Music swapping sites like LimeWire can lead to ruined hard drives
Thousands of kids and adults in St. Charles Parish are breaking the law every time they download music using free sites like LimeWire and BearShare.
Not only is it illegal, Dean Swanson, of Getgo/Gator Systems, says it’s ruining hard drives one downloaded song at a time.
“Because you have created a direct and secure link to a specific directory on your hard drive, you can unintentionally download any virus or spyware in existence,” Swanson said. “Damage can be as mild as a slight slowdown of your computer or as severe as complete loss of the motherboard and/or hard drive of a computer.”
In October 2007, one of the first penalties was set for someone who used a free site to download songs.
A Minnesota woman named Jamie Thomas was sued by the Recording Industry Association of America for making available 1,702 songs for free over the Internet.
A federal jury sided with the RIAA and returned a verdict of $222,000 that Thomas must pay for downloading the free songs off of the Internet.
“It must be stated that downloads of MP3 songs by and of themselves are simply illegal if not from a legitimate source,” Swanson said. “The downloads and the programs that share them are not problematic.”
Swanson says the secure connection bypasses Internet security software, which allows all kinds of garbage to be downloaded without the user’s consent.
“Peer to peer programs are most like an adaptation of VPN technology in which a secure network path is created over the Internet from your hard drive on your computer to another hard drive on another server,” he said. “The problems crop up when people try and download illegal copies of MP3 songs off of other people’s PCs or servers.”
Swanson says the owner of that server now has a direct link to the hard drive’s download directory that bypasses all security software installed on a resident’s computer.
“When you download free songs, you have virtually no idea of what you’re connecting it up to but another directory with some songs listed,” he said. “The downloader can have no idea what else is on the other drive.”
Swanson says it’s not uncommon for hackers and other malcontents to have a field day injecting their viruses into these sites using free music downloads.
“Once viruses of either type gets onto a user’s PC, formatting the hard drive and removing all programming from a PC before reloading it back on in a secure fashion is usually the cheapest means of recovery from an infection,” he said. “That can range from nothing but time and embarrassment in having to reload your PC to the cost of a new one.”
Swanson says a customer with these types of computer problems can generally look at spending between $100 to $300 in recovering and restoring their computer.
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