On April Fool's Day, many students were shocked upon visiting http://boogle.agblog.com Instead of the usual Boogle search interface, they were greeted with a well-spoofed message purportedly from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The notice claimed that Boogle was being shut down because it allows students to illegally trade copyrighted material, and every student taking advantage of this service would be charged a fee for each illegally owned movie or song.The joke terrified many students, prompting an MP3 pirate panic as they madly scrambled to delete all of their offending files. Unfortunately, now the joke is for real, and it isn't too funny. Just last Thursday, the RIAA filed suit against four students who ran similar network searching services at other universities. The students may face the maximum penalty for copyright infringement - an absurd sum of $150,000 per copyright infringed.

Fearing a similar response, Computer Operators Group (COG), which owns Boogle, took the service offline. This was understandable, especially since the group just received funding for a new Boogle server from the Union Senate. Although COG believes that Boogle isn't illegal, they do not wish to risk legal action against themselves or the University.

But for now, let's forget about the big debate over the legality of Boogle-type services, whether CD sales are really up or down and the general controversy surrounding the ethics of music and movie sharing. The real question is: Will groups like the RIAA and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) ever be successful in stopping copyright infringement? Do they have a chance of restoring the industry to the days before the MP3 and the Internet? Or are they merely struggling to hold back the floodgates, doomed to be swept away in the torrent of illegal file sharing?

To answer that question, we need only to look at history. The battle began with Napster, which the record labels quickly took notice of and successfully sued in court. The suit against Napster was followed by another successful suit against Scour Exchange, which later went bankrupt.

The recording industry essentially forced these services to shut down, but the computing community - having foreseen such an action - was already one step ahead of them. Other services such as Gnutella and Kazza emerged, based on new peer-to-peer file sharing technology. Instead of relying on one central computer that coordinated every file transfer, each computer itself became just one node in a global network, making these services more difficult to defeat.

But even though these peer-to-peer networks are decentralized, the recording industry is making some headway by targeting individual users who share large quantities of copyrighted media. Companies such as NetPD are hired to scan networks - Kazaa, for example - for these materials. Once they are found, cease-and-desist letters are sent to the user and their Internet Service Provider (ISP), who will often disable the user's account until the material is removed. The recording industry has thus far refrained from filing any lawsuits against these users, but I doubt it will be long before they do so, in an effort to scare them.

The record labels are also pursuing new legal and technological options to fight copyright violations. A bill introduced last summer proposed that the RIAA be allowed to use hacking techniques on computers logged onto a file-sharing network. And the RIAA is already known to "poison" networks by flooding them with falsely named files or files purposely corrupted.

Yet despite all these offenses, history has shown that the hacking community is a force to be reckoned with. Metallica's Web site was defaced several times while it sued Napster, and the RIAA Web site has been hacked numerous times as well. More importantly, however, hackers have repeatedly cracked the recording industry's most sophisticated copy-protection measures.

In 2000, a digital "watermark" designed to prevent MP3 reproduction was cracked by a team from Princeton, and Sony's Key2Audio disc copy- protection was bypassed simply by using a black felt-tipped marker to draw around the edge of the CD. Further making life difficult for the RIAA are programs like Freenet, a peer-to-peer network designed from the ground up to allow completely anonymous communication and file-sharing. Freenet's members are effectively rendered immune to liability and law suits because no one user knows what another is sharing,

The RIAA is all too aware of these countermeasures, and the recent lawsuits are a sign of its increasing desperation. With this recent bout of legal mudslinging, the usual cease-and-desist letters were forgone in favor of a big publicity stink, designed to intimidate students across America. But these bullying and scaring tactics are bound to backfire.

By departing from the established procedure of first contacting a school and providing a chance for it to deal with the situation accordingly, the RIAA is certainly not making any friends, whose cooperation will surely be needed if they're to make any progress in their war. The bottom line is that this back-and-forth game of cat and mouse will continue ad infinitum. Hackers love a challenge, and there will always be plenty of them to crack the latest copy protection scheme - even if they care nothing for the music. That leaves the RIAA with two options: either shut off the Internet, or devise a way to monitor every single Internet transmission - neither of which appears too likely.

In the short run, organizations like the RIAA and the MPAA may manage to win a few battles here and there. But in the long run, they're going to lose the war.

- Jonathan Melenson '04 submits a column to the Justice.