Here is the lastest effort to diminish this community.

You can read the artical at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2002Aug20.html

A New Tactic in the Download War
Online 'Spoofing' Turns the Tables on Music Pirates

By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 21, 2002; Page A01

The first time Travis Daub got "spoofed," he figured faulty software was to blame. Hoping to sample the new album by Moby, he downloaded one of its songs, "We Are All Made of Stars," from the Web site LimeWire.com. But what wound up on his hard drive wasn't what he expected.

"It was just 20 seconds of the song, repeated over and over," says Daub, a 26-year-old design director who lives in Arlington. "At first I thought it was a glitch. Then I realized someone had posted this on purpose."

The identity of that someone is a mystery -- Moby's label and management team say it wasn't them. But in recent weeks, scads of "spoof" files have been anonymously posted to the hugely popular sites where music fans illegally trade songs online. Spoofs are typically nothing more than repetitive loops or snippets filled with crackle and hiss, and thousands are now unwittingly downloaded every day from file-sharing services, like Kazaa and Morpheus, that sprang up after Napster's demise.

Record labels are reluctant to discuss spoofing, but their trade group, the Recording Industry Association of America, has called it a legitimate way to combat piracy. And at least one company acknowledges that it has been hired to distribute spoofs, although it won't say by whom.

All of this suggests that the dummy files are part of a second front in the record industry's war against illegal music copying. For years, the fight focused on Web sites and their owners. Now it's starting to focus on the fans themselves.

For the labels, any anti-piracy campaign that targets consumers is risky, since it could alienate many who also spend heavily on store-bought discs. But given a two-year slide in CD sales that the industry says has cost it billions, many executives and artists believe they don't have a choice. New file-sharing ventures sprout all the time, and 2 billion songs a month are now traded online, according to the RIAA, far more than during Napster's heyday. Meantime, sales of blank CDs, which can be used to copy songs on the cheap, are skyrocketing.

So labels are racing to develop uncopyable CDs and -- if indeed they're behind the spoofs -- employing guerrilla tactics that complicate the unlawful uploading and downloading of songs. The labels are also supporting a bill, now under consideration in Congress, that would make it legal to "impair the operation of peer-to-peer" networks, such as LimeWire. That could be done, for example, by overloading file-sharing services with so many requests that they slow to a crawl.

"I think in the history of the music business, we've been, with regard to enforcing our rights, pretty generous with consumers," said Hilary Rosen, chairwoman of the RIAA. "But we're looking for a way to stop gross infringers, and there are measures we can take to prevent people from making 100 copies or uploading CDs for millions to take."

The strategy has generated plenty of skepticism, however, and not just among those who regard music thievery as a sacred mission. Some executives in the online music world say the majors -- Sony, Universal, Warner Bros., BMG and EMI -- are wasting their time. Foolproof locks, they say, don't exist in the digital realm, where it takes just one dedicated hacker to open the vault for everyone else.

"All this smacks of desperation," says Eric Garland, president of BigChampagne, a company hired by major labels to measure online file-sharing traffic. "When you've got a consumer movement of this magnitude, when tens of millions of people say, 'I think CD copying is cool and I'm within my rights to do it,' it gets to the point where you have to say uncle and build a business model around it rather than fight it."

Great article... I note that they (media) still don't understand the way P2P works though as they noted in the first paragraph ... An attack on the "file sharing networks" would not be as easy as they would like to think owing to their distributed nature.

Indeed! LOL... it would be so easy to block or even ignore a known Spoof server!

The Washington Post has had quite a few articles about downloading recently....been interesting to see how the media portrays it all.....