"Whoever put my s**t on the internet, I want to meet that motherf**ker and beat the s**t out of him. Anybody who tries to make excuses for that s**t is a f**king bitch" - eminem on p2p networks. Would you listen to someone who talks like that?

The media companies would love to be able to sue everyone who trades an MP3 or movie on p2p networks. Its not practical, but that doesn't seem to stop them trying :-) Every major content producer now has hired an "enforcer bot" company to run bots which scan the internet for infringements and reports back to the copyright holder, who usually harasses the ISP with the infamous DMCA warnings.

The DMCA, hated for its anti-circumvention provisions, was passed in 1998 before digital rights were a serious issue. At the time it only had minimal publicity. It is likely if it was better known people would have campaigned against it. Another equally unpopular provision is the C&D takedown. This states that an ISP is not liable for copyright infringement by its customers or in any files it hosts for its customers provideing it ensures the content is taken down immediately when it recieves a complaint. This was actually proposed by ISPs, who wanted their grey-area "common carrier" immunity made more reliable. Since then this section has been abused countless times, because the ISPs will more often than not remove any content without investigateing. This means that if I find a small website I dont like I can email the ISP who will remove the site, which will remain down for a week or so while the owner sorts out the paperwork needed to get it back up. This is how soulseek was briefly taken down in 2002, and forced to switch ISP. Unusually the complaint there came from a minor and very unpopular trance band, saphirecut, not a large label or group.

These bots, combined with the lack of investigations by either the copyright owners who send the warnings or the ISPs who recieve them, have a rather high false positive rate. Some of these false positives include a childs school report on "snow white", many claims that the MPAA owns the copyright to DeCSS and, in a piece of stupidity even the MPAA rarely manages, internetmovies.com (a perfectly legal trailers and reviews site) which was accused of hosting "lord of the rings: the return of the king" when it was still starting post-production around a year before it was released.

Even through the bots are running at full capacity and the various copyright holders are flooding ISPs with paperwork to get rid of them, the chances of getting caught by a bot are still fairly remote. The penalty is also not severe. The ISP sends a warning, and you just remove the offending files. Very few ISPs terminate accounts immediately for a first complaint, it usually takes three before they do that.

A recent devlopment is the RIAA "sue 'em all" campaign, an attempt to collect the identities and sue hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals for using p2p networks. Most of these are expected to settle immediately, $10,000 to make the RIAA go away is a lot cheaper than the legal costs of fighting them. Dispite the scale of the legal assault, enough to completly jam the courts in some areas with the subpoenas used to force ISPs to reveal users identities, the chances of getting caught are still miniscule. The objective appears to be to scare people into either not using p2p or into leeching - an attempt backed up by the propaganda-filled RIAA-run musicunited website, which claims p2p programs steal users processors and hard drives and has instructions for disableing shareing.

Neither the conventional approach or the RIAAs is effective outside the USA through, where the DMCA does not apply. Local laws may, but theres no campaign to threaten ISPs on a large scale outside the USA. (At least not yet),

Now, here are the minions. Note that this information is incomplete. I know some of the customer lists, but I dont have complete lists for any bot company.