Overpeer Inc. a company hired by RIAA to seed p2p nets with corrupted mp3s has obviously been very successful in it's efforts. No doubt it's getting tonnes of cash for it's effort, which according to the company itself "fools would-be pirates some 300 million times a month by flooding file-sharing networks with decoys, mostly masquerading as popular songs". Pretty neat job indeed, but I wonder how it'd be if the all p2p users around the world all send 4-KB pings to Overpeer and RIAA every second they are using p2p nets. Of course, that would be called 'infringment' or something, but when a corporation seeds networks with useless garbage resulting it them being rendered useless for some users, it's just fine.

Searching for a cure to this plague, I stumbled upon Mp3 Shield today. It's a perfectly legal application listed on C|Net's download.com. You can use it to scan your folders for corrupt files, and while it's running it can even detect if a song being downloaded is corrupted. Amazing! and it actually works too.

That's just another update to the p2p wars... meanwhile, RIAA and Audible Magic, are making rounds in Washington showing off their new filtering technology, which of course is just another 'technology' that some kid would figure out how to circumvent. C|Net says of the technology:

It's most critical weakness is likely to be encrypted files and encrypted networks, which its audio recognition software can't break through. Nor is it difficult to imagine hackers creating "cracked" versions of file-swapping software that have the song-recognition technology broken or stripped out, if legislators were to mandate its use.

So, we get to the same conclusion again, the best way for RIAA to protect intellectual property is to create a new business model, reduce their fat profit margins and give people their due rights. And if you are wondering, iTunes sucks.

Posted in Tech Stuff on March 3, 2004 10:55 PM