RIAA Catches Pirates Using Their Own Weapons

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has an interesting method to find and catch potential pirates, turning to the same file-sharing applications that are currently used by them, The Chronicle reports. According to the same source, the organization made a demonstration on how the employees manage to identify pirates, giving the popular LimeWire software application as example.

The procedure is pretty simple: RIAA set up a list of all the songs belonging to the members of the organization and forwarded it to Media Sentry, the company that was especially hired to fight against piracy. Using the list of the songs, the Media Sentry employees connect to a file-sharing program such as LimeWire and search for one of the files included in the list.

If the search returns some results, Media Sentry connects to the host and takes its IP for further investigation. The IP addresses are then sent back to RIAA in order to issue a takedown notice and ask the user to remove the copyright infringing content. From now on, it's only up to the ISP which, asked by the investigators, have to provide details about the IP owner.

Obviously, the procedure does not stop here because there are cases when the users in question don't remove the copyrighted content or they simply ignore the requests. As expected, this could easily end with a lawsuit but before that, RIAA also sends some "prelitigation settlement letters" and asks the investigators to download said infringing material and check if it really infringes the copyright.

A similar procedure has also been used by the Romanian investigators in the first piracy case that ended in prison for a Romanian man suspected of copyright infringement. According to various reports, the pirate was found through an application working on the Direct Connect, as the investigators gathered the IP address and the infringing material through the file sharing application.