A method and article of manufacture to inhibit automated search engines in
locating and retrieving proprietary media by employing cooperative
scanning, manufacturing, sharing and supervisory control software
processing components to replicate, and make available for sharing, decoy
media in such numbers to render media search engines ineffectual. The
invention's scanning processing component searches media sharing network
communities for illegally shared proprietary media and its manufacturing
processing component constructs decoy media files mimicking identified
proprietary media. The invention's share processing component associates
media sharing network communities with shared media sets containing decoy
media files, and its supervisory control processing component provides for
system initialization and checking subprocesses which establish initial
configurations, and reactive behavior of the invention in addition to
monitoring the effectiveness of a decoy ratio interactively specified by a
user of the invention.
