Piracy Alerts

In the course of deploying our DIF anti-piracy and IndieScan charting systems, we have made an alarming discovery: There are some pirate sites on the net that appear to be benign search engine robots (i.e. spiders), but in reality are stealing song files en masse and using them to provide "content" to pirate sites throughout the net.

How do we know?

DIF and Indiescan can tell the difference between a click and a download. The software does not consider a song file to have been listened to or downloaded unless and until the file has been completely sent.

We became suspicious when we noticed that dozens or hundreds of song files were being downloaded at the rate of one every 5 or 10 seconds. Naturally, that is impossible to do if a real (i.e. humanoid) user is actually listening or downloading to their computer. It can only happen when an automated spider accesses a site from a remote server.

Sure enough, upon closer analysis of the log files, that is exactly what is happening. We have seen instances where a site is accessed by a remote "user", and over 100 song files are downloaded in approximately 10 minutes!!

The good news is, DIF and IndieScan users can now be automatically alerted whenever a pirate server accesses your site. The "block.dat" file included with the software can then be updated to prevent any further access to your site by the pirate.