The Dutch group is the latest in a series of anti-piracy
organisations or music associations to turn their attention to
individual file swappers, rather than corporate pirates or service
providers.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is already
in the process of serving hundreds of subpoenas on ISPs in order to
identify file-sharers. It received a setback on Friday in a
Massachusetts court, which rejected subpoenas from a Washington DC
court as having no jurisdiction. The RIAA was told instead to file
its subpoenas where it alleges the copyright infringement occurs,
rather than targeting all 50 states from a single court.
Similar threats were issued in Spain last month, when legal
services company Landwell announced that it was working with the
Spanish Technological Investigation Brigade in order to prosecute
up to 4,000 file sharers – albeit details of the legal grounds for
prosecution as opposed to civil action were vague and, as yet, no
cases have been filed.
Detection
software
A difficulty in suing individuals who use P2P software for
piracy purposes is, inevitably, the problem of identifying those
involved. Organisations such as the RIAA rely on software that
scans the public directories available to any user of a
peer-to-peer network.
These directories, which allow users to find the material they
are looking for, list all the files that other users of the network
are currently offering to distribute. When the software finds a
user who is offering to distribute copyrighted music files, it
downloads some of the infringing files, along with the date and
time it accessed the files.
Additional information that is publicly available from these
systems then allows the organisation to identify the user's ISP.
ISPs are then told to reveal the user's identity.
The software is getting more sophisticated. Audible Magic
Corporation, a digital audio and video identification company, is
currently developing a network monitoring tool which would identify
each copyrighted song on a P2P network according to its digital
fingerprint, and block its transfer, according to a report on CNet
News. Audible Magic announced yesterday that its system called
RepliCheck is to be used by the Universal Music Group to combat
piracy.
