The End of File Sharing? Doubtful.

The Inquirer, one of the best tech publications around, has an article about a Finnish company that claims to have a method of destroying peer-to-peer networks.

The company — Viralg — claims to have developed a “virtual algorithm” (as opposed to what?) that let it mix code into a file so that, if shared illegally, it will be useless.

Let’s give the company the benefit of the doubt. (It has BMG Finland as a customer and claims to have done good by that company.) Let’s say that if a music company used Viralg’s software, users who tried to share a song would find that song corrupted.

But let’s also be realistic. How long do they really think it will last?

The music has to be playable, obviously. That means that some piece of software has to decode what’s on the CD and pipe it out to a speaker. This isn’t like a secret code that’s meant to be read by a single recipient. A CD has to be playable by the world at large.

And that means it won’t be long before someone finds a way to crack Viralg’s software.

At this point, of course, only BMG Finland is using Viralg, so there’s no “market” for a crack. If it gets popular, it won’t be long before there’s a di-viralger out there.

Will it be an annoyance? Maybe. But then it will be built into CDex and other CD rippers — or into P2P clients — and that will be that.

(Amusingly, the text on Viralg’s site isn’t text — it’s a picture, a JPEG, which makes it impossible to copy and paste.

So either A) they’re trying to be clever by not allowing their marketing text to e copied, which is a foolish move as it only annoys journalists, or B) they don’t know how to format their site’s text in HTML.)