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Napster, Audio Fingerprinting, and the Future of P2P
mjmalone writes "Napster founder Sean Fanning is poised for a comeback, seems the now 22 year old Fanning has developed technology which creates "audio fingerprinting" of individual tracks and compares them against fingerprints in his firm's database to determine legality. A fee may be set and collected on a copyrighted track by its rightful owner. Fanning is actively recruiting industry support as well as pushing the idea to p2p services such as kazaa and grokster. " This isn't exactly new technology, but it's still interesting to see what Fanning is up to these days besides movie cameos.
Umm no.
This is not going to make P2P "legit".
This is going to further destroy legit and non infringing usage of P2P. Now, RIAA will still say "p2p has no purpose other than piracy ban it"! And if people start paying for music from these services, guess what LEGITIMATE users of p2p suffer.
Sean Fanning did not invent P2P. Before napster we used to have IRC/DCC bots etc. and web search pages. Sean Fanning made downloading mp3's easier for the masses because of his windows client that automagically shared files you had downloaded. He's great but he's no God.
You have to give him credit. At least someone out there is actually trying to make p2p legit
P2P is, has, was, and always will be legit. It doesn't need support, approval, or acknoledgment.
If we insist on clinging to greed, laziness, and possession as a way of life....there's no reason to question building tools which vastly fascilitate theivery.
The RIAA has been stealing millions a year while defending a fascade of legitimate service. In fact, this is what capitalism has become in this country. When companies like Microsoft are hailed as success stories, there's no reason to claim otherwise.
So screw all of you because whether you like it or not, all your base are belong to P2P. Time to fucking grow up.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
What good is this going to do?
I thought the whole filesharing problem comes from people wanting to download music for free instead of paying for it. IMHO, the problem is not that there is trouble IDENTIFYING copyrighted songs, it's that it's hard to get people to PAY for them.
Imagine this -- you have a network that identifies what you try to upload, and if it determines that the file is copyrighted, it charges you a fee. What do you do? Well, what did millions of people do when Napster tried to limit what you could share? Simple: They go to other, freer networks and leave the more limited one in the dust, awaiting bankruptcy.
The technology of audio fingerprinting can be very cool when used in other ways... like, perhaps, a more forgiving method (compared to checksums) to make sure a song is the real deal. Or, like some company is doing, enabling cell phone callers to call in with a song playing in the background and have a database identify the song name for them.
Unfortunately, I fail to see how this technology will discourage people from sharing files. We already KNOW which songs are copyrighted. It's just a matter of convincing people to pay for them. To accomplish that, I believe there needs to either be some way to discourage users from not paying (such as the RIAA's legal actions) or, preferably, some incentives to make people WANT to buy legal music (supporting your artists, ease of use/ease of finding the right song, download speed, song quality, etc., but all at a reasonable price).
Crippling filesharing networks to prevent sharing is a stupid, ineffective solution. As history has shown, people will simply use other networks. Unless the RIAA can completely crack down on and close ALL the networks, nothing will change. If there is just ONE free network, it's the one people will migrate to and use.
And after changing a little ID3 tag (or altering a part of the fil itself), the md sum is vastly different from what you have stored. Not to mention that this'll require you to have md5's of that song in allot of formats, and with allot of different bitstreams. That doesn't work. ;) I'd actually like to know how he solved this problem. The only thing I can think of is to compare music itself, in a way that's smart enough to ignore minor differences. Not that I have a clue of how to do that.
On the other hand, I think there's nothing wrong with 'normal' p2p, so I don't care about legal downloads.
Nothing is worse than somebody who is too stupid to realize that their 15 minutes are up.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
I'm sure someone will come up with some software that, say, rearranges the MP3 frames of a song, foiling the fingerprinting but allowing the song to be restored on the other end..
PGP
Yeah, there are issues re: p2p, but the tech is there.
Also there's Freenet Project which obfusicates the source. You can ID it, but you can't get rid of it.
If you want to avoid being ID'ed, I think you would have to hide one of three things:
Most P2P relies on all three bits of info being readily available. Freenet Project hides the source and content. (Someone has to index and/or publish the public key somewhere for you to find the content. This is currently handled by well-known index pages as far as I know.)
An example of hiding the distribution method would be recording something off the radio or sharing music between friends.
An example of hiding the content would be the encrypted warez newsgroups. I'm not sure how people get the decryption keys, but apparently they do. (Or at least did; I haven't looked in those groups in quite a long time.)
A PGP distribution method would admittedly be very different from current P2P. It would probably be more akin to trusted friends trading music rather than a free-for-all like Napster and Kazaa. (Or nearly identical to the encrypted warez groups mentioned above.)
Freenet is interesting, but I have no compelling reasons to use it myself. Same with the new napster.
I'm not familiar with the new Napster. I'm a bit familiair with Freenet (as in the Freenet Project). It's a pain in the ass to use. Well, it's very slow (as in very high latency), at least. I haven't used it for music or warez, so I'm not quite sure how that works (I assume it's published by various people and indexed by others who recieve the keys [=links] via anonymous messaging; at least that's how the parts of Freenet I saw worked); I just browsed some porn and some weird people's sites. I find it disturbing that Freenet enables some of the things it does, like kiddie porn (which I have NOT looked at, btw) and hate groups and apparently a taunting murderer. On the other hand, it enables anonymous free speech that is becoming more and more restricted theses days. I'm not going to argue that copyright-infringing file sharing or kiddie porn are free speech, mind you. I briefly published a freesite about some things that aren't illegal in any way, but I wanted to share anonymously for privacy reasons. I published it in the wrong format; I would've had to update it daily to keep it alive. I should've published in either the "edition-based" or "one-shot" format, but that's part of the Freenet learning curve.
The kiddie porn was the one thing that kept me from running my own permanent Freenet node. There's no way to ensure your node can't be used to transmit that stuff because its all encrypted. However I'm just about convinced that enabling free speech overrides the concerns of enabling the distrubing stuff, and I'll likely run my own node as soon as I get over my tech burnout.
By the way, Freenet is not exactly completely anonymous. It is, but here's where it could get you if you, for example, published music for unauthorized distribution. If you use the same cryptographic key to publish everything, and someone can link you to one published file, then the key links you to all the other ones, too. So if one of the index page guys whose names are known uses his index page keys to publish something naughty it would be easy to infer that he was responsible. But if he used a different key then I don't think there would be a way to tie them together, but IANACryptographer.