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.'"

Comments

Re:What happens if...

[patrixmyth]

I could be wrong, and if I am someone will point it out (along with corrections to my grammar, punctuation and font size), but downloading copyrighted material isn't a violation. The violation is sharing the material without permission. Now, I suppose the MPAA might argue that the DMCA forbids circumventing DRM by using P2P, but they would be SOL because now you can claim you were intending to download the MP3 from JZ, but hey IANAL, I just like acronyms (a lot).