dday and tark101 both used our news submit to report us that according to
industry executives some of the world's biggest record companies are financing the
development and testing of software, designed to sabotage computers and internet connections of people that download pirated music:
 The
record companies are exploring options on new countermeasures, which some
experts say have varying degrees of legality, to deter online theft: from
attacking personal Internet connections so as to slow or halt downloads of
pirated music to overwhelming the distribution networks with potentially
malicious programs that masquerade as music files.
If employed, the new tactics would be the most
aggressive effort yet taken by the recording industry to thwart music
piracy, a problem that the IFPI, an industry group, estimates costs the
industry $4.3 billion in sales worldwide annually. Until now, most of the
industry's anti-piracy efforts have involved filing lawsuits against
companies and individuals that distribute pirated music.
Among the more benign approaches being developed is
one program, considered a Trojan horse rather than a virus, that simply
redirects users to Web sites where they can legitimately buy the song they
tried to download.
A more malicious program, dubbed "freeze," locks up a
computer system for a certain duration '” minutes or possibly even hours '”
risking the loss of data that was unsaved if the computer is restarted. It
also displays a warning about downloading pirated music. Another program
under development, called "silence," scans a computer's hard drive for
pirated music files and attempts to delete them. One of the executives
briefed on the silence program said that it did not work properly and was
being reworked because it was deleting legitimate music files,
too. |
These new technologies will, of course, be very controversial
(to say the least) but you can be sure that record companies will do anything to
stop internet piracy, especially after last week's verdict on
file-sharing software Grokster and Morpheus being legal. Read the complete
article here.
Source: The New York Times
