By Daniel Tynan
(9/3/02)

Is your ISP spying on you?
Consider this scenario: You log on to a file-swapping network such as Gnutella or Morpheus and decide to share your copy of the latest Eminem single or a digital copy of Star Wars Episode II with the world. A few weeks later, you get a letter from your ISP threatening to cut off your service if you don't stop posting copyrighted material.

It sounds like a scenario from a bad Hollywood movie, but it's really happening. This year alone, more than 87,000 such letters have been sent. But don't blame ISPs; the real culprit is Big Hollywood.

I spy?
Over the last year, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has stepped up its campaign to enforce the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which was designed to prevent the kind of file swapping that I've just described, among other things.

ISPs whose customers violate copyright laws can be sued under the DMCA, unless the companies follow certain safe-harbor rules, such as notifying subscribers of alleged violations and removing offending material from any Web sites that the ISP hosts. Such warnings lead some people to claim that their ISPs have been hired by the MPAA to spy on them.

Not so, says EarthLink legal affairs spokesperson Chris Hanson. "We have been in frequent contact with [the MPAA] regarding alleged copyright infringement," he admits. "But that's a far cry from asking us to monitor our subscribers."

Hanson adds that EarthLink's network is set up in a way that makes it impossible to spy on users, even if the ISP wanted to.

Undercover Big Brother
So who's doing the snooping? The MPAA, natch. Of course, to do its dirty work, it employs companies such as Ranger Online, which makes a search engine that combs the Net for copyrighted files. Ranger's software doesn't just search Web sites, it also roams newsgroups, chat rooms, online auctions, and file-swapping networks. The same technology can be used to detect online terrorist activity, hate speech, or kiddie porn.

Ranger CTO Jeremy Rasmussen says that all his company does is collect information that's already public. For example, in the case of file-sharing networks, Ranger logs on and looks for suspicious files, then it initiates a download. It records the IP address where the file is stored and sends all of this data to its client. "If you have 200 movies on your system but you're not sharing them with the world at large, we're not going to find that," he says.

Ken Jacobsen, director of the MPAA's worldwide antipiracy program, says that the letter campaign has two purposes: to protect the copyrights of its members and to educate people about what is and isn't kosher on the Net.

"We truly believe that some people [who swap files] on the Net don't understand that they're violating the law," says Jacobsen. "We hope that by contacting them through their ISPs we can start a conversation about what is proper and improper behavior."

The moral here: If you think you can swap files anonymously, think again. Someone could be watching.

Do you copy?
Copyright attorney Bruce Sunstein points out that people have been complaining about unauthorized copying since the days of Gutenberg. But he adds, "As nasty as the MPAA is at times, their basic contention that people shouldn't be able to freeload is correct." The question, then, is how to go about solving the problem.

Back in the '70s, Hollywood opposed the VCR because it believed that if people could watch movies at home, no one would go to the theater. But instead of killing movies, the VCR opened up a new, vastly profitable revenue stream. The same thing could happen in the digital world, argues Peter Guber, producer of Midnight Express and Batman, and one of the most tech-savvy guys in Tinseltown.

I talked to Guber while he was taking a break from shooting Beyond Borders, a drama starring Angelina Jolie due out next spring.

"This issue is like a tidal wave," says Guber. "You've got to figure out how to surf it, how to create revenue streams out of the way people do business, not out of the way you want to force them to do business. The challenge is to protect the artists' work and provide new revenue streams in an efficient, effective, and fair way."

Right now, Hollywood seems more inclined to unleash the lawyers than think about creative solutions. Let's hope this one has a happy ending.

I recently received an e-mail ad for instant credit cards. The message also said that if I believed I had been spammed I should "lodge a complaint with the Spamming Bureau." What is the Spamming Bureau? Is it a legitimate antispam site?

Spike in Southport

Dear Spike:

Well, not exactly. The site is owned by WorldNets.com, a.k.a. RDN Corporation, an e-mail marketing firm in Dallas that uses it for list washing, removing the names of people who don't want to get more spam. Chuck Mensch, who runs WorldNets' e-mail operations, claims that his company contacts only people who've opted in at its clients' sites, which include credit card vendors, online casinos, and psychic readers. Mensch says that his company bought a list of addresses last spring from a vendor who claimed that he had users' permission but, in fact, did not; he says that WorldNet has stopped using that list. Mensch added that his employees registered the Spammingbureau domain using false data to avoid threats from antispammers; it has since been updated with correct data, and contact info has been added to the site.

My take: signing up at the Bureau might get you off some lists, but it won't stop spammers. For tips on how to fight back against unwanted e-mail, see our reviews of spam stoppers.