Labels tout program to disable swapping
Found on CNet News on Wednesday, 21 September 2005
The music and movie industries are giving people who have swapped songs and other copyrighted material over the Internet a new way to repent for their illicit ways.
A free program released Thursday, called Digital File Check, will uninstall or disable file-sharing programs on people's computers. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), an affiliate of the Recording Industry Association of America in London, helped develop the software along with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).
The software, available for download, will also search computers for music and movies and remove any illegal copies, the group said.
They can't honestly assume that this piece of code will have a signifcant impact. Those who use P2P know it and have little reason to run that software. I also wonder how reliable it will identify "pirated" media files. I doubt it comes with a list of MD5 checksums for "illegal" files. Perhaps it will just go for filenames? But some users have legal MP3's, so that won't work. Checksums for legal files also don't work, because one could edit the tags or re-encode it. It will probably just list all audio/video files and offer a "delete all to be sure" button.