RIAA organizes P2P "entrapment" operation

In the ongoing (and totally ineffective) battle against online music piracy, the RIAA has enlisted Media Defender (http://www.mediadefender.com/) to create fake P2P websites. These sites prompt users to download fake software (which is actually spyware in disguise) in order to download illegal tracks from the site. One of the sites is http://www.miivi.com/ but as soon as this news broke, the site was taken down due to traffic overload.

When a user logged into this site or one of many others, they were prompted to create an account at which point their IP address would be tracked as well as other personal information by the RIAA. Once the user downloaded the software (which was actually spyware), their entire hard drive would be searched for illegal and copyrighted media files and reported back to Media Defender. You can read more here: (http://www.techspot.com/news/26021-mpaa-sets-up-fake-p2p-site-to-lure-pirates.html).

This seems beyond belief in terms of privacy violations. Again, the Internet makes it really hard to tell who is who in terms of users and web traffic so there would be tons of "false-positives" in an operation like this which would make unsuspecting consumers all the more angry about the situation.

Still, you have to hand it to the RIAA. If their charter is to make customers cower in fear and suffer every kind of copyright injustice (which it isn't by the way, but seems to be the only thing the RIAA spends it time doing), then the RIAA is right on track.