What might be the low down dirtiest trick on the web to date is what can be seen happening right now in the file trading world of Kazaa when trying to get the latest album from Eminem, "The Eminem Show".

So far, from several hundred MP3s that I have downloaded, only a handful have been complete and original real copies of the songs. The rest are loops, and fake copies that have obviously been generated by Eminem's record label or an affiliate thereof.

I found one particular Kazaa user that I believe is directly apart of the scam taking place. Here's why:

1) The user had super high bandwidth... I was getting over 100 KB/second... which is pretty good.

2) The user had about 7 copies of every track on the CD, with a filename pattern consistent for every track.

3) Every MP3 available from this user was jacked... Some are just a small portion of the song looping over and over (professional quality)... others, and this is the worst, are the whole song with no loops, but you get 5 seconds of the song with sound, then 10 seconds of dead silence, then 5 seconds of sound again, this pattern repeats until the end of the tracks... Others have just the first 5 seconds normal, and then the rest of the entire file is dead silence.

The 3rd item from my above list is a dead giveaway that this is a scam to get 1000's upon 1000's of fake copies of the songs out on the net so people can't filter the real stuff out. This tactic will even have a greater impact when combined with item 2 on my list, because these fake songs have so many variations in the filenames, it's going to be even harder for users to filter these out.

It might be nice with programs like Kazaa to vote against users, so their files won't show up in search results, or are listed with a different color in the results.

A somewhat related tactic is when a small band will label an MP3 of their song as a popular band, this way they are exposed to a wide audience who hopefully likes what they hear and don't delete the song, but instead goes and downloads more.

While I think these tactics are dirty and low... they are smart. And I mildly support them. I like the idea of small bands trying to get noticed... and I even like the artist/label trying to screw the file sharing communnity by exploiting the method files are shared.

However, I in no way support the people that label pornography videos as popular artist videos. It is horrific to me that I can download a video labeled as Busta Rhymes and end up with a lame porn video. It doesn't make sense to me, with porn as huge as it is on-line, why would anyone think that it would be useful to push the material to people looking for unrelated files.