RIAA Fights College Piracy With Automated Scripts

by admin May 17, 2008 at 10:12 pm

Content industry demands universities pay attention

The content industry is stepping up efforts to root out piracy on college networks, and a new report shows exactly how.

As it turns out, the actual methods used to detect pirates aren’t very sophisticated. The RIAA gives a list of files to watch for to its hired watchdog Media Sentry, who then searches for infringing materials on common peer-to-peer networks, such as Limewire. Media Sentry sometimes runs the same client as most of the networks’ users, using the network client’s built-in facilities to harvest users’ IP addresses and browse their shares.

As reported earlier this month, a number of universities reported a tenfold increase in the quantity of DMCA copyright notices they received. At the time, the only thing that college administrators and observers could do was guess as to the RIAA and MPAA’s motives, as content industry spokespersons remained silent.

Full story: dailytech.com