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."

Comments

I hate to say it:

[Stupid White Man]

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!

Re:I hate to say it:

[kfg]

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.

No. What they will be forced to do is make nothing but "hit singles."

In past eras when the hit single was king it produced the maximum amount of Britney Spears type pop crap in the minimum amount of time.

This time will be different though. Now they have computer programs to analyze hits and pump out more just the same.

So things are looking up, eh?

KFG

stupid and impossible to enforce

[nil5]

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" :)

Re:Works in the lab, never in reality.

[Bobdoer]

And what about those open source and non-American filesharing programs? Are these folks going to be ecstatic to add this wonderful DRM type technology to their programs? I really doubt it...

Re:Crappy technology shoved down our throats

[orthogonal]

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.