AN anti-piracy firm in America has been hired to gather evidence against Irish users of online music-sharing networks so they can be prosecuted.

Dick Doyle, the director general of the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) that hired the firm, said he already has evidence against some of the estimated 250,000 Irish users of peer-to-peer file-sharing networks such as Kazaa and eDonkey.

Those caught in possession of illegally downloaded music can be fined ¤1,900 per song or face total fines of up to ¤127,000 and five years’ imprisonment.

IRMA’s recruitment of American expertise is the latest development in a continuing battle between record labels protecting their copyrights and online peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks.

“We have specialists on P2P sites watching what’s going on,” said Doyle. “We’re not only issuing warnings to people but also gathering information about the behaviour of certain individuals. This stuff could be used in litigation in a couple of months’ time.”

Internet service providers (ISPs), which could be required to identify individual customers through court orders, have voiced concerns.

“I don’t think our members feel it right to have private investigations actively going on when the assumption of guilt is the wrong way round,” said Paul Durrant of the Internet Service Providers Association of Ireland.

“The methodology and morality of it are very questionable,” he said. “It’s not illegal but it’s what you could call sharp practice. We do not condone pirating of music over our services, but we also have to think about the privacy of our customers.”

Although Doyle refused to name the company carrying out the surveillance, the general manager of Overpeer, an American firm that provides “digital media data-mining and anti-piracy solutions”, admitted that it was operating in the republic.

“If someone in Ireland was trying to download a pirate file that we’re covering, our anti- piracy would impact that, yes,” said Marc Morgenstern at Overpeer. The company boasts that it can target its efforts “to a specific geography”, and has already done so in France, Germany and elsewhere.

Morgenstern said: “We intervene to stop piracy and we literally do that billions of times a month. We gather data of those people offering pirate files for sharing — that includes all the file data as well as the internet protocol (IP) address of the person offering the file.”

Overpeer also introduce “spoof” files to networks, the most famous being Madonna’s Living in America that, when downloaded, was a recording of her saying “f*** off and buy the album”. The company has also been accused of introducing virus files that corrupt copies of copyrighted tracks in users’ hard drives.

The Recording Industry Association of America has brought more than 4,600 suits against users, negotiating settlements of about $3,000 each with more than 900 people.

In a landmark case in Britain last Thursday, an ISP was forced by the British Phonographic Industry to release the identities of 28 customers against whom it had gathered evidence.

“It’s a serious crime,” said Doyle. “You actually are stealing. It’s the same as if you went in and did it in a shop.”

Nameer Kazzaz, an internet security consultant, sees Overpeer’s activities as “white hacking”. “These guys will go for common names and files held by users with Irish IP blocks,” Kazzaz predicted. “If you’re connected in Ireland you’ll be within a certain block assigned by your ISP. They just need some powerful machines to profile so many people at once, and a big connection. They could probably do it in 48 hours or less.

“My guess is they’ll generate profiles first for about the first 100 most active users. Within their profile will be logging hours and time stamps. They match those to real people through the ISP’s records. Then that’s it, they’ve got them.”

Eric Garland at Big Champagne, a company that compiles statistics on P2P network usage, called it a “great shock-and-awe tactic” but whose effectiveness deteriorates as time goes on.

“Those that are most likely to be sued are the casual, naive downloaders, young and old who aren’t savvy,” he says. “Those who do this regularly know how to avoid these efforts and it’s not hard.”

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