In an air-conditioned room underneath Oxford Street, a black box is clicking away. Streams of numbers pour down its screen: IP addresses, times and dates. A few words fleetingly pass by: Hulk, 50 Cent, Finding Nemo...
These are the offices of NetPD, one of the leaders of a flourishing new arm of the copyright industry: "media defence". Here, and at other companies such as the Wiltshire-based WebSheriff.com, internet research technicians - cyber sleuths if you like - are gathering information on the activities and identities of internet song-swappers: their IP addresses, the search terms they use and the files they are downloading. All major peer-to-peer networks are scanned continually. "Phone directories" of data are generated, collated and filtered. These are then passed to the major record labels.
Until recently, the worst penalty you could expect was a cease-and-desist email, or a threatening instant message from a Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) spook.
In a change of tactics in its war on file sharing, however, the RIAA has announced plans to sue individuals who distribute illegal files across P2P networks. The goal is to create a climate of fear among users. The lawsuits will use evidence gathered by media defence cybercops.
Prosecutions have already begun. A group of IT students in the US was sued for $29.7bn, later reduced to $57,900. File sharers have also been arrested in Milan and Germany. But no individual in the UK has been sued or prosecuted. Yet.
"I think it's going to come," says Phil White, chief operating officer of NetPD, "but no one wants to be the first one to do it." Record companies will not want to be seen to target customers, he argues. They will leave it to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the RIAA's UK counterpart, to make the first move.
The BPI has made no specific threats against users. This is unusual, since it rarely falls out of step with the RIAA. Differences in US copyright law may be a factor. The industry says it is awaiting UK implementation of the EU copyright direc tive due this summer. The targeting of individuals, however, has not been ruled out.
"If we're faced with an individual who, for example, uploads a million files, and begins to enrich himself," says Peter Jamieson, BPI's executive director, "I would regard him as a perfectly legitimate target."
Other targets are more pressing. All UK universities and the top 100 corporations, for instance, have received BPI circulars pointing out that allowing employees and students to use P2P networks and infringe copyright could result in prosecution. At the same time, the bulk of the industry's anti-piracy resources are being poured into combating counterfeit piracy, which accounts for one in three CDs sold in the UK.
"We've got enough on our plate," says Iain Grant, the ex-Hong Kong police superintendent who heads up the BPI's anti-piracy enforcement division. "We're not looking at consumers. If you take an analogy with drugs, the consumer is a secondary target and somebody who needs help and education."
This education may be late in coming. The number of file sharers in this country is growing. According to the BPI, UK peer-to-peer activity at its peak accounts for nearly 27% of worldwide P2P traffic. More than 1.2m users are exchanging around 287m files every weekend.
The media defender's main tool for stemming this vast copyright leak has been "interdiction" - the direct targeting of file-sharing computers with custom software such as download blockers or, more commonly, spoof files.
Thousands of spoof files have been seeded across the networks by specialist media defending outfits, such as the French Retspan.info (Napster spelt backwards). The files appear to be a current single from Radiohead but, in reality, contain silence, white noise or, as with Madonna's last single, a 30-second clip of the artist lambasting the pirates with salty language.
Ostensibly, spoofing is meant to annoy or frustrate users, so they will give up. But spoof files can have a secret purpose. Technical limitations dog cybercops when they attempt to scan modern "serverless" networks such as KaZaA. They can monitor the searches users make, but not the files they download. Spoof files are their way in. Some media defenders use spoofs as a lure to catch the internet addresses of anyone attempting to download them.
Labels have invested big money into spoofing. Unfortunately, as NetPD's White, has discovered, it is not working. Even 10,000 spoof files are barely a drop in KaAaA's 750m-file ocean. "The record companies think it is effective," he says. "We can give them reports that make it look effective. But it's not."
The toothlessness of interdiction is powering a greater need for prosecutions and setting examples. Most of our net police think prosecution of UK file sharers is imminent, although not all agree with the tactic.
John Giacobbi, of WebSheriff, be lieves there are cheaper and more effective methods, such as going for the user's ISP. He believes that picking on individuals is just the record industry's belated attempt to recover lost ground. "There are millions of users. Even if they prosecuted two or three to make an example, it's using a hammer to crack a nut."
The bulk of RIAA prosecutions are expected next month. Some figures, however, suggest that the climate of fear may be working. Since June 25, when the RIAA made its first threats, traffic for applications such as KaZaA has fallen by about 15%, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.
This pleases the media defenders. "We don't want to be seen as 'The Fun Police'," says White. "A lot of our work is prevention rather than 'getting people'."
When the lawsuits do come, they will be aimed at uploaders, whose vast MP3 caches form the backbone of the P2P system, rather than downloaders (or "leechers" in file-sharing slang), who do not share files and make up the bulk of the P2P community. As the number of uploaders decreases, the system is damaged, users drift away to legitimate services and illegal file-sharing dies. That's the dream, anyway.
Meanwhile, the black box under the street keeps ticking. More search terms appear: Matrix Reloaded, Black Eyed Peas, R.Kelly. The data is automatically processed into cease-and-desist emails, 60m of which have been sent to individuals and ISPs.
"We have received information," they read, "that an individual has utilized the above referenced IP address at the noted date and time to offer downloads of copyrighted material, including such files(s) as:...."
You have been warned.
