On The Case With The RIAAs Private Dicks

[JackSpratts]

An Observer investigation reveals the secret war being waged by the entertainment industry against web pirates who threaten its very future.
David Rowan reports

Sunday April 21, 2002
The Observer

On the second floor of a nondescript office building in Victoria, central London, four young men tap intensely into keyboards as phrases such as 'Panic Room', 'Resident Evil' and 'Spiderman' flash up on their monitors. Hooked up to online file- swapping networks such as WinMX and Morpheus, they are searching for 'hot downloads', from films to computer games, that can be theirs free of charge at the click of a mouse.

But unlike the millions of internet users who exploit such networks each day to swap copyrighted material, Jimmy, Bill, Neil and Bruce are online detectives rather than pirates. From this office, among laptops and flashing network cables, they set powerful software agents crawling the net's murkier corners to detect, identify and remove files that should not be there.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/internetne...688022,00.html

- js.

[goldie]

Originally posted by JackSpratts
An Observer investigation reveals the secret war being waged by the entertainment industry against web pirates who threaten its very future.
David Rowan reports

Sunday April 21, 2002
The Observer

and remove files that should not be there.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/internetne...688022,00.html

- js.

Hmm....I dunno but I really, REALLY think they're going about this the wrong way.

This will just piss people off..............certainly a dangerous thing indeed.

Will they ever "GET IT"?!

Thanks for passing this on JS!

[snowman]

Anybody know how they supposedly remove files. They claim a rather amazing number of successes. Sounds a bit over the top to me.

Their corporate site is at http://www.netpd.com

[twinspan]

I wonder how many of the files they claim found for a particular movie are fakes, especially LOTR and Ocean's 11.

I doubt they actually remove the files, more likely they get them removed, tracing the IP of the sharer and then sending nasty form letters to the sharer's ISP, who send a nasty form letter to the sharer, who then panics and stops sharing the file in question, if not many more files as well.

And what is it about dingy offices in central London? That's where the BSA's investigators are too. (Can't provide a link as I don't remember where I read the article on them.)

[BuzzB2K]

Says NetPD sales and marketing director Jon Fowler, "We can also put filters on each search to differentiate between pirates and genuine fans, and the software is so sophisticated that it also can differentiate between
different mixes of a song or whether a song is from a live concert or from a studio recording."

This is a link from the link provided by snowman, the article is about a year and a half old so take that into account...

Billboard©article published October 21, 2000
NetPD Tracks file Swapping On Web;
U.K. Co. 's Software Instrumental in Metallica's Suit Against Napster

There is an interesting point made in the last paragraph about gaining government support by pointing out the amount of porn available through the same channels:

"We are trying to raise government awareness of this, and by doing that we can also hopefully help the music industry and others to stamp out Internet piracy."

PS - And on a completely related note I recently ran across this text in my travels:

Rip Date....: 04/09/2002
Retail .......: 07/23/2002

If you read all the above links provided you might know what this refers to... (A little haven in the desert maybe? )

[napho]

I had about 30 people downloading Heathen Chemistry from me simultaneously on eDonkey. The download websites seem to have dead links now so maybe the detectives actually succeeded at something.

[BuzzB2K]

Maybe I got mine from you? Thanx

The download websites seem to have dead links

I don't understand this bit

[napho]

Originally posted by BuzzB2K
Maybe I got mine from you? Thanx



I don't understand this bit

There are quite a few warez type sites that have music.

[BuzzB2K]

Originally posted by napho


There are quite a few warez type sites that have music.