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Ed Felton is reporting that the recording industry may be deliberately spreading harmful files in place of a actual mp3 file.
The files are encoded in a Microsoft file format. When the user plays such a file, the user's browser is forced to visit a URL contained in the file. For the files at issue here, the page at that URL uses various spyware-insertion tricks to try to infect the user's machine with standard spyware programs. Ben Edelman reports that when he clicked on one such page, "My computer quickly became contaminated with the most spyware programs I have ever received in a single sitting, including at least the following 31 programs..."
So, a question that I have about this is -- Does this open a label so acting to legal vulnerability? Some jurisdictions are either considering criminalizing virus production or have already done so (US and Canada).
Nominally, a person who is downloading a file from a P2P network is almost certainly skating the boundaries of the law -- if not out and out breaking one or two. It would stand to reason that most lawbreakers aren't going to turn to an authority for help when and if they are the victim of a crime while commit one on their own (much like violence or theft committed against a prostitute and/or john during an assignation). Still, if any lawyer-type person might want to comment on the legalities, I'd be interested to hear more about it.
Posted by Casper at January 4, 2005 12:36 AM