With the record industry preparing to sue its customers — at least those who download without paying — now comes the next step: file-sharing services that promise to keep users anonymous.
Recording Industry Association of America officials say they can find any song swapper on services such as Kazaa and Grokster using simple tracking software. But new services such as Earth Station 5 and eDonkey2000 say they can protect the identity of their users. And established file-sharing services say they will adapt to protect their customers.
The RIAA’s actions ”will force us to come up with solutions that will make it harder, if not impossible, to detect who the users are,” says Elan Oren of Imesh, a song- and game-swap firm based in Israel. ”It’s the never-ending game of the firewall and the hacker.”
Imesh — which has been in operation since 1999 and somehow never was sued, unlike Napster, Scour, Aimster, Audio Galaxy, Kazaa, Morpheus and Grokster — has 50 million registered users. Oren suggests that, instead of suing its customer base, the RIAA make peace with file sharers and learn to co-exist.
”By attacking its users, they are motivating them not to pay,” he says. ”We met with them and begged them to make their material available on Imesh for a fee, because we know our users would gladly pay. (The RIAA) refused.”
Songs on Imesh are traded the traditional way — click on a title to download the file, and it ends up on your hard drive. New programs such as eDonkey and Earth Station 5 do it differently, cutting a file into little pieces and reassembling it when it arrives at your hard drive — a process that makes it harder for file sharers to be tracked and unmasked.
Still, Internet detective Mark Ishikawa insists that despite new technologies, if it happens online, he’ll find it. ”If five buddies are sharing in their dorm room, that’s one thing,” says the CEO of BayTSP, which works for studios and record labels. ”Once it gets to critical mass and goes out onto the Internet, you can’t hide.”
Another avenue that analysts expect to lure file sharers is instant messaging. AOL, MSN and Yahoo’s chat programs have nearly 100 million users among them. Besides conversing with buddies, users of the software can send photos and music files to each other, without being tracked by the record industry.
For now, the RIAA says it will stay focused on the more established file-sharing programs. ”We can’t solve every problem, only the biggest ones before us,” says RIAA president Cary Sherman.
Kazaa, the most popular swap service with more than 240 million users, shows no sign of slowing down despite the legal threats: 890 million files were being traded Thursday afternoon by 4.3 million users.
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