Bootleggers, download them tapes

A company hired by record companies to pollute file-sharing networks with "spoof" audio and video files has just gone out of business. Overpeer was one of the first companies contracted by the music and movie industries to foul up peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa by flooding them with phony files. The logic was that the constant, overwhelming amount of spoof files would bring down the networks and discourage users from bothering to download anything. All it really did, however, was drive dowloaders to more sophisticated, and harder to track, BitTorrent networks, where fake files like Overpeer's practically never show up. Hence, the going-out-of-biz sign. (P.S. When Overpeer logged on in 2003, there were an estimated 3 million downloaders on the p2p networks-- today it's 10 million.)