RIAA reveals how it tracks college file sharing
A painstaking examination of how the RIAA goes about its business hunting down file sharers on college campuses is available online.
The Chronicle of Higher Education visited the offices of the Recording Industry Association of America and got a demonstration.
The RIAA employee, who declined to give his or her name for fear of receiving hate mail, said the organization has hired online copyright enforcer MediaSentry to do most of the heavy lifting. MediaSentry writes scripts to automatically hunt for the names of copyright songs and locate the IP addresses of computers sharing files, and forwards the information to the RIAA.
If a university or college is involved, the RIAA sends a takedown notice to campus network administrators. The RIAA says it doesn't target specific schools. It's interesting to note that MediaSentry checks the hashes (identifying marks) on the song files to make sure they match the copyright song. If the marks don't match, the company uses software from Audible Magic to compare sound waves.
There aren't too many surprises about how the RIAA goes after serious offenders, but the story is worth reading.
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Here's an idea to thwart their efforts: Get a list of all the titles in the RIAA database, then create files with those titles, but with bogus mp3 content, maybe a baby crying. This will force RIAA investigators to spend too much time tracking down false positives so the economics of the program. That's the ticket--web spam RIAA and MediaSentry with so much crap their system becomes unusable.
Why not fight their legal crap with legal crap?
The script hangs onto the IP Address (and port) of any connecting PC. It will do this until you block the port which was being used by the p2p program. What is even more interesting, it appears to be selective in what is being watched. TV shows seem to be flavor of the month.
It definitely isn't just universities being watched - - and I am based in the south pacific; not USA.