The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is rabidly pursuing users who share content via torrent networks but it seems that porn is too hard to resist.

As it turns out, someone was seeding about a dozen or so instances of adult content video using an IP address originating from the RIAA itself.

The folks over at Torrent Freak like to monitor certain notorious digital pirate venues using ScanEye, a BitTorrent tracking platform. While this task may be uneventful most of the time, things turned interesting when the folks over at Torrent Freak found the event in question.

"With a reputation of taking harsh measures against unauthorized file-sharing, the RIAA has made quite a few enemies over the years," notes Torrent Freak. "How ironic is that the RIAA website now appears to be seeding more than a dozen pirated porn videos? Or could it be that someone is trying to nail the RIAA in a clever way?"

"During our routine searches the RIAA suddenly turned up in the results. At first glance it appeared that the music group was sharing a dozen, mostly German, adult video clips. A peculiar finding to say the least," Torrent Freak further explains. "A closer inspection of the data revealed that the IP-address listed does indeed belong to the RIAA. More precisely, it's the IP of the RIAA website.

Most of those videos were apparently made available in April, with a few posted just a couple of weeks ago. As the IP address was specifically pointing to the RIAA website, it could originate from a webseed added to the torrent files, Torrent Freak points out. This way, even if the files are not hosted on the website, they would still point to it and make it look like the RIAA is sharing copyrighted porn videos.

The most likely scenario is that someone was trying to frame the RIAA for seeding porn either to get the Association in trouble or to prove some sort of point. This theory makes even more sense considering that the EyeScan platform found that none of the 16 video files were ever downloaded. This likely means the files were not actually hosted where they were alleged to be.

While some may get a few giggles out of this whole RIAA porn story, the incident highlights a serious issue: any individual could spoof someone else's IP address via the so-called webseed method, making it look like than person or institution is sharing copyrighter content. This means that an innocent person could potentially go down for copyright infringement if someone doesn't look into the matter thoroughly.