The Good, the Bad and RetSpan
p2pnet.net News > Paris, France:- It looks like a remake of Sergio Leone’s movie, "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly".
The bad: file-sharers who download illegal songs, videos and/or softwares.
The good: those who make money to Bug the Bad.
The ugly? France’s RetSpan, whose the reward program PeerFactor aims to bribe its users into nailing people who share in p2pnetworks.
Subscribers to PeerFactor are enticed into spreading fake files on P2P networks.
The files are generated by RetSpan from the originals and lead file-sharers who try to run them to ‘legal’ download sites backed by the corporate music industry.
To reward PeerFactor members, RetSpan scans p2p networks to find out how many times a fake file has been downloaded. Content editors set the tariff.
According to RetSpan’s sales blurb, subscribers can earn 125 euros ($US148) a month but so far, the three-year-old association hasn’t revealed details of how many people have ‘earned’ (or how much) from spreading fake files.
Could PeerFactor limit illegal downloading?
"Yes!" says RetSpan in itsPeerFactor presentation.
"With 1000 fake files shared by 1000 PeerFactor subscribers, the original file will be very hard to find."
Since the launch on April 5, PeerFactor has gathered "300 to 400 hundreds" devotees, president Didier Wang, president of Restpan, told TF1.fr, part of the national broadcast television network.
However, because the files they spread are fake doesn’t protect Restpan users: they can be treated in the same way as other p2p file sharers and could potentially be sued by the Big Five record labels.
In fact, they could be in even more danger than real file sharers because RetSpan keeps a track of all members’ IPs. Just in case.
Moreover, cynics might think the whole process isn’t much more than a way to for this at the moment ‘non-profit’ outfit to eventually create a lucrative PeerFactor and IP monitoring business.
Thuan Huynh
April 26th, 2004 at 7:26 pm
Can Retspan stop savvy file sharers who are able to easily obtain the real mp3’s? Can they stop these same file sharers from graciously burning multiple CD’s for their friends?
Silly Frenchmen.
April 27th, 2004 at 12:11 am
Greed is always ugly. After all, it’s one of the seven deadlys.
A plea to good hearted hackers everywhere. Please show these goons at RetSpan/PeerFactor what for… You know what I’m talking about. };-)