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June 05, 2008, 04:23 PM ET
The Entertainment Industry's Piracy Warnings May Target Innocent Users
The techniques used by the entertainment industry to catch alleged pirates on BitTorrent implicate innocent machines and users, according to a report released today by University of Washington researchers.
Using simple techniques, the researchers were able to provoke entertainment industry investigators to generate hundreds of bogus Digitial Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices to machines that weren’t sharing music. “We have applied these techniques to frame networked printers, a wireless (non-NAT) access point, and an innocent desktop computer, all of which have since received DMCA notices but none of which actually participated in any P2P network,” the researchers wrote.
The research indicates that other DMCA notices being sent by the entertainment industry may also be false positives, and that “malicious user[s] can falsely implicate a third party in copyright infringement.”
The Chronicle recently released an inside look into how the Recording Industry Association of America’s investigators catch music pirates on LimeWire, another popular P2P file-sharing software.—Catherine Rampell
Categories: Campus-Piracy, Legal-Troubles
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