The Dutch group is the latest in a series of anti-piracy organisations or music associations to turn their attention to individual file swappers, rather than corporate pirates or service providers.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is already in the process of serving hundreds of subpoenas on ISPs in order to identify file-sharers. It received a setback on Friday in a Massachusetts court, which rejected subpoenas from a Washington DC court as having no jurisdiction. The RIAA was told instead to file its subpoenas where it alleges the copyright infringement occurs, rather than targeting all 50 states from a single court.
Similar threats were issued in Spain last month, when legal services company Landwell announced that it was working with the Spanish Technological Investigation Brigade in order to prosecute up to 4,000 file sharers – albeit details of the legal grounds for prosecution as opposed to civil action were vague and, as yet, no cases have been filed.
Detection software
A difficulty in suing individuals who use P2P software for piracy purposes is, inevitably, the problem of identifying those involved. Organisations such as the RIAA rely on software that scans the public directories available to any user of a peer-to-peer network.
These directories, which allow users to find the material they are looking for, list all the files that other users of the network are currently offering to distribute. When the software finds a user who is offering to distribute copyrighted music files, it downloads some of the infringing files, along with the date and time it accessed the files.
Additional information that is publicly available from these systems then allows the organisation to identify the user's ISP. ISPs are then told to reveal the user's identity.
The software is getting more sophisticated. Audible Magic Corporation, a digital audio and video identification company, is currently developing a network monitoring tool which would identify each copyrighted song on a P2P network according to its digital fingerprint, and block its transfer, according to a report on CNet News. Audible Magic announced yesterday that its system called RepliCheck is to be used by the Universal Music Group to combat piracy.