Grokster in file share scare

IN A BIT OF a daft anti-piracy stunt, the former file sharing outfit Grokster has been posting visitors IP addresses on its homepage.

Visitors to grokster.com are shown a snap shot of their IP address and are warned that the address has been recorded and their visit to the site was not anonymous. The move is no doubt to prove to the music and movie business, in which Grokster hopes to become a mover and a shaker, that the outfit is serious about piracy.

The downside is that it is being treated with hoots of laughter from the file sharing community. Those who know what their IP address looks like will not be spooked that Grokster has a server that can read it. They know that servers all know their IP address, it's part of that whole Internet thing.

Those who might be scared about their IP address being ‘recorded' will probably think it is something to do with the microwave and nothing to do with piracy. Already on some bulletin boards file sharers are having fun logging in famous IP addresses such as Google at the site so that they can be recorded and ruthlessly hunted down by the music industry lawyers.

The only problem is that we can't see any sending code in Grokster's page so chances are that nothing is being recorded by anyone. µ