Will the real IFPI please stand up?

The art of a proper online hoodwink is an elaborate enterprise. (Just look at all the time and energy phishing scammers put into their fake websites.) But some downloading enthusiasts have managed to score as much success with a rather low-tech approach -- a simple domain squatting ruse that has allegedly managed to fool the music industry's leading lobbying organisation into coughing up valuable legal documents to its crafty nemesis. Here's how it happened:

Earlier this year, a group calling itself IFPI, or International Federation of Pirates Interests, registered IFPI.com and built a garish site to go along with it. (The site, a lone, static page with links to its friends at Piratebay.org and Kopimi.com, once belonged to the other IFPI, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. The music industry body let its registration of IFPI.com lapse and, according to the Whois directory, a Swede by the name of Peter Kopimi swooped in and registered it. The music industry group is now aiming to wrestle it back, via a WIPO domain name arbitration hearing that could come up shortly.

The shortlived hijack though has already proved effective. According to TorrentFreak, the IFP has twice now e-mailed internal memos -- one that included legal strategy against The Pirate Bay -- to an IFPI.com mail server, and thus straight to The Pirate Bay. Here's how TorrentFreak explains the mix-up:

Several people were wondering how this email leaked, and rumors about hacked mail servers started to circulate. It now now becomes clear how the email leaked - and there is not much hacking involved - it seems that some of their members were still sending emails to xxx@ifpi.com addresses - not that smart.

Oops.

Comments

[D Cage]

Has anyone costed out the fraudulent, or at best abuse of power, copyright charges consumers have had to pay because of media changes. I have got four different media of some recordings but there is no refund mechanism by the music industry for defunct technologies.

Perhaps it is time consumers had a group action against the music industry to reclaim this money.
I am sure it grossly exceeds the value of personal copying.