NEW YORK (Reuters) - Programmers at the file-sharing firm Aimster said Tuesday they had found a disarmingly simple way for Napster (news - web sites) users to avoid recent restrictions imposed on the service by a federal judge: an encryption scheme based on Pig Latin.
Aimster, whose software lets users trade files by piggybacking on instant message networks, released the free Aimster Pig Encoder program Sunday on its Web site (http://www.aimster.com/pigencoder.phtml).
Under the terms of the injunction against Napster, the company must remove songs within three days of receiving notice by copyright holders. It's the file name, not the file itself, that is screened: Early reports suggested that copyrighted songs with slight misspellings in the file names were undisturbed.
With the Pig Encoder, ``'Music' becomes 'usicM,' 'Hello' becomes 'elloH,' the Aimster Web site says.
Aimster Chief Executive Officer Johnny Deep said that changing file names with encryption makes it illegal to systematically remove the altered files.
Deep said Napster might be able to remove encrypted file names one by one, but it couldn't ``reverse engineer'' the Pig Encoder to remove all songs that had been encrypted -- even though the encryption is so simple that anyone can deduce the real title of an encrypted file name.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (news - web sites) outlaws the reverse engineering of encryption schemes, Deep said. Encryption is defined as ``the scrambling and descrambling of information using mathematical formulas or algorithms.''
Deep said his company's encryption uses an algorithm, albeit a simple one, and thus qualifies for legal protection.
``It has that beautiful irony,'' Deep said, adding that the program took him and his team ``about six hours'' to complete.