Inside the RIAA and MediaSentry

bsdewhurst sends along an interesting article about how MediaSentry and the RIAA identify file sharers. Since 2003, while the RIAA has been filing 28,000 lawsuits, the percentage of US Internet users using P2P for downloading music has dropped from 20% to 19% (there is no knowing how much of a factor the lawsuits have been). The list the RIAA uses for ISP takedown notices is about 700 currently popular songs that are updated based on the charts, so not liking the top 40 could save you. The list of songs tracked for the user-litigation program is said to be larger.

Comments

get out of your shell.

[westbake]

How much free content do you need to see before you realize that people want to share? There's more music on Archive.org than you can listen to in hundreds of years. Wikipedia spanks all other encyclopedias so badly that Britannica has given up and started to accept downloads. Free software is about to entirely replace non free software. You are spending your own time on a user created news service. It's not a free ride, but it's a lot cheaper than depending on some kind of publisher/freeloader.