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Legislators Looking At Peer to Peer Monitor
rocketjam writes "According to CNET News, a California based software company has developed a song-identification technology which could be incorporated into file sharing software. It would then monitor music being downloaded or made available in a shared folder, identify songs by a process which examines their 'psycho-acoustical' properties and then compare them to a copyright database and stop them from being traded if a match is found. Audible Magic, has been demoing its technology before legislators and regulators in Washington D.C for the past month. The RIAA is greatly enamored of the concept and has helped the company get access to government officials. However, the technology would obviously require the makers of file swapping software to add it into their products either voluntarily or through legislation."
Reminds me of the "identify a song recorded off the radio" feature of the Neuros mp3 player... Only evil... Really evil.
1: A swap-every-other-byte file would likely result in an unplayable file, which therefore would fail the "audible" inspection.
.zip or .tar file, decompress it, and then the normal process can analyze its contents.
2: The header would either do the same, or result in a file that audibly matched.
3 and 4: Software exists that can recognize a
Of course, such a service would have to resemble the original Napster, which was intentionally limited to MP3 files, so everything had to be audio and not data files.
No. Any such transformation, to work, must be publicly known. Any known scheme can be implimented in this software. An arms race on formats would ensue, but I don't see the p2p users keeping up. What you would see would be cracked versions, almost immediatly, just like you see with games. And locked-down hardware is required to stop that.
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
it looks like this company is using MuscleFish to do the matching - MuscleFish was a audio query-by-content startup with actual products, which they bought out.
in fact, then, what this suggests is that there was no market for what you are calling Songle, so the technology wound up being perverted for use in DRM enforcement...
MusicBrainz has been using these "TRM"s (essentially track ids) to identify music to correctly add ID3 tags to your music collection for some time.
The more people that use it, the more accurate and complete it becomes. It is basically a free CDDB replacement (the biggest one I think) but kind of works in reverse as well (matches mp3s to their associated CDs).
Kinda cool, check it out.
I.O.U One Sig.
No but the article seemed to mention legislators, and by inference legislation. It would have to be mandated.
But then you'd have to have it put into every web browser and FTP program and hey why not cp and mv while we're at it..
Heck, you know it just looks like this won't work without locking down the hardware, and I won't buy such non working stuff. So they'd have to legislate the hardware too, and then we're screwed. But I have some faith we won't get there. Er, hope at least...
But can this system be extended to the internet population as a whole, as p2p is now?? No, because the p2p filter writter, and indeed the p2p filter program itself are part of the internet population. Post your keys to a public website? p2p filter writter grabs the keys and compiles them into the next 'update'. send them through p2p? the filter program itself grabs the key, decrypts the file. Kazza style p2p would be dead.
In your example, if both the server and the client(you) are typical p2p clients, your example falls flat immediatly. You sent the key through your client program, which has the filter program compiled in. It grabs the key. send it outside your client? the server you send it to is also a p2p program with the filter inside. It refuses to send the files to you, it analysed the files before encrypting in the first place. In short, munging the files like this is a temporary measure at best. The only way around this is cracked/hacked p2p clients, wich renders the munging moot.
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
In the UK there is a service called Shazam. You dial 2580 on your mobile, hold the phone up to the music source and 20 seconds late the call will automatically end.
After about 30 seconds, it'll send you a text message with the name of the track and the artist.
Provided the music source isn't tainted too much (ie. you're near it and there isn't something else loud in the background) and isn't too obscure, then it does pretty well.
It costs about 9p for the call and 50p for the text message. Best to check on their website.
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Because P2P allows you to scale up nicely as more people download your legally distributable files, while centralised systems need more and more servers to handle the connections. Linux isos and game demos on Bittorrent are a good example.
Their site primarily promotes it as a network appliance, that "passively listens to all traffic on the network" and "block all P2P traffic or specify that P2P transactions are limited to a specified bandwidth" or "You may also choose to block only offending copyrighted works from being traded on your network". So it doesn't have to be installed on the client or server side. Any network provider, business, school, etc., could install this appliance.
Even if hard drives could do this (the original idea was rather a kind of tamper-resistant storage accessible only by certain applications, which I suppose could be eavesdropped on by either tapping the IDE channel, or by tracing the syscalls of the processes), the trivial workaround is to use any kind of encrypted filesystem.
http://www.musicbrainz.org/tagger/download.html
The one-time pad.
Of course, defeating the measure described in the article would be trivial: simply don't use a client that uses their filtering technology. (No really, no need to thank me.)
But on the issue of technological countermeasures, let's consider the most extreme scenario: the government compels every ISP to install software that scans traffic for certain patterns of data in an attempt to detect copyright infringement. Even then, this could be defeated by p2p clients that encrypted the the data for transmission (as Mute does -- and since Mute's encryption is on-the-fly, it'd be impossible for the government to simply add the encrypted versions to the blacklist, like it would be for Freenet). If even such a ludicrously over-the-top Big Brother solution would fail, there's no way of killing p2p short of taking away every personal computer in the country.