The Entertainment Police

When music industry associations won the court battle to shut down Napster - that giddy but short-lived music-swapping service that made peer-to-peer (P2P) a household phrase - they were just getting started. The entertainment industry is at war with Internet pirates, which it believes are threatening its very livelihood. The MPAA, which estimates that the U.S. film industry loses $3 billion a year from physical piracy alone, is growing increasingly frustrated by how often video files are available on the Internet before the movies are released in theaters or on DVD and video. The RIAA, meanwhile, blames piracy for the 7 percent decrease in the number of compact disc shipments during the first half of 2002. That kind of research causes much eye-rolling among Internet libertarians who believe file-swappers aren't necessarily downloading files they would otherwise purchase, and others who say that a free sample might entice listeners into buying a whole album. But the threat to the industry is real, if overstated.

Part of the problem is organized hacking groups, plain and simple. So-called Warez (pronounced "wares") groups host websites that proffer pirated software, music, movies and pornography. Hackers get bragging rights for being the first to post new files or to crack copyright protection schemes. It's likely that our anonymous CIO's computer systems were being used by one of these groups.

To hear the entertainment industry tell it, though, covert Ware activity on the networks of unassuming companies - the risk of which can be minimized by heeding long-established security best practices - is only background music. SecuritySecurity 101 precautions such as properly configured firewalls, the dogged installation of patches to fix newly discovered software vulnerabilities and even carefully monitored intrusion detection systems will go only so far in preventing illegal activities. That's because, while Napster is no more, dozens of services, such as eDonkey, Gnutella, Grokster and Kazaa, have sprouted in its place - and have earned the reputation of being venues for exchanging pirated files. Alles zu Security auf CIO.de

These P2P systems, which allow people who download their software to exchange .exes, MP3s, .mpegs and other files directly with one another, have legitimate reasons for being. Some artists like to giveaway songs or videos to win fans, and the business possibilities of file-swapping are promising enough that Lotus Notes creator Ray Ozzie started a company, Groove Networks, that is working on P2P for the enterprise, with funding from MicrosoftMicrosoft. Kazaa, the most popular P2P service in the United States, boasts that its software has been downloaded more than 200 million times. Alles zu Microsoft auf CIO.de

Citing estimates from third-party analysts who put the number of illegal file downloads at 2.6 billion a month, RIAA President Cary Sherman says, "You're just not going to get those kinds of numbers from people going to Warez sites."