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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."
Would you rather have the RIAA sit on the networks and monitor traffic themselves, or have the government do it for them?
Out of the pan, into the fire.
I have been pwned because my
If we remember our history from way back in Y2K, the original Napster was ordered to install a technology that would block copyrighted songs or shut down. Simply doing filename-based blocking didn't fly, users simply used phonetic spellings. Napster did actually come up with a blocking system that's much like what's being proposed by Audible Magic, but it was too little, too late. See, with good blocking employed on the network, the Napster network lost all of its value. The users fled, and it was game over.
So, you could say such technology, or at least some way to stop users from sharing illegal-to-share songs is already required for any service that operates in the USA. It was found out that nearly 100% of Napster's traffic was illegal, because once they actually blocked the illegal stuff there wasn't much if any traffic left.
Of course, the Kazza's of the world are never going to comply with that, but they already exist in a semi-outlawed state by being forced to incorperate in outside-of-US-reach locations just like online gambling sites do. They're already doing their best to avoid US laws of any kind. Since the barn door's already open on this type of program, I'm not sure there's anything US law can do to truely stop illegal music sharing.
So, this piece of technology might be a great technical discovery, but it's got no use in the real world. It's been tried before. The people who want their copyrighted music for free will just go to systems US laws have a hard time controling... and this system is no solution to that problem.
1. You swap every other byte or
2. You add a header to the beginning that says "REMOVE THIS HEADER"
3. You zip it
4. You tar it
Or any other of an uncountably infinite number of transformations.
There's nothing they can do about it technologically unless they lock it down at hardware level (and I won't buy a machine like that). Everthing else is just fooling around...
Compress it (tar, zip), and once they get wise to that, there would be a million little utilities that could be written to move the bits around in the file, like reversing, or doing some sort of shuffle.
The problem then becomes a matter of distributing these utilities. I know, P2P!
But we've all benefited from the file sharing madness. File sharing completely changed the medium in which most people received their music. Instead of spending $18.00 for a CD at Virgin Megastore, they would spend $0.00 for it on Kazaa.
This of course launched Itunes and the rest of the online music stores. Now you ask... what does this mean to me?
I don't know about the rest of you, but I myself have a rather large CD collection. In that collection, there are some CD's you can listen to from start to finish. Others I'm not so lucky. There are the two hit tracks that we all heard on the radio, and the rest is bullshit. Buffer material to fill up the CD.
Well, much like other folks, I grew tired of being anal raped by the Record Industry. I grew tired of shelling out my hard earned cash for buffer material.
I like to think that Itunes will cause artists to recognize that they can no longer get by on bullshit CD's. I like to think that artists will be forced to make better music in hopes that the consumers will purchase more of their songs, thereby making them more money.
File sharing changed everything... and in the end... it's for the better.
Cheers!
what stops me, joe coder from hacking together my own open source p2p file sharing tool, to get around this? i mean look at gnutella for example. sure you can stop the big boys with targets on them, but it will be impossible to make a program which doesn't have said functionality cease to exist.
:)
you can't make information "not exist"
Kazaa isnt based in the US. US laws have no jurisdiction over the developers.
Make it illegal to distribute any software in non-compliance? Download it from a server in Japan or Europe.
Make it illegal to use software that isnt compliant? Now instead of the RIAA suing 12 year, the FBI arrests them.
More election year rhetoric? perhaps...
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
The RIAA could make the following proposition to ISPs: You install this monitoring software on your network, in return, we give you a little kickback for each file your users legally download from our various services. Well even buy the hosting services and bandwidth from you!
If AOL, Earthlink and MSN were to make such a deal with the RIAA, it'd take a huge bite out of P2P songswapping.
...people start sharing "backward" music files.
This will only really affect those who indiscriminately upload/download/share music. The vast majority of people I know only share music/warez with people who they know through one or two degrees of separation. A group of about 10 of us have tens of terabytes between us.
Think about how you might buy or sell weed. If you go downtown and buy it from a bum, chances are that you'll eventually get busted in a sting (in addition to getting some crappyass weed). If you buy from someone you know fairly well, then you're cool.
This is just weak copy protection JUST SO something like the DCMA can be used on P2P networks.
If there's no copy protection, the DCMA is useless... BUT EVEN IF there's something as trivial as a weak protection that is easy to block... say hello to my little DCMA.
With this kind of protection system, I envisage a future P2P network full of backwards songs, or encrypted tunes with unscrambling keys or passwords in the filename enabling you to decrpyt them - something the protection software won't be able to work around easily.
What's going to happen when chart-topping artist has a track which can be found on a P2P site... and looking down the list, you notice about 200 different encryptions of the same tune?
How do you keep track of and police that?
The whole idea of copy protection is just plain stupid in the long run.... history proves it.
Maybe one day people will realise that EVERYONE listens to music somewhere and at some point, and will simply tax everyone for the privilege of being able to get and hear it.
It's a crummy and unfair compromise for sure... but at least that way the RIAA, MPAA and everyone else will shut the hell up and let everyone have unfettered access to culture.
Well, this is the best idea I can come up with to solving the digital rights issue.
The only other option would be for distribution channels to rely on IPsec-level encryption in order to distribute films and music to specialist hardware..... cue Microsoft stage left.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
No, the Universe doesn't revolve around Washington D.C., regardless of the distended view our out-of-touch legislators have deluded themselves into thinking
Not the Universe, but the planet.
Doubt it, just think about the situation in the Middle East, Saddam Hussein violated 1 UN resolution, that got him deposed because that's what Washington DC wanted. Israel is in violation of 69 UN Security Council resolutions, the only bombs going off there are homemade by Palestinians because the US would kick ass if the UN even thought about using force against Israel.
The US wants DMCA like laws around the globe, countries that were holding out are dropping like flies as world governments cave in to the demands of Washington.
Less than half of all registered voters in the US actually go to the poll, not even all eligible people are registered. Washington DC is enslaved to the people who donate the much needed money to their campaigns, because they have to fight all the harder to get the votes of the few citizens who vote.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
This is yet another example of big business and government trying to influence a medium which is specifically designed to resist any from of centralized control. The internet is one of the most powerful forms of free speech which we have in the world today and the move towards censorship (i.e. china) is starting to tarnish this. Like it or not the p2p phenomenon is out of the bag so to speak. Before actions such as these are taken the pros and cons must be carefully evaluated because there is truly no way to completely control internet copyright infringement without stepping on the toes of somebody's personal liberties. Which is more important to you? Intellectual property or the ability to say what you believe without fear of punishment.
All their behavior of the past few years suggests they have no clue. I mean they've wasted billions of dollars and still people download mp3s. Their more succesful strategies (suing individuals, companies) only have a temporary effect (new better networks replace the old ones). My impression is that they are rather desperate and have basically concluded that without big brother legislation they can't properly do their jobs.
The only purpose of this tool/technique is to push legislators to pass such laws. The sideeffect this will have that p2p technology will evolve to make this even harder (mute, freenet are still evolving, so is gnutella).
Jilles
I recently did a report on the Prohibition of liquor in the '20s, and one tactic the rumrunners used was selling "juice" that included specific instructions that said what to "NOT DO" because it would cause the juice to turn into hard liquor.
Even if the government did by some act of legislation, the RIAA, and the gestapo, get all P2P software to incorporate it, open source programs could have a little readme that says "DO NOT delete line 276, it calls the copyright-protection function."
In conclusion, there is absolutely no way in h3ll the government, the RIAA, or even the gestapo can enforce this (dumb) idea.
68.3% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Screw the RIAA - I want to see this technology used in an ID3-tagger/file-renamer. o:-)
I suspect they'll have to - when the program claims it is an illegal file, while it actually isn't you'll need some way to dispute that claim "This file has been falsely identified as being song X of artist Y, copyright registered by holder Z". How else would the system work? "I can't let you do that, Dave"?
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
What if I don't want to give another corporation information about what I'm trading... [And several
other, equally valid points]
I want to expand on this, just a bit, to highlight the problem here.
It seems highly unlikely that the RIAA would allow the end-user to download their database of "song signatures" or hashes or whatever implements this, so that the end-user could filter songs locally, deleting unauthorized songs on the honor system. After all, if the RIAA trusted its customers -- and if the customers were trustworthy -- but that's all water over the dam, isn't it?
So clearly this means uploading either the whole song, or some derived signature, to RIAA, every time you want to trade the file. This means uploading not just music, but any traded file.
And this introduces a chilling effect on free speech. Because the files I might be trading -- or the samizdat that secret Falun Gong supporter Won Ma might be sending to his fellow Chinese dissidents -- might not belong to the RIAA, but might invite government scrutiny for being unpopular dissent.
Certainly, knowing that everything that was traded, from bootleg Pete Seeger protest songs to homemade iMovies juxtaposing images of George Bush and chimpanzees to recordings of parody songs about John Ashcroft's resemblance to Darth Vader, was reported to a central repository -- the RIAA copyright detecting server -- could make that repository an irresistible target of monitoring by unscrupulous government agencies interested in tracking dissent -- whether those agencies are in Beijing or Washington D.C.
Would a government employee or contractor, worried about maintaining a security clearance, feel as free to engage in lawful and even patriotic dissent if he was worried his bosses might be able to monitor the his trading, from his home, excerpts from the documentary Guns & Mothers to which the he had added his own commentary defending his Second Amendment rights? Of course he'd worry -- and thus be discouraged from exercising his constitutional rights under not only the Second but the First Amendment as well!
Might a closeted homosexual worry that trading documentary films about Mattachine Society founder Harry Hay could reveal his sexual orientation and make him subject to blackmail?
Might Christians living in a Muslim theocracy fear persecution for trading Bibles or Christian devotional music?
Having any central server aware of all file trading gives whoever controls -- or can subvert the security of -- that central server a far too broad window into the demographics, politics, proclivities, and beliefs of anyone trading files. While this would be a boon to marketeers, governments, and anyone else whose goal is manipulation and control, it must be anathema to anyone who values privacy and liberty -- from left wing "hippie" to right wing "gun-nut", from closted homosexual to crypto-Christian.
Whatever your politics, whether you trade files or not -- and, no, I don't --, this is something you must oppose, for it threatens the liberty of all of us.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Do you guys know the song, Taking Care of Business?
Well, after the band had it's first hit, the president of their record company invited them for a lunch, where he told them: give me one more song like this, and I guarantee you that you will not have to work for the rest of your life.
The band did just that, and the president has kept it's promise.
The other day I read in Time Magazine that Sting still gets over $US 2000 a day as royalty for Don't stand so close to me.
I do love Sting, as anyone else... but the wealth distribution system has some serious flaws here, obviously.
Does a hit really have such impact on society, humanity that demands such financial rewards?
These numbers can shed some light about the length, how far the beneficiaries of this system would be willing to go to keep up with the status quo.
The courts have already ruled on the legality of prior retraint -- it's not legal. So the legislature (being led by the nose by the RIAA and MPAA) can look at legislating this all they want but short of a constitutional amendment and the courts will overturn it because there's already a world of precident in regards to this.
But hey, maybe on the 429th page of the "no gay marriage ammendment" they can throw in a few things making prior restraint legal then not only can they monitor your downloads but they can cut off your kids limbs at birth to ensure they never hurt anyone.
Don't forget the rising number of open source solutions. You can just forget about putting anything like that into them. It will be easy enough for anyone with sufficient coding skills to remove the parts that identify songs, and voila, you've got a free system again.
And for each iteration the software will move more and more towards secure crypted and hard to trace methods of sharing. Making it easier and easier to use for far worse purpuses than downloading music. A very real life example would be the spreading of child porn.
No, it wouldn't. It would give a true positive.
That's as stupid as expecting to completely protect music against copy without noticing that one just has to copy the analog signal sent to the speakers, and there's nothing to do against this. They are amazingly clueless about what technology can and can't, they never realize that the problem with human being is that they can and will adapt themselves to new technological constraints...
They really beblieve Santa Claus will bring them a Monopoly Enforcment Unbreakable Device for Xmas!
Song identification could be done in theory just by compressing very lossily; to, say, 1kbit.sec-1. I guess it might require an extension to the envelope transform to work at low bit rates; but, ultimately, it ought to be possible to determine, say, that a compressed file is a particular piece of music.
.....
.tar.gz, commenting out the "unwanted" checks and recompiling it?
However, it probably would break down with encrypted file transfers; and in many jurisdictions, it is against the law to attempt to decrypt something unless you are the intended recipient {hence DeCSS is fine, because the owner of a DVD is the intended recipient of the encrypted data}.
I personally use apache-ssl for all my file sharing needs, mainly because the client is so readily available. Although I haven't paid for a proper SSL certificate, that doesn't mean the transfers aren't encrypted
And if someday, somebody does decide to include some sort of song-identifying bit in their file sharing software, then what exactly is there to stop me from just downloading the
The RIAA et al must face facts. Their business model is dependent on an assumption which time has given the lie: that the equipment needed to manufacture high-quality recordings was beyond the reach of the lumpenproletariat. It was great while it lasted, but it has come to an end, and only a fool could have failed to see that this would be the case. The only way there is any money left to be made is by selling stamped CDs cheaper than burned CDs {the cost of which includes bandwidth, time and hassle} -- after all, whoever saw a bootleg copy of a book?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I wonder how good it is at identifying the psychoacoustic characteristics of the encrypted payloads increasingly common in P2P apps.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
I think the quote you are looking for is this one:
- Edwards' Law
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
So, this piece of technology might be a great technical discovery, but it's got no use in the real world.
A real world use I would like to see is a service offered based on this technology, that will go through all the music on my harddrive and tag and rename it correctly. I have a lot of songs that unfortunately in the early days of ripping CDs I was very lax in naming. Now I don't have the time or the energy to go through them all to update them.
I think that the recording industry is missing the boat on this whole issue. They could offer the above mentioned service and then provide links where you could order music by the same artists or artists with similar styles. They could offer information about the songs, who first recorded them, who else has covered a particular tune. There is a huge marketting opportunity just sitting there that the RIAA is shooting in the head because they can't get over the idea that someone somewhere might listen to a song without them getting their nickel. I seem to recall that a number of studies showed that the people who were the heaviest users of Napster were also the biggest consumers of audio CD's and that sales of CD's seem to rise and fall with the growth and then demise of Napster.
I doubt that there is anything that the RIAA can do, short of draconian legistlation that will take away control of our computers, that will satisfy their desire to have absolute control over the music they hold the rights to. I think they need to get used to the changes in the world and adapt to them rather than impose a huge economic burden on our government, taxpayers and computer owners in order to pursue the phantom of total control over their copyrights.
Personally, I think the recent extensions in copyright protection to be some of the most misguided bits of legistlation I've seen when it comes to intellectual property. Just the idea that "Happy Birthday to You" deserves more protection than a patent is silly.
The longer the term of protection is for any given bit of intellectual property, the more difficult and complex enforcement and tracking of those rights is going to be. Our society needs to weigh the cost of protecting the intellectual property of entertainment companies against the costs imposed on our society to do so.
One of the costs we should not overlook is the cost incurred by turning otherwise law-abiding people into criminals. How much are we willing to pay in additional judicial expenses, delays in our court systems, and increased requirements for jail cells?
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
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Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.