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

Oh, they'll add it alright...

[stienman]

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

Songle, a optimist's view.

[Anonymous Coward]

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 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" :)

ID3 tagging?

[aardvarko]

Screw the RIAA - I want to see this technology used in an ID3-tagger/file-renamer. o:-)

Crappy technology shoved down our throats

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Questions

[Mongoose Disciple]

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.

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...

2 major problems with this idea

[Nakanai_de]

1) Given the number of users of P2P applications, the millions of queries that are going to be sent to this company's database are going to cost it through the nose in bandwidth, if not slashdot the server completely.

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.

related technology

[shird]

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.

It seems to work here

[Mwongozi]

Here in the UK there is a service called Shazam. Basically you dial 2580 from your mobile phone, and hold the handset up to some music being played. After 30 seconds it hangs up, and within 10 seconds, you get a text message back telling you the title, artist, and which album the music was from.

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.