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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."
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'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?
I would rather it was the RIAA. I can easily block them. The government would probably make it illegal to attempt to block them.
This is hypothetical since I don't use music swapping programs. I only rip CDs I purchased and don't make them publically available.
-- Will program for bandwidth
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"
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.
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.
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...
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
OK, so make a zip file containing a text file and the MP3 in some sort of password protected/encrypted archive. In the text file say something like:
"The password is *** where the first star is the first letter of the first word in the filename, the second star is the third letter of the second word, and the third star is the second letter of the fourth word"
Or "The password is the last word in Slashdot's slogan"
Or "The password is the month in which Christmas occurs"
etc.
Nope. Andrew S. Tannenbaum, Computer Networks, Section 2.2.1., "Magnetic Media"
The exact quote:
I only know that, because the book was sitting right next to me. Still...
"Slashdot: Exact quotes provided by anal dickheads while you wait."
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
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!
This is hypothetical since I don't use music swapping programs. I only rip CDs I purchased and don't make them publically available.
.. alright.. guess I'm done ranting for now :)
I don't rip music, as I don't buy CDs. I don't download music either (well, not often anyways). Instead, I use shoutcast radio and listen to one of the thousands of radio channels that are available. I subscribe to www.di.fm, so I get a 192Kbit stream. Not too bad at all.
I will NEVER buy a CD again... because it's too expensive, and since they started with the "copyprotection"... well.. f-off... If it can't be played on my computer.. I don't want it!
In regards to copyprotection software like the one in the article... being implemented in client-side P2P software... well... good luck.
I would like to see how my bittorrent client will recognize mp3's, as there is no file to compare to until I have the entire file downloaded.
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.