If You Can't Beat 'em, Flood 'em

Echoing Steve Verdon's words disagreeing with Zimran Ahmed, I simply can't take the marginal cost of music via Napster or Kazaa to be $0, and for precisely the same reasons Steve mentions -- the costs are the effort to locate the song and then the time it takes to download several versions in the hopes of getting one good one copy. Given what else you might be doing with your computer at the time (the programs are RAM-heavy and the downloads can choke even a DSL line), the opportunity costs aren't exactly ignorable.

To emphasize this point, there is a new tactic in the market for fighting illegal downloading of music: frustrating the music pirates to the point where the effort is no longer worth the benefit of locating the song. This is done through flooding the P2P systems with bogus files that mimic real files.

A computer science professor and graduate student have been awarded a patent for a method of thwarting illegal file sharing on peer-to-peer networks by flooding the network with bogus files that look like pirated music.

The software creates bogus files with attributes -- such as file names and description tags -- that make them look like the real thing, but they are in fact white noise, low-quality recordings or advertisements to buy the song. What's more, the software sends out thousands of decoys to frustrate P2P users with fruitless downloads.

I've downloaded music, but fully admit it's breaking copyright (I've since stopped -- I buy CDs and use iTunes). I can attest to the frustration created by bogus files and bad quality. This strikes me as one of the best tactics to fight the practice I've yet heard. I espeically like the ability to use the files as advertising. If there's anything that'll drive users from such a system, it's excessive exposure to corporate shills.

The marginal costs might have just gotten a lot higher.