Mods, don’t know if this belongs in GQ (or even the Pit eventually), but since it’s about music and movies and whatnot…
I, um, have a, ah, friend, yeah that’s it, and he tells me that when he’s downloading music or movie files from Kazaa, they’re often misnamed. What possible benefit could there be for doing this?
Two possibilities:
The RIAA is planting misnamed mp3s to frustrate downloaders.
People are really, really dumb.
I’d lean towards the second myself.
It’s just stupidity, is my guess. Someone is sees a parody song, and they have to label it “Weird Al”, because they think he’s the only person in all of history who ever did a parody of a popular song.
Also, they are mistaken about who does a particular song. They download “Stuck In The Middle” by Stealer’s Wheel, and since they never heard of Stealer’s Wheel, and can’t imagine an actual song by somebody they never heard of before, they rename the file to “Bob Dylan” cause it kinda sounds like him, or “Steve Miller” or “Grateful Dead” for some reason.
[Jon Lovitz]
Yeah, that’s the ticket!
[/Jon Lovitz]
The misnaming is often deliberately done to frustrate RIAA investigators from finding these files. Of course, that makes it harder for other Kazaa users to find them, too. But such is life.
I figure it’s done by those not smart enough to write a virus, but still want to piss people off.
Same with Save Ferris. They will always, always be No Doubt.
Well there are a number of unintentionally misnamed songs, but the majority are put forth by anti-piracy advocates. It is particularly prevalent in computer games.
S’got nothing to do with smarts. I still can’t figure out which of them is doing that live cover of Ob-la-di.
What would be easier to remember, and gets more hits:
“Bullets with Butterfly Wings”
or
“Rat in a Cage”
Uhh, no offense, Kid C, but that sounds dumb. 
Why would anti-piracy advocates post real music, but misidentify/misspell it? That in no way would diminish or hinder a kid from going out and downloading all of the available, correctly attributed and spelled content. What anti-piracy advocates (firms hired by labels and RIAA) DO do is post junk files, incomplete songs, 10-second repeated loops, etc., sometimes by the thousands. That makes it difficult to freely download - if the first 7 files you found of “Crazy In Love” were all messed up, you might not try for the 8th.
I think the reasons for the mistakes are, in decreasing order of likelihood:
These two reasons are the correct ones - especially the first one mentioned here. It goes for all public ‘communities’ where ‘not-so-legal’ files are available/shared. As RIAA/MPAA/etc. folks are searching the networks for copyrighted material, it’s renamed to make it harder to find for them, naturally.
The second reason would be more prominent in P2P communities where there’s a minimum share quantity to be able to join, but to free up your own bandwidth you change the filenames so no one finds anything worth downloading from you.
But that’s what a misnamed song is: a junk file. It’s just easier to copy an existing song 100 times and rename it rather than make a junk file or edit the real song to loop. As for computer games, I know that the renaming of files is to screw over pirates. They will often include messages saying so in the download itself.
The art of renaming files may be a holdover from the Final Days of Napster when they were filtering out copyrighted material, so anything named “Metallica” would be blocked but “Metalikkka” might not. Audiogalaxy did this too – I remember trying several different permutations of the name “Deaf Leopard” before finding the demos I was looking for. 
So is it the RIAA who’s putting out mp3s that play for about 20 seconds and then go, “SSSSKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH” and make you nearly leap out of your chair?
Yep.
I fail utterly to see the logic here. Misnaming files doesn’t “screw over pirates,” it helps them, because it gives them multiple methods to search for the same file. If someone was looking to “screw over pirates” looking for, say, Rollercoaster Tycoon, why would they put a 100% correct, working copy of the game on a P2P network in the first place, correct name or not?
I can see why someone looking hinder pirates would want to put fake files on the internet – ha ha, you spent all this time downloading Rollercoaster Tycoon and instead got a dummy executable – but don’t see how simply changing the filename screws over anyone. And it seems to me that if you’re going to put a fake file on the P2P network, you’d want to correctly name it, so as to maximize the number of potential pirates you piss off.
I can see changing the filename as a boon to pirates, by giving them a way to search for a file without using phrases likely to hit a content filter (like misnaming Metallica files after Napster started filtering those searches out)
But I’d guess stupidity and typos when renaming files are the chief culprit.
Dude, try finding Christmas music that is what it says it is. In what universe do The Three Tenors equal The Backstreet Boys?
That’s just it. They don’t put a working copy of Rollercoaster Tycoon on the network. They’ll take any old large exe file and name it Rollercoaster Tycoon. Half the real-time strategy titles out there are really Age of Empires. NHL2000 is commonly used as a fake file for all kinds of games. Sometimes there is no real version of a game on the network, just fakes to frustrate pirates. Sure many people put up real files, but a pirate has to either download them all or figure out which is the right one. It takes a looonngggg time to download these games so getting a fake is particularly frustrating (I would imagine). This practice is particularly prevalent when a game is first release. One day after release there will be 5 huge files named after the new game.