What do adult Internet subscription sites and Napster have in common? They’re both vulnerable to account piggybacking. London users of the pay-to-play online music store are reportedly sharing their passwords in order to let others get into Napster without paying the monthly rate for the service. The Register reported April 10 that an unidentified young Napster user told them she “and some of her student pals” share a Napster account to cut the cost of paying to play.
For adult Internet companies like Titan Media, however, such practices are nothing new. But they’ve learned to remedy the problem by closely monitoring their sites’ usage at all times. “If there’s a spike in the use for a particular name and password we can pretty much tell if it’s been compromised,” Titan legal counsel Gill Sperlein told AVNOnline.com. “And we’ll contact the person that name and password is issued to. In some cases they were careless with it; in other situations they may have given it to friends. So usually the first time we’ll just tell them.”
When it comes to dealing with this issue, the online pay-for play music industry—once the wild west of music pirating—is just catching up with its adult peers. “Apparently it's a relatively common practice, at least among these London youngsters, for one person to pay for the 9.95-pounds-per-month Napster account and then to distribute the user name and password among several others—in exchange for favours and drinks,” the publication said. “Our contact couldn't remember exactly how many people she'd given the details to, but stated that she knew for certain at least two other people who used her account on a regular basis.”
The Register cited another online publication, MusicAlly, which ran a number of tests showing it was possible to download and stream simultaneously from four separate computers on two separate online connections for a considerable amount of time.
“Our findings so far suggest this situation is the same whether we use a trial account, a paid-for credit card account, or the £14.95 Napster To Go service,” MusicAlly noted. “By comparison, several other Internet subscription services, including Real's Rhapsody, log the first user out automatically if a second user logs in using the same user name and password.”
Other similar online stores bump the actual account holder offline if another user logs in with the same user name and password.
"[You] cannot maintain two accounts simultaneously–if you log into the same account on another machine, the previous user will be logged out within five minutes," Napster said in a statement tied to the problem. “Our license agreements allow people to access the service via a single account on three PCs, but we certainly do not allow users to share/log onto an account simultaneously.”
The Register and MusicAlly refuted that argument, saying their tests belie the claim, “and we have the earache from listening to music coming from three sets of computer speakers simultaneously to prove it.” The two publications said it may not yet be a widespread phenomenon but password sharing could prove detrimental to both online stores and rights holders.
Sperlein said webmasters who don’t monitor their subscription usage closely would be more likely to have even a small problem with password sharing.
“In this electronic age, people that own content have to be ever vigilant,” he said. “Every time there’s a new technology, there’s people trying to find ways around it and share for free. We’re pretty good about it. We hope other content owners and producers will be as well.”
