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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.
Reminds me of the "identify a song recorded off the radio" feature of the Neuros mp3 player... Only evil... Really evil.
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...
The following will be said in this thread "THE RIAA is EVIL, burn in hell!" "Stealing music is illegal.. shut up asshat it's copyright infringement." "The music produced nowadays is utter crap" "Use freenet" and so on....
Of course they'll add it, voluntarily even. Just think - you request a download of a particular band's song, and the software verifies that you're getting the illegal file you want instead of some cranky artist going, "What the &#*@ do you think you're doing?" and some silence.
-Adam
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?
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!
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.)
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"
It works so well because the waveforms it picks up is nothing more then consumer grade muzak. So be it, all the better. I've always wanted a meathod of cleaning up all the hiphop crap from P2P networks. Heh
Life is not for the lazy.
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?
This software contains code which will identify and restrict you from doing what the RIAA deems is bad. Please do not spend the additional 20 seconds it would take to find and download the crack that removes all such restrictions. Thank you.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
I'd rather just steal music anonymously, thanks.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
what about DJ mixes? would the "acoustic modelling" give a false positive?
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.
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 swear that when I glanced the test I read it as "The RIAA is greedly enamored of the concept and has helped the company get access to government officials."
-
Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
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.
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.
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!
I think the quote you are looking for is this one:
- Edwards' Law
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
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.
===---===
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
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