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Mission: Infiltrate the P2P Network
prostoalex writes "Wired News unveils the secrecy behind Overpeer, the company whose mission is to infiltrate peer-to-peer networks with low-quality audio and video files, or corrupted chunks of data which carry the same name and have the same size as originals. Apparently OverPeer even managed to procure a USPTO patent on (a) producing an advertising digital music file by deteriorating or damaging a sound quality of an original music file of a record of a cooperating record corporation; and (b) distributing the advertising digital music file through the communication network."
How many people and companies that are willing to make money by being scum...worse still that the patent office is willing to grant them a patent on being a scum. P2P is good for the world, why the hell can't people just get over it and let it be.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
On the one hand, this sounds perfectly fair. After all, they are taking steps to prevent folks from stealing intellectual property.
On the other hand, it seems like it's easily bypassed -- some authority should keep a central server with a list of known good files and some sort of hash associated with each file. If the file is distributed in pieces, there could be a hash for each piece.
Finally, isn't the entertainment industry's time is better spent developing a functioning revenue model? People want music online, and they won't pay a lot. Sorry, the genie is out of the bottle -- get a real revenue model -- or someone else will, and they'll kick your butts. All the incredibly crappy and formulaic new "music" isn't helping much, either.
This is a perfectly valid attempt by the record companies to fight for their survival. In fact, I applaud it because, for once, they are not resorting to the courts or the coercive power of the state to crush the "criminals" who share music. Instead, they are playing a technological game in our arena, on our own turf. This is simply a variation of the way a.s.t used to invade newsgroups by flooding the channel with bogus trolls.
And since they are playing our game, we can strike back the same way. We can institute the equivalent of killfiles (if we know the IP of these bogus sharers), or, even better, we can add audio fingerprinting to P2P networks to filter out the bogus files. That sounds like a good open source project.
So long as they try to play this game with us, they can't win.
Aren't they illegally distributing these copyrighted content without permission, which is still criminal regardless if it is of low quality?
Or do they have the copyright owner's permission (i.e. licensed), in which case it is legal to download those recordings?
- They assume all users are guilty of piracy, and will proceed with that in mind
- Since all users pirate works(see above point), they release copy-protected works that do not work according to standards...other than the infamous "neener-neener, you can't copy this" standard
- Through their extensive lobbying efforts, they're seeking to remove what little legal rights we had to items purchased. (e.g. When I buy a gallon of milk. I have to make sure there's no EULA. Of course, I can't see me taking the time to reverse engineer it)
- Now they're actively trying to poison P2P networks
I would like to know when this is all going to come to a head, or is it going to be continue to continue spiralling until someone/something/group of someones intervenes. Perhaps it will stop when the majority of their user base becomes so alienated that purchasing a copy (licence) of a work is viewed as a faux pas.If they'd work on developing a better digital delivery system (I don't see the current methods being very viable), perhaps that would do something to curb piracy
Sorry. The Laziness of the industry to not find a way for you to use the music conveniently trumps your own laziness because they have all the bucks and the lawyers, and they also extract more profit, at least in the short term, by branding your usage piracy.
Ever notice that once a file like these spread on a p2p some people labled them to say they have loops. Then once a real mp3 shows up people start naming them "Real" or "No Loops."
If you want to make sure something is good, get your mp3s higher then 128kbps. The record companys always release "loppers" at 128 or less so people using origanal Kazaa can download it.
Get Kazaa Lite or get on IRC and enjoy.
...and it's called Google!
Just think about how google works, I look for "slashdot" and what comes up in the first page of results? Now think why, it's because loads of other people have been there before me and they thought that www.slashdot.org was exactly what they were looking for.
now apply this to p2p, someone posts crap, I download it, it's crap, I delete it, problem solved, the file doesn't distribute because I don't share it, if nobody wants a file then it gets disregarded. okay so it won't be so effective against less popular music, but that's not the kind they're likely to try and propagate.
This kind of this has some crossover with the network theory post from today (yesterday?). If you're interested in P2P I'd recommend reading about it.
but the client supplies the checksum. There's nothing to stop a client from sending a phony checksum.
What if the content were divided into blocks. Each block has its own hash. As you are downloading the content, each block can be checked. As soon as you encounter a corrupted block, you blacklist that node.
Really a trust based ratings system is going to have to be established. But in a way that it totally decentralized.
This can be extended such that you download different blocks of a file from different nodes at the same time, thus getting the file sooner.
In fact, what would happen if no single node had a complete file? This might not absolve you from copyright infringement though. So suppose that in order to form each block of the file, you actually had to download multiple blocks by their hash number, and XOR them together. Yes, it might take 3 times the bandwidth to download a file, but not necessarily 3 times as long in real time on a broadband connection.
Now if Joe offers block 0x2857389298371987578392 of bytes that must be XOR'ed with two other blocks in order to produce the first block of the file, is Joe guilty of copyright infringement? But that same block might also be needed to reconstruct The Constitution of the United States, or the Bible or Moby Dick.
The process of obtaining a file would be to first obtain a trusted list of the block numbers you need to obtain. Then you download those many blocks over the P2P system. The blocks you obtain may come from many different nodes. You just recombine them by mixing and adding water.
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
I don't know about other P2P programs, but LimeWire has told me on many occasions that it has detected file corruption and asks if I'd like to continue to download. I don't know the process it uses, but it is probably some MD5-type checking. For audio files, it indicates the bitrate so I only download files that specifically indicate they have at least a 128 bitrate.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
UNLESS OF COURSE,THEY HAVE A WAY THEY CAN TELL WHAT FILES THEY'VE TOUCHED ALREADY....hmmmm
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
This is probably true but then another issue comes up in regards to collecting / licensing societies (organizations such as BMI, Harry Fox, SOCAN, etc...) Some of these societies (one example is GEMA, the German all-encompassing one, and also the UK one to a degree) have contracts which take away certain rights of the copyright holders. That is, they contain a clause that forbids you from negotiating new contracts, or severely limit the options you have in the new contract. If someone is knowingly collecting and/or distributing a sound file for a band (even if severely deteriorated, but still recognizable) then they should also be paying mechanical/performance licensing royalties to the respective organizations. Further to that they may have additional contracts with Engineers and Producers, and even band members, that dictate a strict quality approval process for any release music. Producing lower quality files may also break such contracts (though I suspect most contracts are worded in such a way that the label can do what they want in this regards).* The mileage of these contract limitations varies from nation to nation, and the societies in Canada and the USA pretty much allow whatever, but a lot of popular artists have song copyrights controlled by European societies that have more strict rules. *If rather they are distributing sequences of noise we should simply ask the death industrial and japanese noise band to start looking for copyright violations of their music. :)
And this hash is provided by who ?
If the client provides then a fake hash has to be returned, and then send the bad file.
You can never trust the client. That seems to be one of the problems with P2P. The client is also the server. If you can't trust the client then you can't trust the server.
You'll need to have some type of cryptographic signature so that certain keys can be signed and trusted. Of course then you lose anonymity because even though you can't determine who has a key easily you can determine which files have been signed by the same key.
Then once you find the person who owns that key, you have a long list of copyrighed material that that person has signed.
>>Hmmmm. Maybe this guy has the ultimate scam. As file traders find new ways around what he does, he can sell new methods to his clients . . .
A similar business model works great for antivirus software companies.....! Oops! Did I say that outloud?
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
Bandwidth's expensive. If we could at least come up with a system for users to have to actively opt to share each file after they have played them and can verify its quality -- instead of downloading bad files, not deleting, and thus sharing them -- that would slow the spreading of these files. Opting-in would, of course, slow down the general proliferation of good and bad files and would make it more difficult to find any files as fewer would share users, but I think it's a good trade-off.
That would leave the record industry cops with a lot more uploading to do. 700+MB is a lot of bits to move, and they have to do it every single time a user initiates a transfer. Are the odds that that user (assuming he only shares it if it's good and does not spread bad files) would go out and buy the movie/CD instead of either continuing to try to find a valid file, or simply giving up altogether? I highly doubt it.
Download it here. Note that it has no search feature. You'll need to link it from 'freesites'. Visit the site for more details.
I thought in ourder to get a patent somethign ahs to be *useful* and *new*. I donno which dumbass was asleep at the wheel at the USTPO, but the intentional damage of something seems neither useful nor new to me.
On the back of my "Is the RIAA liable to hacking charges" discussion, do sysadmins have any legal ground against this company if a user downloads stuff off a P2P network beliving it's real, but then realises 'that was a waste of time and bandwidth'. I wonder what the IP backbone providers will think of this?
Then again, there are believed to be some weaknesses in MD5, making this a little bit easier.
TANSTAAFI: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free iPod.
I thought the DMCA specifically disallows the distribution of programs that are designed to hinder or sabotage the functioning of another program?
Since there is no way to tell that by downloading bonjovi-livingonaprayer.mp3 I'm not actually getting a crappy recording of my grandpa in the shower in the first place, specifically writing software to categorically sabotage specific filenames is essentially illegal isn't it? Or is this another case of "my lawyer is bigger than your lawyer" where the larger companies can afford to recklessly abuse the laws that they bought without the book being thrown at them?
All in all, I think that if this is the case it would be a delicious irony.
Have you heard of intermittent reinforcement? In behavioral terms, when you have a mouse pressing a button to get a treat, the way to keep him pressing the bar time after time even when he is not hungry is to only give him a reward once in a while. Never give a reward, he stops pushing. Always give a reward, and they stop when they are full. Give them a reward once in a while, they will keep pressing even after they are full.
This is the addiction principle slot machines and gambling operates on. By making it harder to download a good copy of a song, many people are just going to sit there and download song after song, just because they become habituated to it, because they know they might not be able to get the song later.
Viola - P2P addiction, and much higher participation rates among people on the P2P networks. Look it up if you don't believe me. Evercrack anyone?
Actually I have first hand experience of this, sometime in the not to distant past, I downloaded a song from the up and coming Dare Devil Movie called "bring me to life." Parts of the song were missing with weird distortion where music should be. Any copy that you could get of this song was the same. It was only recently that I actually found a decnt working copy. If this isn't proof, it is at least some indirect confirmation.