Madonna Flips Off Internet Pirates

04/17/03 3:00pm

Go ahead and try to download any of Madonna’s new tracks from her new American Life album through services such as KaZaA. You’ll be greeted by a very friendly voice asking "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" And yes, the voice is provided by Madonna herself. The Madonna camp is clamping down on any online peer-to-peer piracy by flooding file-sharing networks with decoy files. American Life is Madonna’s eighth album and it’ll hits stores April 22. The first single, also titled "American Life," is all over the radio and a retooled video for the song debuted on the nation’s music stations yesterday. Madonna is used to the piracy racket. Leading up to her 2000 album Music, there were unfinished pieces of the title cut flooding services like Napster. To help ensure it wouldn’t happen this time around, journalists were not granted review copies of the new album.(On an unrelated note, movie critics are often barred from advance movie screenings when studios know the flick is a stinker. Just saying is all.) Despite her personal message to pirates, Madonna is at the forefront of the digital music trade game. Much of her repertoire is available to digital music services — but rather than letting fans download specific songs or "rent" her music, she only allows users to permanently buy entire albums. —Marta Bialecki