Excerpts from the article by CATHERINE RAMPELL on How It Does It: The RIAA Explains How It Catches Alleged Music Pirates

To catch college students trading copyrighted songs online, the Recording Industry Association of America uses the same file-sharing software that online pirates love, an RIAA representative told The Chronicle at the organization’s offices during a private demonstration of how it catches alleged music pirates. He also said the group does not single out specific colleges in its investigations.

The official explained that one way the RIAA identifies pirates is by using LimeWire, a popular peer-to-peer file-sharing program that is free online and used by many college students (there is also a more-robust version of the program sold for a small fee).

Here’s how the process works:

1. The RIAA maintains a list of songs whose distribution rights are owned by the RIAA’s member organizations. It has given that list to Media Sentry, a company it hired to search for online pirates.
2. That company runs copies of the LimeWire program and performs searches for those copyrighted song titles, one by one, to see if any are being offered by people whose computers are connected to the LimeWire network. For popular songs, the search can turn up dozens, if not hundreds, of hits. A search on Madonna’s latest release, “4 Minutes,” turned up more than a hundred users trading various copies of the song.
3. The LimeWire software allows users who right-click on any song entry and choose “browse host” to see all of the songs that a given file sharer is offering to others for download. The software also lists the IP address of active file sharers. (An IP address is a unique number, assigned by Internet-service providers, that identifies every connection to the Internet.)
4. While the names of the people associated with particular IP addresses are not public, it is easy to find out which IP addresses are registered to each Internet-service provider. Using public, online databases (such as those at arin.net or samspade.org), Media Sentry locates the name of the Internet-service provider and determines which traders are located at colleges or universities.

Swift Detection

The process mimics how pirates themselves locate files but with a significant difference: speed. Media Sentry has automated the process by using scripting software that types in the songs, grabs the IP addresses, checks them, and forwards the information to the RIAA.

The RIAA’s first step against campus pirates is usually to send a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice, which asks the college to remove infringing content from its network.

In collecting evidence for those takedown notices, Media Sentry investigators do not usually download suspect music files. Instead, the company uses special software to check the “hash,” a sort of unique digital fingerprint, of each offered file to verify that it is identical to a copyrighted song file in the RIAA’s database. In the rare cases in which the hashes don’t match, the investigators download the song and use a software program sold by Audible Magic to compare the sound waves of the offered audio file against those of the song it may be infringing upon. If the Audible Magic software still doesn’t turn up a match, then a live person will listen to the song.

Based on that information, the RIAA will send a letter to the college asking for the song to be removed. The letter lists the name of the file and the date and time when Media Sentry investigators saw it available online.

On listservs and in interviews, some university administrators have recently questioned the validity of some of these takedown notices because they say they do not have any record of a download at the named IP address at the specified time.

Seeking Settlements

In more serious cases of piracy, the RIAA sometimes decides to send out “prelitigation settlement letters,” which asks alleged infringers to cough up several thousand dollars in lieu of going to court and potentially facing a much more expensive punishment.

Before sending out the prelitigation settlement letters, Media Sentry investigators always download music files believed to be infringing on licensed songs. Live human beings then listen to those songs to verify that the files are infringing. A letter goes out to the college with the date and time when investigators saw that the song was available for sharing.

While the process for generating both takedown notices and settlement letters is largely automated, the RIAA said that before each warning is sent out, a full-time RIAA employee reviews each case to make sure the claim is legitimate and that the alleged pirate is in the United States. Thanks to the speed and ease of the automated process, though, the RIAA is “able to identify hundreds of instances of infringement on a daily basis,” according to RIAA spokeswoman Cara Duckworth. She also acknowledged that the RIAA can tell only when a song is being offered for users to illegally download; investigators have no way of knowing when someone else is actually downloading the song.

“The automated takedown notice program we have right now is solely university-focused,” said the anonymous RIAA representative. “We’re trying to make universities aware that they have an issue with peer-to-peer file sharing on their network, and so we don’t send automated notices to commercial ISP’s, I think because they are generally aware that there’s a problem.”

The RIAA said it does not single out particular academic institutions to be “made examples of.”

“We have no capability of targeting any school at all,” said the RIAA representative, who argued that there is a large “misperception” among university administrators that individual colleges are being picked on. “Technically we can’t do it. We find what we find with this process, and that’s what we send to schools.”

So thats that. On the other hand you have Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails saying at Sydney Hordern Pavilion on September 16, 2007:

“Last time I was here, I was doing a lot of complaining about the ridiculous prices of CDs down here. And that story got picked up and got carried all around the world and now my record label all around the world hates me, because I yelled at them, I called them out for being greedy fucking assholes. I didn’t get a chance to check, has the price come down at all? I see a no, a no, a no… Has anyone seen the price come down? Okay, well, you know what that means – STEAL IT. Steal away. Steal and steal and steal some more and give it to all your friends and keep on stealin’. Because one way or another these motherfuckers will get it through their head that they’re ripping people off and that that’s not right.”

And hes making headlines for not just that!

Tren Reznor is not only breaking the old distribution model, he’s even breaking the newest, like Radiohead’s pay-what-you-want: Nine Inch Nails‘ latest album—The Slip—is 100% free, no payment required in any case, not even when you download the whooping 1.2GB version—which includes high definition WAVE 24/96 files (better-than-CD-quality 24bit 96kHz audio.) You can also choose from high-quality MP3s, FLAC lossless and M4A lossless. Note to record labels: drop dead.

Now how cool is that. I remember months back they are prolly the first group to release their album in Multitrack format! This allows anyone at all with access to the proper software to create their own remixes of these Nine Inch Nails songs. Recently, a new section has been added to the official Nine Inch Nails website to host remixes created by both fans and professionals alike; point your web browser to remix.nin.com to check it out! NIN is not just hot air as some pro-RIAA people might say, He is at the cutting-edge of music.

Cultural references to RIAA(source Wikipedia)

• “Weird Al” Yankovic’s single “Don’t Download This Song” satirizes the RIAA’s lawsuits against copyright infringers.
• The March 4, 2007 FoxTrot strip also satirized the RIAA’s lawsuits, where Jason tried to teach his iguana Quincy to download music, because “it’s one thing for them to go after single moms, widows, grandmothers, dead people and children… but sue an iguana?! That’d be insane!”
• MC Lars’s single “Download This Song” criticized the RIAA and the music industry in general, mentioning the RIAA’s lawsuits against “little kids downloading hit songs.”
• Billy Joel said in an interview that his first album Cold Spring Harbor wasn’t worth the money to buy, and urges people to steal it if they can manage it.
• After being asked to compose a Christmas Song safe for download Jonathan Coulton released ‘Podsafe Christmas Song’ which contained the lyrics “Don’t think us rude, we don’t want to get sued/ by the thugs at the RIAA”
• After the release of the album Year Zero, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails told fans in Australia during tour to “STEAL IT. Steal away. Steal and steal and steal some more and give it to all your friends and keep on stealin’. Because one way or another, these motherfuckers will get it through their head that they’re ripping people off and that’s not right.” Renzor has openly opposed the RIAA, and later left Interscope, his record company at the time.

INDIA TODAY. March, 2007
An Ancient Tale Retold.

The Ant and the Grasshopper.
Old version:
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed. The grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.

New version:
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away. Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving. NDTV, BBC and CNN show up to provide pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. The world is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can it be that the poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so? Arundhati Roy stages a demonstration in front of the ant’s house. Medha Patkar goes on a fast along with other grasshoppers, demanding that grasshoppers be relocated to warmer climates during winter. Amnesty International and Kofi Annan criticize the Indian Government for not upholding the fundamental rights of the grasshopper. The internet is flooded with online petitions seeking support to the grasshopper. Opposition MPs disrupt the Parliament work and stage a walkout. Left parties call for a “Bharat Bandh” in West Bengal and Kerala demanding a judicial enquiry.

The CPM(Communist Party of India) in Kerala immediately passes a law preventing ants from working hard in the heat so as to bring about equality of poverty among ants and grasshoppers. Lalu Prasad allocates one free coach to the grasshoppers on all Indian Railway trains, aptly named the Grasshopper Rath. Finally, the Judicial Committee drafts the Prevention of Terrorism against Grasshoppers Act (POTAGA), with effect from the beginning of the winter. Arjun Singh makes special reservation for grasshoppers in educational institutions and in government services. The ant is fined for failing to comply with POTAGA and, has nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes. His home is confiscated by the government, and handed over to the grasshopper in a ceremony covered by the NDTV. Arundhati Roy calls it a “triumph of Justice”. CPM calls it the “revolutionary resurgence of the downtrodden” . Kofi Annan invites the grasshopper to address the UN General Assembly. Many years later, the ant has migrated to the USA and being diligent and sincere, set up a multi-billion dollar company in the Silicon Valley. Hundreds of grasshoppers still die of starvation in India despite reservation. As a result of losing a lot of hard-working ants and feeding the lazy grasshoppers, India is still a developing country.

From: The Telegraph, article by Khushwant Singh.

ps: cant seem to trace where i got THIS version from, corrections welcome.