In the wake of its legal victory over Napster, the recording industry is shifting its focus from lawsuits to high-tech silver bullets as it tries to clamp down on online song swapping.
The Recording Industry Assn. of America has been meeting privately with Internet security firms to learn about their anti-piracy technologies. Soon, the record companies' trade group is expected to seek proposals for detecting and responding to piracy on Gnutella, a loosely organized file-sharing network whose popularity has skyrocketed since a federal judge slapped Napster with a preliminary injunction this month.
"They're really looking to understand and monitor the Gnutella network so they don't find themselves in the same position as [they did with] Napster," said Randy Saaf, chief executive of MediaDefender Inc., a privately held anti-piracy firm in Los Angeles.
In fact, Redwood City, Calif.-based Napster Inc., the most popular of the online song-swapping services, may prove to be the least of the record industry's problems. Although Napster attracted millions of users who copied billions of songs for free, the labels won a preliminary injunction March 7 that requires Napster to try to block the transfer of popular songs.
Gnutella, on the other hand, is one of several decentralized file-sharing networks that aren't businesses and have no central control. That means there's nobody at these networks for the labels to sue--just the consumers who use them.
Security experts say that controlling piracy on Gnutella is a daunting task, given the number of users and the amount of data being transferred. But one effect of the RIAA's recent moves may be to put the fear of detection into the hearts of Gnutella users, who thus far have been cloaked in anonymity.
"To me, it's posturing," said Bruce Forest, vice president of media and entertainment for Sapient, an Internet consulting firm. "That basically is a, 'I've kicked Napster's [rear] and now I'm coming after Gnutella users.' It's a scare tactic."
Amy Weiss, a spokeswoman for the RIAA, said her organization prefers technical solutions to lawsuits as a matter of policy. But she added that no request for proposals has been issued, and the RIAA has no plans at this time to issue one specifically about Gnutella.
