Shamelessly excerpted from politech list:
From "Paul \"Evil Genius\" Music" Fri Jul 6 02:45:31 2018 From: "Paul \"Evil Genius\" Music" To: "DeClan" Date: Sat, 17 May 2003 00:24:49 -0500
http://www.kuro5hin.org/print/2003/5/16/163447/493 RIAA Pit of Confusion (Culture) By salimfadhley Fri May 16th, 2003 at 10:13:06 PM EST After reading about the RIAA threatening to sue yet another innocent archive operator, I decided to take some direct action: It occurred to me that the RIAA keep falsely accusing others of piracy because they put their faith in an unintelligent spider - a fact which can be simply exploited to make my servers into an RIAA no-go-zone... Whilst spidering is nothing to worry about (and only to be expected on a public site), the way the association fires off legal threats based on this spider results alone seems wrong. Since this spider does not actually look at the whole title of the file, or even it's content, I figured I could have some fun at their expense: What if I could write a `tarpit' script that could create a large number of interlinked automatically generated web sites. If their spider tried to scan my server it would be fooled into thinking that it had found a treasure trove of MP3 sites. Anybody who took the time to look at the site could see that the site contains no pirate content at all. How might the RIAA react to such a thing? <snip>