Big Brother is watching and keeping records of your every file trade!
Record Companies Prowl the Internet
Detailed Records being Kept about Files and Traders
March 25, 2001
Fueled by investigative reporting by New Zealand based 7am News.com , the net is buzzing about tracking software being used by the major record companies and their agents to monitor individual users and their file trading patterns and files available on line.
The record companies monitor Napster, Freenet, gnutella, IRC chatrooms, newsgroups, interrogate search engines and check ftp sites for potentially copyrighted material. They are collecting all pertinent information. In most cases this information is more than adequate to allow the recording companies to identify a user's machine and the "offender's" ISP (which is also identified), ultimately determining the users actual identity.
The date and time the song at which a given song was shared is also recorded. All this is held in a database that can be used to cross-check individuals' sharing patterns and to locate ISPs with a high percentage of sharers among their subscribers.
7am.com reports that this information will be regularly sent to ISPs whose users are allegedly breaching copyright laws with a demand that, in the first instance, the ISPs take action to stop those users re-offending. This could result in an ISP canceling your account.
the WIZARD points out that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) already has a history of collecting information on individual traders and then using that information to crack down on a single user. Last year the RIAA notified Oklahoma State University of possible copyright violations. Acting only on the note from the RIAA, the OSU police raided the university student and confiscated his computer and files.
Additional information is also available from the British Investigative MagazineThe Register
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