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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."
I don't know about you, but I have well over 20 gigs of MP3s/AACs at the moment, and I still have a few thousand CDs and Vinyl albums that I have to download. What kind of insane amount of work will my PC have to do to examine that much audio?
I've long thought about a sort of whistle-me-a-Google/name-that-tune search engine, where you know a snippet or melody of a song that has no lyrics or you have no idea what the lyrics are, and it peruses a vast collection of songs...
Could this be the answer, these 'psycho-acoustical' properties?
There are too many different file sharing programs out there now for this to work. The government would have to make the P2P programs that do not add this software illegal. Even then, I do not think that this would work, even with the most Gestapo of tactics that the RIAA will try. This reminds me of China outlawing FreeNet. There is also IRC if any of this fail. We still have the Internet Privacy Act of 1996 in our favor. (The law that won't let RIAA, or government officials in a private channel if they have been told that they are not welcome.)
Screw the RIAA - I want to see this technology used in an ID3-tagger/file-renamer. o:-)
If it has a false-positive rate at all, there will be enormous public outcry about how it infringes on legal trading.
"... add it into their products either voluntarily or through legislation."
Gosh, that would be effective! Almost as effective as that striking success of limiting spam by legislative fiat.
Or trying to outlaw crypto years back.
When will people learn that perhaps there's money to be made by giving people what they want, instead of trying to hinder them by laws which will be ignored?
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
How are they going to control that? Like DeCSS?
...remember good 'ol times when IP used to mean Internet Protocol....
Gotta love lobbyists and legislators. What if I don't want to give another corporation information about what I'm trading. What if it's my own copyrighted material, wouldn't there analysis be creating derivative works without my authorization? What happens when I block their server on my firewall? What happens when their server gets hit by a DDOS? Too many things can go wrong here.
This is interesting, but it leaves a lot of important questions unanswered, technically as well as legally/politically.
For example: just how computationally intensive is the Audible Magic "listening" algorithm?
If it occurs client-side, does that unfairly mandate a higher caliber of hardware for a user to partake in file-sharing? How easy would it be to hack or fake out this kind of software? The better question may be: is it easy enough for the kind of non-technical mass user that has made P2P such a success?
If it occurs server-side (at least, as much as this term is accurate in the case of file-sharing paradigms that have supernodes or the like), who's responsible for setting up and maintaining it? Does file-sharing become impossible if these things go down?
The article mentions the Napster era of faking out filters by simply changing file names. Could you fake this out by changing your audio files to have extensions that identified them as something other than audio files? If not, does that mean the software will be stupidly trying to "listen" to pictures I'm sharing of my last kayaking trip?
Ultimately, if this is somehow legally mandated it'll probably kill Kazaa etc. the same way the courts effectively killed Napster. Hopefully that won't happen, but it's interesting to examine the airtightness of the solution nonetheless.
So, (and no, I haven't read the entire article) does this "technology" work no matter what the file type is? I mean, does it only work for MP3, or does it even work on the FLACC, AIFF, VQF, OGG, WMA(shudder), WAV, MIDI, or any other sound file/compression people may come up with? Not to mention if the song were rolled up in a tarball or "zipped" or renamed or encrypted or sent as a "hash" file (remember DeCSS? there was a version of it that came as a rather large prime number, which when run through some hash algorithm would leave you with the source code.)?
For those who describe their systems as 'boxen', do you order multiple 'boxen' of corn flakes also?
2) Most P2P applications support resuming from partial downloads. If the monitoring software cuts you off partway through a download, just continue downloading from the point where you were cut off.
Of course, there's also the fact that getting this attached to every P2P program is a Herculean task, but I don't count on that stopping our Legislators from passing a law mandating it.
Sono koro, bokura wa, sore ga sekai no shinjitsu da to shinjite ita.
I agree that this will be bypassed. Unless there is a mandate for all ISPs to filter everything coming into the US using these "psychoacoustical filters", then music and movie swapping will continue.
Also, I claim a patent on the "psychoacoustical filter router module". Cisco and Juniper can contact me for terms.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
so whats different?????
9 6, 716085,00.html
http://media.guardian.co.uk/newmedia/story/0,74
you hear a song in a bar, you phone a number on your mobile and hold the phone up for a few seconds to record the song and you get a text message with artist/track name
I am certain that they are well aware of how difficult (impossible) this is. There must be some other motive behind this move.
Making noise ? Trying to mask the fact that copyrights are too hard to enforce in an environment where information exchange is happening at uncontrollable rates and speeds and between uncountable people across continents ? Give the false idea that their antiquated business model can prevail at this day and age ?
Whatever it is, we're going to witness that it is in vain. I just hope that all these attempts and researches find use in other areas...
Bias Meter:
[Perl ---------|-- Python]
So, effectively, they'll be asserting through de-facto law made through government mandate, that stopping the transfer of anything that sounds like what they are looking for can take precidence over the free trade of information.
Fine. Really - highly annoying, and a misuse of power, but fine. If they want to take the time to listen to a small percentage of those files, suing people and publicising it, fine. Let the reign of terror continue. I honestly don't listen to their music anymore anyway.
As a consequence, however, software which will encrypt content and sender/reciever identification will become much more robust and ubiquitous. That I wouldn't mind seeing.
I empathise with the music "industry" - many of these people are acting out of a motive of self-preservation. But they make their living by offering a service - they can't just threaten people into choosing that service. Here, they are demanding the whole nation change it's rules of conduct to meet it's desires... they may get their rule change, but they won't change people's conduct, nor will they convince people to pay for their services this way. They have to provide better services for that to happen.
Hopefully the music industry will wise up to their real source of self-preservation - dissolving the RIAA as a legal-punishment agency, and turning it into a real service-enchancement agency. Make us want you, don't keep trying to force us to need you!
Ryan Fenton
The same thing actually applies to any such transformation. The end-downloader needs to know how to play the file. There is no method that I can imagine to tell the downloader (random joe on the internet) without also telling the company who makes this softaware. And in the next update. . . dead.
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
I don't think the answer is in the technology. By definition, technology can be defeated.
By definition? What, did you read that in the dictionary.
I'm not going to argue that *this* technology can't be defeated, but presuming that *all* technology can be defeated is a bit of a stretch.
-a
The RIAA's anti-swap activities are breeding a smarter and more resourceful brand of file-sharing software faster than venerial diseases adapt to antibiotics.
Right now the masses might be using FastTrack or gnutella, but the tide is sure to shift as soon as these networks are crippled or shut down.
The future of P2P clearly involves strong encryption, and is also likely to employ some "invite-only" attributes. That future software is here today; all that is lacking is the user base.
Trying to "filter out" or "regulate" file sharing is akin to trying to "filter out" or "regulate" voice over IP. Or, if you prefer, like trying to deliver content to me for my viewing while simultaneously attempting to prevent me from duplicating it - flatly impossible.
So I ask the "inventors" of this media-analyzing software, can you make my encryption transparent? Can you "peer" inside my tunnelled session and identify the content by artist and title?
This will turn out exactly the way every other bogus "piracy prevention" fiasco has.
1) Company releases "copy protection" product which flatly falls on its face (that is it purports to accomplish the impossible).
2) Company sues pre-existing services and products for "patent violation" (after all, these pre-existing products clearly violate the new patent if they are able to "circumvent" the system, right?)
3) Some service gets shut down, ten others replace it.
Make the guy on the other end pass a turing test in order to get your key. Or you create keys that only work in combination with n other trusted keys and you create a web of trust er wall of trust using some reasonable method.
I think the RIAA would love for you to use such a scheme. For one thing, you've just displayed consciousness of guilt. Plus, you've gone out of your way to subvert a copy protection scheme. Now, they could probably sue you for 10 times as much.
-a
Of course, there would be no point in putting this code in the p2p software if someone could just comment it out before they recompiled it. So evil open source code must be outlawed. Hail Microsoft.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
This is still fairly easy to defeat.... just invert the bytes of the files or gzip the file or whatever
Another doomed approach to solve a social problem with technology...
just sidestep the problem.
I just use a 200G HDD in a USB2 shell with all my songs as WAVs.
Send to friends, they send it back with some new stuff, enjoy.
Postage is a lot cheaper and is actually less hassle than downloading a shedload of files that may be corrupted anyway.
As is said in 'The mythical man month' (I think) "Never under-estimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of back-up tapes.
what about DJ mixes? would the "acoustic modelling" give a false positive?
This time will be different though. Now they have
computer programs to analyze hits and pump out more
just the same.
No, now the LISTENERS have computer programs that they can use to find more esoteric music, that appeals to a narrower audience.
p2p is the antidote to the problem you are describing. (Pop music becoming so lame and artificial)
Besides making then fully redundant, non-centralized distribution channels also take away the major labels ability to print money in the form of artificial bands.
Actually stopping sharing is not that hard. All you need is a technology that pushes the cost of file sharing/swapping above the market price of about $1/song (assuming ITunes, walmart, etc.). The technology could be the trojan MP3s that reformat your hard drive, turns your machine into a server for child porn, uses your processor to violate the DMCA by using it to crack passwords, etc. Imagine if MP3s or DivX files started something like the Blaster worm. If the RIAA is willing to sue 12 year olds, they're probably willing to hire some firm in Eastern Europe to do some dirty work.
Let's see.
Kazaa.
eDonkey.
Gnutella.
MSN messenger.
Yahoo messenger.
ICQ messenger.
Jabber.
Usenet.
FTP.
HTTP.
Email.
Did I miss any? (answer: about a jillion).
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
You can then go to the above web site and buy the music you played down the phone. It's stunningly and sometimes disturbingly accurate. It's recognised every piece of music I've played at it, even the theme tune from "The A-Team". I don't know where they get their database from, but it's massive.
I would like to borrow this technology to make a program that would automatically update the mp3 file info and filename. My collection is pretty messy and this could be the answer!
just a thought
what about file formats which are not understood by the sharing program ?
will it block all such files ?
or if you have sharing program which understand wav and mp3 but not ogg, can you easily share pirated ogg music ?
what about zipped/gzipped/bzipped music ? what about encrypted music ?
and what if this 'central database' is down ? will it completely shut down p2p ? nonsense, this goes against the true nature of p2p !
or can i simply block it on my firewall ?
and will there be an open source version for linux ? you know, there are people who won't put any trojaned binary software on their systems
Can it read the properties then? or better yet zip it and re add the mp3 extension.
IT also seems to me that the p2p software being written now a days is taking things like this into consideration and what this leads to is legisslation on what can and can not be written ito software, it could become illegal just to have a non branded p2p program.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Surly a PERL script could fix all of MP3's in a matter of months. Then we'd all be sharing files on alternate networks with correct tags. FINALLY!
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
NPR had a report this morning which included mention that soldiers in Iraq are buying truckloads of pirated CD's at $2 apiece. I don't see RIAA going after them anytime soon. Hmmm, double standards anyone?
I don't see how this would work on an open-source P2P project. As a project manager, I would require that the code be included, if mandated by law. However, because I'm open source, you as a consumer could remove said code and recompile. Voila. No more bloated code. Let them "legislate" the inclusion. The Open Source movement won't care, we'll include it, and then let you remove it if you want.
Perhaps, this scenario would provide those who fail to see the value in Open Source to "come around". Trying to legislate open source is like trying to legislate a persons thoughts. Can't be done reliably.
To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
As the "War on Drugs" has shown, depite increasing sentences through the roof drug use is still increasing. Unfortunately noone wants to back off on these entences because they will a) look weak on crime, and b) annoy all those voters who are emplopyed by the DEA, the prisons, gun manufacturers, etc.
Recently a study in the State of California showed that despite the appeal of the "3-strikes you're out" law id has had a negligable (possibly even harmful) effect on crime. It has also cost the sate so much money that (before the gubernator arrived) there was open talk of dropping it. Haven't heard anything along those lines lately.
As for the other restrictions that you mentioned, the scary part is under the SSSCA and it's descendents they were proposing exactly that mandatory restrictions on tools for the sake of one or two corporations.
To be fair to the Jewish population of Israel, there are quite a number of world interests that would like nothing more than to see the anihilation of the Jewish people.
To be honest, there are even more that would like nothing more than to see the end of the state of Israel.
Israel is a secular state. Judaism isn't codified into their law.
Since 1948 there has been conflict beetween Zionists and anti-Zionists, for over 1000 years before that there was relative peace between Arab muslims and Jews. In fact Arab muslims were often welcomed conquerors because they permitted the Jewish people to worship in peace.
Strange, isn't it?
Frankly, I think 90% of our politicians could be charged with treason for putting their special interests ahead of the interest of the country.
An apathetic electorate is what put them in a position where they have to.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano