Frame Them for Me, Will ‘ya

American Scofflaw

The RIAA, it seems these days, is suing everyone with a pulse with claims of copyright infringement. And perhaps a few "individuals" without a pulse may get sued. At least, they are receiving DMCA takedown notices, at some folks at the University of Washington discovered:

Practically any Internet user can be framed for copyright infringement today.
By profiling copyright enforcement in the popular BitTorrent file sharing system, we were able to generate hundreds of real DMCA takedown notices for computers at the University of Washington that never downloaded nor shared any content whatsoever.

Further, we were able to remotely generate complaints for nonsense devices including several printers and a (non-NAT) wireless access point. Our results demonstrate several simple techniques that a malicious user could use to frame arbitrary network endpoints.

You read that right: researchers at the U of W managed to get the RIAA to send a legal demand to a networked printer. You'd think that a legal demand would need to be vetted, or at least signed off, by a human being, but apparently this is not the case.

Equally disturbing is the fact that these legal attacks can be engineeered. A perfectly innocent person can be "framed" with bogus traffic sent from other computers. In a sane world, this would immediately discredit the evidentiary value of the RIAA's network "investigations"; but alas, we don't seem to live in a sane world.