For many years, the RIAA has been using the company MediaSentry (now SafeNet) to find people illegally sharing music. To date, MediaSentry has helped the largest music labels file lawsuits against about 35,000 people. Just before the end of 2008, the RIAA decided to finally do away with its infamous lawsuit campaign and now The Wall Street Journal has confirmed that the RIAA has quietly dumped the controversial evidence gathering firm MediaSentry a few months ago.
MediaSentry has been widely criticised over how it collected evidence against file sharers. Earlier last year, the RIAA showed The Chronicle how MediaSentry traced users involved in copyright infringement online. The RIAA would provide Media Sentry with a list of songs to check for unauthorised sharing of and MediaSentry would run an automated process to find out who's sharing them. Once they obtain results, they would check the hashes to verify the songs. If a hash fails to match, they would attempt to download the song and use Audible Magic to examine the sound waves of the song to identify whether it matches the title. Finally when they confirm matches, they take note of the IP addresses of those found sharing the music, carry out an electronic handshake to verify the files are available for downloading from the suspect IPs and then provide this information back to the RIAA for them to take action.
One thing MediaSentry could not check or prove was who was downloading the shared songs, let alone whether any have actually been uploaded to other people at all, so the RIAA tried arguing that simply making files available is copyright infringement. This argument got a major blow last April when a federal judge rejected this argument in a lawsuit against a couple who were accused of copyright infringement. Now that the RIAA has ended its lawsuit campaign last month, they have made agreements with some ISPs to reduce the Internet service to heavy file sharers. It's unclear what reductions will be made, although it’ll likely include limiting the user's bandwidth.
The RIAA has decided to return to its previous piracy tracing firm DtecNet Software ApS, which it has worked with for tracking piracy both in the U.S. and overseas. Despite ending its lawsuit campaign, they said they would still monitor those who illegally share music and will file lawsuits for exceptional cases.
