Slashdot Mirror
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'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?
Screw the RIAA - I want to see this technology used in an ID3-tagger/file-renamer. o:-)
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.
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.
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 p2p companies have been claiming that it's impossible to implement this filtering. The point of the demo isn't to have p2p companies implement filtering, it's to establish (legally) that the p2p companies could implement the filtering and choose not to.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
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.
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 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.
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.