The FT’s story on tackling online piracy (www.ft.com) highlighted one of the music industry’s new weapons in the war on piracy: spoof files (the practice of uploading blank and bogus files into P2P networks). There has been a lot of noise from the file sharing community about this tactic, but to be fair, they have little room for complaint.
The very ethos of P2P networks is free access for all to all, to the extent that their operators generally refuse to place filters on files for record labels. Technically, a software agency acting on behalf of the record industry, uploading bogus files, has just as much right to populate the networks with their files as anyone else.
In short, P2P is getting hit with it’s own stick!
