Under the guise of copyright protection, there are several companies who are issuing subpeonas and sometimes shutting down internet accounts of people they suspect of sharing copyrighted software and music. There is no need for a trial, or even a judge to approve the subpeona. This is allowed under a US law called the DMCA. The problem is, there is no requirement under this law for even miniscule checking before issuing a subpeona, and there is also no recourse for someone's inconvenience and financial compensation if they were targetted incorrectly by a subpeona. Needless to say, this makes the DMCA a very unfair law, open to widespread abuse. This has already been noted by several groups, most notably the free office suite OpenOffice.org and it's mirrors, who received threatening letters and emails because the word 'office' in their filenames was assumed to be pirated Microsoft Office. Also, a mirror of the Gentoo Linux distribution received a claim from the Entertainment Software Association that the file 'INFMapPacks123FULL-MAN.zip' was an illegal copy of PacMan, and they were in violation of the DMCA. In reality, this file is for a completely different, freely available game, Unreal Tournament Infiltration.
There are other examples. Ibiblio.org, essentially a "library" site, distributing free software and other public files, as well as linking to other similar sites received a cease and desist letter citing DMCA violations, because they have a file named "Junior-2.2-CD1.iso" on their server. This is a CD image file of a Linux distribution, but was assumed by the robot to be the 1994 Arnold Schwarzenegger film, "Junior".
Governments and the court system have not, until now, shown any signs of realizing that this law is inherently bad, poorly written, and is currently being abused by groups who have written bot programs that simply scour the internet for keywords in filenames, then automatically send off threatening emails to both the user in question, and sometimes to their internet provider, without even any human interaction or checking involved.
Well, if they can write bots to use our bandwidth and abuse our rights by sending subpeonas and emails for files which are not the violations that they claim they are, we can write bots to give them all the filenames they want, linked to garbage data files.
The results of my realization of this fact is DMCA Bot Killer. Basically, what it is, is a program you install on your webserver, simply to plug up DMCA-enforcing copyright bots with meaningless garbage.
At the very least, this will give the enforcement bots an overflow of junk data, making them useless as what they were intended. At best, some of the results of this program might reach political and court offices, showing them that this law is indeed flawed, and needs to be entirely rewritten, or scrapped completely.
To see what the program looks like when it runs, go to:
http://www.cbserviceslondon.com/warez/
Keep in mind that no file available through this page is a program file, and if you try to open one with Winzip, or some other archive program, it may even crash your computer. This is because the files available are simply random bytes, which just give some of the smarter bots something to sink their teeth into, rather than a file not found error.
To download the program, and support and documentation files:
http://www.cbserviceslondon.com/Anti-DMCA/dmca-bot-killer_1.0.2.tar.gz
Since 1.0.1, I've fixed a bug in the decoy file generation script, which, stupidly enough, I'd never actually tested. Duuh. That also made my setup of the program not work properly, too.
Read all the documentation for this program. There isn't much, but there could possibly be some potential legal issues, which I will not take responsibility for if you choose to run this program.
If you decide to use this program, keep checking here for updates. It automatically updates the filenames list that it uses, but it can't automatically update itself, yet. I'm going to add some new features to it, but I'd rather get it out there now, than wait until it does everything I want it to eventually.
If you want to add to the filenames it can use, go to:
http://www.cbserviceslondon.com/Anti-DMCA/update.html