The practice is called spoofing and it's being used by major record labels to battle Internet piracy.

Thousands of fake songs from popular artists such as Bryan Adams, India Arie, Blink-182, and Mary J. Blige have begun to pop up on the Internet's hugely popular file-sharing services.

When these seemingly innocent looking songs are downloaded and listened to, all that's heard is the sound of silence. In some cases, the song plays fine for about 20 seconds before the chorus loops endlessly. The files are bogus, placed on the Internet to foil would-be music pirates.

The recording industry has contracted a stealth-mode company called Overpeer to flood the Internet's file-swaping networks -- also referred to as peer-to-peer (P2P) networks.

The idea is to make music trading -- an illegal but incredibly popular practice with more than 60 million users worldwide -- so annoying that users will stop.

"It's gotten real, real, real severe," Darrell Smith, chief technical officer of StreamCast Networks, which runs the hugely popular trading service Morpheus, told the a U.S. technology newspaper.

Spoofing is being done with the full permission of the record companies, specifically Interscope and Universal Music.

"Several of the record labels are doing it with every release," one record executive told the San Jose Mercury News, based in Silicon Valley.

"We're not using any of this with any kind of promotion or marketing in mind. We're doing this simply because we believe people are stealing our stuff and we want to stymie the stealing."

In the past, record companies have relied on court orders and expensive lawyers to shutter the trading of their wares, which the music industry blames for a downturn in CD sales.

The legal tactic worked well with Napster, the California-based company that first launched the file-trading movement.

At its peak, Napster had more than 70 million users, each swapping songs quickly, easily and for free. With Napster, an entire CD that would normally cost $18 in the store could be downloaded for free in less than 15 minutes with a high-speed Internet connection.

A court order ended all that and now few users, if any, still have the Napster application installed on their computers.

However, today's breed of file-sharing services have taken note of Napster's problems. Services such as Gnutella, Grokster, iMesh, Morpheus and others are not centralized and don't have a head office to shut down.

In some cases, such as with Gnutella, there aren't even executives to haul into court. That makes fighting piracy a whole lot tougher. Enter the spoofing idea.

Overpeer's mission appears to be aimed at foiling the peer-to-peer movement by poisoning the networks with so much bogus music, that irritated users will simply go away and buy the music instead.

Overpeer is an interesting firm. Backed by SK Industries, the second-largest corporation in Korea, CEO Marc Morgenstern used to be a vice-president at The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), the big American performing rights organization.

Morgenstern's father has been on the ASCAP board of directors for decades.

"We offer an effective solution that is a potent marketing engine, and a powerful anti-piracy weapon," Overpeer says on its website. "By penetrating P2P networks . . . our solution can use the power of P2P against abusers, instead turning software pirates into customers."

A group of Internet file traders surveyed by CTV.ca shows users are a little less enthusiastic about the idea.

"You don't really think that this is going to work do you?" says a file-trader known only by the online alias Twitter.

"People will simply be annoyed and have to share more. Someone is going to have to pay for the increased bandwidth usage and it's not Universal Music. So Universal is stealing from cable operators. It's like spam, but they don't even hope to make money off it."

Twitter is one among thousands of users that argue the recording industry still doesn't get it.

"This disgusts me," says another music trader known only by the online name Warmth.

"There's nothing more annoying than finding a brand new album in a high quality bitrate and then finding out it's nothing but a loop of two seconds."

Others argue the spoofing practice is akin to computer hacking using a technique called denial of service (DoS) in which a computer network is flooded with so much useless information that the computer or network becomes useless.

The recording industry, meanwhile, remains unfazed by all of the attention its latest tactic is receiving. Label executives said they are evaluating other countermeasures that would scramble music search queries or make music files download so slowly, few would bother to retrieve them.

Online music trader Kirruth sums it up this way: "They're fighting technology with technology -- fair enough."