How It Does It: The RIAA Explains How It Catches Alleged Music Pirates

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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 demonstration was given by an RIAA employee who would speak only on condition of anonymity because of concern that he would receive hate e-mail.

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: 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. 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.

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.) 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.

 

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By Antony Bruno

DENVER (Billboard) - Perhaps no single device has had more impact on mobile music than Apple's iPhone. While only 6.7 percent of overall mobile customers use their phone to listen to music, rising to 27.9 percent for smartphone users, a full 74.1 percent of iPhone owners reported using the device as an MP3 player, according to M:Metrics.

The majority of this music, however, is transferred from the computer, rather than purchased through the phone and downloaded wirelessly. That may change this summer once Apple unveils what many expect will be a new version of the iconic device, featuring access to high-speed third-generation (3G) wireless networks.

Murmurs about Warner Music Group's (WMG) ability to handle its $2 billion+ debt got louder today, after the company suspended its dividend. But Edgar Bronfman Jr, , asked repeatedly about it during his 2Q earnings call, insisted that everything's fine, that the company is in no danger of violating its debt covenants. And that they wouldn't be even if they kept handing out the dividend. Not sure that's going to quiet the peanut gallery, though.

The rest of the business? More or less the same: Physical sales still falling, digital growing but not enough to compensate.

What will change that? New digital revenue streams that WMG and the rest of the industry have been waiting on for some time. Among the ones they'd love to see: Signficant download revenue from somebody other than iTunes (AAPL), and mobile sales that aren't ringtones, which have been flattening.