Study Shows That RIAA's Evidence May Be Unreliable

from the oops dept

While the RIAA has made a big of show of telling people that it's impossible to hide from their hired copyright sniffing robots, a new report suggests that it's really not that hard to fake peer-to-peer requests to make it look as though a different machine has the files in question. In other words, this sort of thing could explain how someone could be wrongly accused by the RIAA and also calls the quality of their "your IP address identifies you" legal argument into question. Of course, using this argument seems like a bit of a stretch, and seems in the same vein as folks blaming tax fraud on trojans (though, that argument worked). Still, based on this, I wonder if someone could write a file sharing system that specifically generated incorrect information to throw off sniffers? I'm not saying that this is recommended, but from the beginning, we've been saying that all these actions by the RIAA are only going to serve to push file sharers deeper underground. The end result? The recording industry has a ton of really pissed off customers (some of whom will boycott the industry) and people are still sharing music. It seems to make a lot more sense to try to come up with reasonable business models that support unrestricted file sharing, instead of a costly legal route that will do nothing but anger your best customers.

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