much new reporting for anyone who has been following the war, it is a very good general summary of what the music industry is doing to defeat P2P file sharing. The article emphasizes "spoofing" or providing bad files to the networks. (One thing that gets me about news coverage of spoofing is that they all act as if it something new, when it started almost immediately after Napster became popular).
The article does make a good point about the difficulty of stopping copying using DRM. The example they give of Ripflash, which creates MP3s directly from your audio line, demonstrates persuasively the futility of trying to stop all copying (not that the record industry isn't interested in encrypting speaker wire). Favorite quote: Eric Garland of Big Champagne, a P2P marketing research firm, comments on the death of the single (which are no longer fully supported by the music industry), "They've [the music industry] got a promotional system designed to implant a 30-second hook in your head, but it's difficult to buy just that song. That's like Coke advertising cans on TV but selling only 12-packs in stores." The conclusion of the article is the same as most reasonable articles. The only way that the music industry will stop P2P file sharing is not solely to harass it, but provide a compelling alternative. Slate magazine points out that the MP3s are not the main source of the music industry's woes (Hit Charade: The music industry's self-inflicted wounds).
Finally, some inadvertant humor. The New York Times (reg. req.) runs an Associated Press wire story reporting that some movie theaters will be running anti-piracy ads, explaining that downloading movies is illegal and a bad thing (Theaters to Warn on Movie Piracy). Ummm ... isn't this the wrong audience for the message? Presumably, if you are pirating movies, you aren't going to the movie theater (at least according the MPAA's logic).