By Gil Kaufman
Enquirer contributor

The adage "You get what you pay for" has taken on a new twist in the age of music downloading. What fans of such peer-to-peer (P2P) music-trading networks as KaZaA, Limewire and Grokster have been getting from artists such as Madonna and Linkin Park lately is a whole lot of nothing. Which is exactly what the artists and their record companies want.

But despite the best attempts of the major record labels and their technology partners, illegal music file trading continues to grow. The most recent estimates put the number of illegal music files traded per month at more than 200 million, which the music industry says has contributed to three consecutive years of declining sales.

Though Apple's recently launched song service, iTunes, saw a remarkable 1 million songs legally downloaded in its first week, fans have been slow to adapt en masse to the paid download system offered by Apple and such services as MusicNet, Pressplay and Rhapsody. Therefore, artists and their labels are pursuing an aggressive strategy, called "spoofing," to beat downloaders at their own game.

Essentially, spoofing is a bait-and-switch tactic. Traders who log onto P2P networks are duped into downloading files that look legitimate, but are cleverly concealed fakes aimed at frustrating, annoying and deceiving rogue traders.

Weeks before the No. 1 album's release, if you logged onto Limewire, for instance, to look for the songs on Madonna's American Life, you were likely to find a host of files that looked official, but featured a rude awakening as .the singer herself scolded downloaders obscenely. Other Madonna spoofs contained four minutes of silence or a repeated loop of the chorus from the "American Life" single. (A hacker had his revenge on Madonna, when her official site was hacked and the entire album was posted, along with a tart, equally obscene response to her message.)

Last month, spoofs of Linkin Park's recent single, "Somewhere I Belong," began appearing on P2P networks. Many of the bogus files featured the band speaking about the song in a loop, silence or, like Madonna's phony files, the song's chorus repeated over and over.

Both Madonna and Linkin Park are signed with Warner Bros.

A senior major label executive who requested anonymity said, "Everyone is engaging in peer-to-peer countermeasures of some kind." Spoofing is a perfectly legal and appropriate pursuit for the labels, according to the Recording Industry Association of America's Jonathan Lamy. Spoofing is part of a larger strategy to make the experience of an unauthorized network such as KaZaA as unpleasant as possible and lead users to legal services, he said.

Business of spoofing

A couple of New York companies are betting that as long as illegal file trading continues, there is a future in frustrating pirates.

"Our goal is to have a user click on our files and not a pirated file," said Marc Morganstern, CEO of spoof service Overpeer.

Morganstern, who is prevented from naming his clients due to confidentiality agreements, said his company blocks millions of attempted acts of piracy every month and is protecting more than 10,000 songs. Overpeer's goal is to make the downloading of pirated songs so frustrating that users have no choice but to go to legitimate sites to get them.

Morganstern said Overpeer technicians spend much of their time studying the shape and format of illegally traded files in order to disguise the spoofs well enough to trick savvy downloaders.

Covenant is taking a different approach: preaching to the converted. Or rather, converting them instead of preaching. Unlike its competitors, Covenant is open about its client list and hopes to turn the tide by luring pirate traders into distributing their spoofed files for them with the promise of cash and prizes.

"If you go to KaZaA right now, you can stream the first few seconds of a file and know it's a fake and abort it," said Jim Meier, Covenant CEO. "We don't want to just stop piracy, we want to promote artists."

Downloading for profit

So far, Covenant's only high-profile client is rock band 3 Doors Down. Versions of the band's hit "When I'm Gone" play for one minute before being interrupted with the pitch, "Earn thousands of dollars just for downloading this track, for more information go to protectedbycovenant.com."

So far, according to Meier, in its first full month more than 1,500 users have signed on to help distribute the company's files.

"Other companies are raising millions and setting up servers all around the world to send their files out," Meier said of his competition.

"That's costly. Why not have the pirates act as distributors of our files instead? This is a way for consumers to help save the music industry and make sure their favorite bands can keep releasing music."

The first payout to these legal pirates was Thursday. Covenant members received up to $200 for the 3 Doors Down tracks Covenant has been protecting.

In addition to spoofing, The New York Times reported recently that the music industry is financing research on even more aggressive countermeasures, including software that redirects users, scans individual hard drives for illegal files and deletes them or freezes computers for up to several hours.

The legality of such measures remains a matter for debate.