AIMster Uses Pig Latin Encryption to Defeat RIAA

wiggles writes "On Sunday night, Napster started filtering out copyrighted song names from its system. People have been proposing alternate ways of naming their music files so as to defeat such filtering, but no workable solution has emerged... until now! AIMster is offering a Pig Latin encoder that will encrypt your mp3 titles. They state that, under the DMCA, it would be illegal for the RIAA to reverse engineer their encoding scheme and try and filter the encrypted filenames from Napster. Beating the RIAA over the head with the DMCA is fun!"

Comments

Better than pig latin

[stinkydog]

The problem with 'pig latin' and the DMCA is that there is not copyrighted material to protect.

Then solution is to create a plugin that creates an encrypted header (rot13, rsa, enigma whatever) that contains copyrighted information as well as the song name. The header should look like this:

Metallica.MP3 (Aimster Business Plan: Use DMCA to bludgen RIAA as much as possible. Copyright 2001 Aimster Inc.)

Then, decypting the 'copyrighted' portion of the message creates the infringment. Then Aimster sues the RIAA. Even searching for RIAA material will create hundreds of violations. Unfortunatly the larger header will consume a bit of bandwidth :)

Re:Maybe we need open source laws....

[griffjon]

How about just open secrets?

The RIAA's 98 lobbying moneys

2000 donations by TV/movies/music combined. -- over 100% increase since the 96 presedential election. The entertainment industry is ranked 8 in amount contributed to elections across ALL industries.

Time Warner, Seagram and Sons, and Disney leading the pack.

You can also look up individual investors. Jack Valenti (MPAA) knows which side of the bread to butter--ALL of them, donating equally to Gore, Bush, and McCain. His congressional donations are...interesting.

Hilary Rosen actually has a decent donation list. She gave Hatch 1000, but then took it back (apparently) and donated a decent chuck to a pro-choice group.

Get the source code!!!

[Shoeboy]

Right here.
I'd paste it, but there's this lameness filter thing.
And yes, it will compile and run on any system.
--Shoeboy

No.

[mindstrm]

Under DMCA, reverse-engineering an effective copy-control mechanism is illegal. This is what the RIAA claims that DECSS does.

Simply breaking any old encryption is not, nor is it a copyright issue.

If that encryption is used for copy control.. then it is. This is not.

Pig Latin is not a copyright protection scheme

[inkydoo]

I'm sure I'll regret posting something that sounds like a defense of the RIAA, but the DMCA states that it is illegal to attempt to circumvent a copyright protecion mechanism. Inasmuch as Aimster's Pig Latin Encoder does not protect copyright, but just mangles filenames, it's not a copyright protection scheme. Thus, it is perfectly legal for the RIAA to begin using the encoder to request both the regular and pig-latinized versions of songs be removed from Napster.

Don't do this.

[cje]

Seriously.

This is just going to be more ammo for the RIAA. When Napster says to the court, "We're filtering out all copyrighted songs," the RIAA can just come back and say "No they're not; they're using Pig Latin now." This will likely result in Napster being shut down entirely, regardless of the promises that David Boies and the rest of the team make. The RIAA has always taken the position that Napster users will do whatever is necessary to trade music "illegally." They will claim that this just demonstrates their point.

This would be shameful since there really is a lot of music legally traded on Napster. And not just the indie stuff, either .. remember that bands like Phish and the Dead encourage their fans to tape their live performances and swap them with other fans. This is exactly the type of application that Napster was built for.

Now, I'm not siding with the RIAA here. They're a bunch of greedy bastards with little to no interest in the artists they claim to represent. But they're also a bunch of greedy bastards with a vast legal team and a bunch of sympathetic courts. The way things are right now, Napster can at least be salvaged for those of us who use it to trade "legal" material. So let's not goad the RIAA any more than we need to.

Re:Don't do this.

[astrashe]

I think you're 100% right.

Putting aside moral arguments on one side or another, pushing for global piracy networks doesn't make sense because it isn't winnable. I'm not saying that there won't always be file trading networks around -- just that they'll be shut down frequently, and that finding them will probably be more trouble than it's worth.

There was an interesting article on arstechnica awhile back. The writer said that Napster's offer to the recording industry would be rejected, because it created a distribution system that would be a level playing field for small companies as well as for big companies.

We need to shift our focus away from piracy, and towards the creation of an open and level electronic distribution system. If you want to screw the record industry, make it possible for bands to distribute and sell their own stuff efficiently without paying more than half to the record industry.

If your position is "I want everything to be free" your voice will be marginalized, and you won't count.

Re:Don't do this.

[cleetus]

This is just going to be more ammo for the RIAA. When Napster says to the court, "We're filtering out all copyrighted songs," the RIAA can just come back and say "No they're not; they're using Pig Latin now."

Uh, it's not Napster that's "using pig latin," it's cohort of Napster's users. While Napster could legitimately be faulted for a weak-ass filtering system, This also serves to highlight the difficulty of content verification in general, a problem with not only Napster, but all the rest of the P2P protocols for the most part. In fact, I would argue that this problem is just a cousin to those that plague NetNanny and the like, and that it's just not worth trying to effect any content management scheme through filtering.

This will likely result in Napster being shut down entirely

Good. I thank Mr. Fanning for the protocol and his nifty beta software, but, like all good networking protocols, development for this one is best left open source community. if Napster could provide a service to me beyond a moderately accurate catalogue of other people's mp3s, I might think about giving them my money. Until then, the opennaps at al. will be my choice for finding music.

Finally, I think that Aimster's citation of the DCMA as a defence for it's plugin is another reason to use it. Forcibly exposing the idiocy of this cancer of a law in such a public and widespread manner will in the end do the cause of fair use more good than harm.

cleetus

DCMA

[bitchx]

A careful reading of the DCMA would show that it's not going to protect you, sadly. The relevent passage reads:

`(A) to `circumvent a technological measure' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and

The problem, obviously, is that the encryption is not desgiend to protect a copyright holder, sadly enough.

It's not really pig latin, is it.

[Stavr0]

Real pig latin moves the first syllable to the end and appends 'ay'.
Tried looking up a FAQ or some other 'formal' definition but no ucklay.
---

Arslay, allcay ouryay officeay!

[ConceptJunkie]

The "key" is knowing how to arrange the letters. If you use ROT13, the key is 13. If you XOR everything by 42 the key is 42.

As silly as it is, I think the logic is valid. I personally prefer double or even quadruple ROT13 for maximum safety, but this is an interesting application of the "logic" used to create the DMCA.

There's no doubt that as more and more legislation is passed, we'll see more and more examples of ludicrous conslusions drawn from the tortured reasoning behind the legislation. Face it, our generally techno-illiterate legislatures know what they want to do, but they don't know how. Preventing people from ripping off the record companies is a reasonable goal (not that they have made any effort to keep the record companies from ripping off the consumers, but that's a slightly different issue). However, any legislation that is going to work, has to crafted by people who not only understand intimately the capabilities of the state-of-the-art, but have enough insight to predict what things might be like 10, 20 or more years down the road. The current legislation smacks of 19th century law (which isn't bad in itself) and seems to completely fail to understand 21st century technology (which is disasterous).

Re:ROT13

[Shoeboy]

Are you insane?
Sure encryption with ROT13 is fast, but decryption is a bitch.
Go ahead if you've got a quad xeon box, but on anything else, forget about it.
While encryption is an linear, decryption is an N^2 operation. Even with a processor capable of performing 10^12 operations/second you'd requre months to decrypt a gigabyte of text.
Admittedly, there's some academic research that indicates an N lg N solution for ROT13 decryption is possible, but nobody has built a working prototype.
And don't even get me started on the amount of CPU time a ROT26 algorithm requires. It's been proven to be an NP complete problem. Can you say "computationally unfeasable"?
I knew you could.
--Shoeboy

Re:Let the RIAA play.

[Squid]

And more importantly, when people start flocking to independent music that doesn't pull these kinds of shenanigans, sells music for reasonable prices, and generally doesn't treat the music-buying public as the enemy.

Re:Maybe we need open source laws....

[Squid]

If, for some reason the RIAA was violating the DMCA, how long do you think it would be before the same lawmakers who wrote the damn thing in the first place fixed the bug in the law to make AIMster the bad guys?

Orrin Hatch, one of the key players, has already dropped strong hints that he's not happy where the DMCA has gone. I suppose next time he should READ proposed legislation before he votes for it. But anyway.

And, just curious, but totally unrelated, of course, but how much has the RIAA and its members given to the Republican party in the past year?
How 'bout the Democrats?

Politicians are cheaper if you buy them in bulk.