Slashdot Mirror
Decoy Files on P2P Sites Become Ad Vehicles
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Some record labels hire outside companies to plant fake files on peer-to-peer sites. Now, labels are turning these decoy files into vehicles for marketing to music pirates by inserting promotional material into the files, such as an eight-minute clip from a Jay-Z concert, the Wall Street Journal reports." From the article: "'The concept here is making the peer-to-peer networks work for us,' says Jay-Z's attorney, Michael Guido. 'While peer-to-peer users are stealing the intellectual property, they are also the active music audience,' and 'this technology allows us to market back to them.'"
So, like a lot of things on Slashdot, I was interested in this hip new technology. I hopped on eDonkey and downloaded a bunch of Jay-Z until I found the golden ticket.
c ation.html) and there it was, a registration form for a free boat!
... something called an "Average Out of Court Settlement." Yeah, like I'm going to pay you $22,000 for that! As if! I think they want you to pay that if you want a free boat. I'm not stupid though--I know how this scam works--they give you a free boat but after taxes and registration, it's not even close to free anymore.
It was great, it said I had won a free boat! So I went to the URL in the file (http://www.riaa.com/tricks/freeboat/warrantappli
I start filling this out, you know, understandable things like name, address, average household income, what mp3s was I downloading when I won, where they are on my hard drive, which attorney would be representing me if a court case broke out--you know, the usual.
But once I hit submit, I got some law-talking guy spamming my e-mail address non-stop! Trying to sell me some product I'm not even interested in
People on the internet are so stupid sometimes.
My work here is dung.
"But judge, the only way I could get the exclusive pre-release video of [hyper-hyped band/singer-songwriter/pretty face] was to steal random music from a P2P service. I didn't want to, I obey the law and have never stolen anything in my life. But [record label] would only hide the must-have exclusive video in fake song files. I didn't know which songs they were, or which ones were fake or real. So I had to download several thousand of them to finally find the video."
Case dismissed.
Actually, from what I read, they consider the audience to be TOO legit. Legally, they are too legit to quit.
I know, the disconnect is ridiculous:
"Damn kids, downloading all these music videos."
"We can hire a company to seed decoy files."
"I have a better idea, instead of wasting that file with garbage, we could always put some ads in it."
"Like what?"
"Hmmm, how about music videos of our artists!"
"Outstanding! Here, have another line of coke..."
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
A boat's a boat, but the mystery box could be anything. It could even be a boat! You know how much we wanted one of those!
And pretty soon, RIAA will start suing p2p indexing sites for caving and shutting down the index servers, claiming it cost RIAA advertising revenue.