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By Hazella Bowmani
The music industry is using many different approaches in an effort to thwart file sharing with little success

Price value: DVDs include much more content than CDs even though both of them retail at comparable prices.
Overview
A year after destroying Napster in 2001, six of the leading file-swapping programmes had as many as 14 million users in one month (Online Music Sales Declining, 2002). The RIAA responded to this surge of piracy by taking a multi-faceted approach. We’ve seen that making people feel guilty about downloading music is insufficient, inseminating fake music files onto peer-to-peer (P2P) networks makes getting music bothersome but not dissuasive, and suing college students and every other copyright infringer is impractical. The problem isn’t that the copyright laws aren’t restrictive enough or that there isn’t enough corrupted material already floating around file sharing networks, it’s that there’s no incentive to buy music, only the discouragement that stealing it is illegal.

Copyright laws
Recently, the RIAA has filed lawsuits against individuals and companies it feels potentially infringe copyright laws, and it has the full support of the law to continue this policing. The most prominent copyright law is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998, which is designed to encourage strict control of copyrighted media, rather than protecting intellectual property from theft.
The DMCA explicitly includes “measures that prevent unauthorised access to a copyrighted work and measures that prevent unauthorised copying of a copyrighted work” (DMCA Summary, 1998). In an official report by the U.S. Copyright Office on the DMCA, it is mentioned, “the transmission of works interferes with the copyright owner's control over the intangible work” (U.S. Copyright Office Summary, 2002). ‘Access’ and ‘control’ of media seem to be the primary concerns of the law, and with this legal backing the industry can continue its crusade against piracy.

Persecution and retaliation
Although legally the RIAA can prosecute copyright violators, the rhetoric and methods it uses are full of fallacies and inadequacies, which limit their effectiveness. Legal action seems to be the most press-covered, if not the most RIAA-favoured form of retaliation. The campaign also includes music artists speaking out against piracy (What artists and song writers have to say, 2003), spamming P2P networks with messages threatening legal action if users continue to use such networks to get music, inseminating fake files onto file-sharing networks, copyproofing music, and if the right laws are passes, uploading programmes that would erase music files from your hard drive.