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Hollywood Fears Fighting Piracy
Posted by Ernest Miller on Monday, January 13 @ 13:26:17 EST File Sharing
WIRED has an article on P2P spoofing, something that Hollywood treats like a dirty little secret (Hitting P2P Users Where It Hurts). Spoofing takes advantage of one of the weaknesses of P2P systems. In order to minimize legal liability, the systems cannot really control what goes on the system. Thus, some users can upload misleadingly titled or damaged songs, so that people trying to download don't get what they want. This can be very effective at reducing the utility of a P2P network for copyright violation, but requires significant resources. So, this is a good thing (from Hollywood's point of view) right?

Apparently not, since Hollywood fears letting anyone know that they are doing it. This is one of the reasons that Hollywood has been unsuccessful in stopping copyright infringement. They talk a good story to Congress about losing the fight against piracy, but Hollywood is unwilling to actually go after pirates. Not only is Hollywood unwilling to prosecute those who they call "thieves," Hollywood is unwilling to let people know that they are taking steps to interfere with the "pirates" behavior.

Spoofing is not 100% effective, but it doesn't have to be. All Hollywood has to do is make P2P sufficiently onerous to use that most or many people would rather purchase the legitimate product. As the article notes, there will likely be an attempted arms race as P2P networks develop new methods to foil spoofing. However, this is a race that the P2P networks are almost certainly doomed to lose. The reason is that the more control is put in the system (control necessary to foil spoofing) the more legally liable the networks or the users of the networks become.

Hollywood could win this fight if they wanted, but apparently they are afraid to.

 
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Re: Hollywood Fears Fighting Piracy (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Tuesday, January 14 @ 15:41:41 EST
Curious, but wouldn't it be more effective to infiltrate the clients themselves via the spyware attached? It should be easy enough to set up a fake company that pays for a spyware payload with a client (like kazaa and brilliant networks).

In fact, since the EULA provided with brilliant allowed the company to use the customer's machine as part of a network, it seems like it would work just fine as a node in the network of spoofers.

Or, the spyware could report the search strings back to headquarters to determine what files should be spoofed by the main network.

Or, if the RIAA had any brains at all - monitor the downloaded files, wait 2 weeks, then damage the file and any file that, in the future, shates the file name. If they are still listening after two weeks, they'll want to buy the CD. If not, then it wasn't going to be a sale anyway.



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Cost Effectiveness of Fighting Piracy (Score: 1)
by hillct on Wednesday, January 15 @ 00:39:18 EST
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The reason the movie industry hasn't brought suits against indevidual pirates is vary simple. It wouldn't be cost effective to do so. It's far more cost effective to pay a lobyist to get legislation passed making it a federal crime to reproduce videotapes (or other media) for anything other than private use. This way, the federal government foots the bill asociated with prosecution of these 'offenders'.

In recent years, P2P networks and other mechanisms for distribution of pirated content have dramatically increased the instances and visibility of audio and video piracy, ot the point where the number of federal prosecutions do not serve to desuade potential offenders, so the industry is looking for new ways to reinforce their position, so as to maintain their proffit margins on the content they produce. These margins would be cut to almost nothing if they undertook private suits against a large number of offenders. Better to take steps behind the scenes (mor or less) to reduce the ease with which content can be pirated, and promote the passage of more stringent legislation in the area of IP piracy; the most telling evidence of this being the notable absense of the MPAA from the coalition that recently announced their intent not to pursue legal mandates for DRM technologies.


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