In the UK, the record industry there has just announced that it has successfully won a court order to force Internet service providers to reveal the identities of 33 suspected file sharers.
The British Phonographic Industry claims that the 33 suspected people have been responsible for illegally posting 72,000 music files to the Internet, and is demanding compensation, citing figures like the apparent 654 million pounds ($855 million) the U.K. music industry has supposedly lost over the last two years due to file sharing. The Five ISPs involved now have just days to turn over the details of the suspected file swappers.
Meanwhile, someone in the blackhat community (or a derivative of) seems to have their own ideas on how to fight P2P. A hacker (I hate that term, but never mind...) has created a virus that targets music lovers by deleting MP3 files on infected computers. Posing on P2P networks as DVD copying software, Nopir-B, searches through your computer for MP3 files and then deletes them. The worm appears to have originated in France.
In a further blow to P2P (illegal or otherwise), a Finnish based company called Viralg believes it has designed software that will finish it off once and for all, by mixing files on a P2P network, corrupting downloads and rendering them worthless.
"On the market where our competitors can only offer a mediocre service for blocking illegal file swapping our solution means totally new level of revenue protection. By utilizing Viralg's technology we can guarantee 99% protection for intellectual property like music, movie and game content in all the main peer to peer networks." - Viralg.
The new software works by providing corrupted content with the same hash code as the originally sought media, and can trick file sharing clients into downloading corrupt file segments. Doubtlessly, programmers in the P2P community will try to overcome this somehow.