RIAA's Latest Tactic To Drive File Sharers Underground

from the further-and-further-they-go dept

Sometimes you wonder if the folks involved with the RIAA ever think beyond one move ahead. They seem to be the most short-sighted strategists around. Their latest move against file sharers is to gleefully run up and down the halls of Congress showing off Audible Magic's new filtering technology, that they claim can match a file that's being shared to a database of copyrighted music, and stop the sharing on the spot. Of course, it doesn't work on encrypted files or encrypted networks, so pushing this too hard will just drive users in that direction and it will be back to square one. Actually, it will be even further back, because once everyone's using encrypted systems, it'll be even harder to track them down. With each move, they don't do anything to actually slow or stop file sharing. They just make it more difficult to figure out who's sharing what (which is good market research material) and making people even angrier at the established music industry. This isn't a business strategy, it's death-by-bad-lawyers.