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Software To Stop Song Trading
Shippy writes "Palisade Systems is about to launch new software that can identify and block copyrighted songs as they are being traded online. However, the article fails to mention that it will also stop legal song downloads. The software blocks anything that's copyrighted, whether you already own the song in another format or not. Here's some snippets from the article: 'If installed in a university, for example, it could look inside students' emails, instant messages and peer-to-peer transfers...', and 'Jacobson said the identification process would not work on an encrypted network, such as is used in several newer file-swapping programs. However, the Palisade software could also act to block those applications from using the network altogether.' Great."
Encrypted protocols increase in popularity.
I guess it's time to start bridging those WiFi networks around the world. If you can't beat em, fuck em. I start file sharing over WiFi networks. I look forward to the days of local BBSes again. (WiFi BBS?)
Life is not for the lazy.
Encrypt IM encrypt file sharing encrypt your email
404
How does this effect pay-for programs like iTunes?
Also, is this RIAA-only songs being blocked, or other songs? Copyrighted doesn't always mean "undistributable". Someone may hold the copyright to something but may actually let people distribute it-- am I wrong there?
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how do i tell this software that i want people to trade MY copyrighted music? if they block my file swapping would that be some sort of anticompetitive thing? just because the RIAA and its labels own the majority of music being traded doesnt mean that all the music being traded belongs to them.
If I send my friend an mp3 of me playing some music how can it tell that from me sending a copyrighted work? Is it reading the 'finger print' and then checking byte by byte? Isn't that going to kill traffic... But couldn't it be beaten by adding one extra byte to the file? Sending in another format?
Funny, on slashdot GPL violators are on step below Charles Manson, while copyright infringers of music, movies, and software are somewhere below jaywalkers.
Wait... it did say that it can look into student's emails and instant messages right? So basically it is giving the University free right to look into student's messages and claim that they are merely looking for illegal songs. There has got to be something that can be done by the students at these universities to block this. This is a total invasion of privacy. If any university tries to impose this onto the students attending, the students must do something. Hopefully we haven't lost all of our rebellious nature.
..is a P2P app that can run over an SSL connection, disguised as web traffic. I'd bet that could beat this thing. Does such a thing exist?
From the article:
"seeking audio "fingerprints" that could be compared with information in Audible Magic's database."
We've tried database-oriented filters to stop spam in the form of keyword lists and the like for years, yet spam is more of a problem today than it was 5 years ago. Why won't the same techniques that let spam slip past our filters let content slip past these filters? Add a byte here or there, run a very light encryption routine over a file and bam - one broken filter.
Even if the networks that use encryption in the protocol itself are stopped - encryption on the file level can be used on insecure networks and this software becomes useless.
Josh
How many roads must a man walk down? 42.
Is this software going to intercept any archives (.rar, .tar.gz, .zip etc.), unarchive them and check them? I'm not against such software - Universities have a right to disallow file trading on their networks, just as I have a right to use an ISP which doesn't use such software for my home connection. However, I just think that this won't work, at least not without blocking or hindering so much legitimate use that everyone revolts against it.
sig under construction...
I think you're on to something here. Writing all of your songs in shorthand, scanning them, then emailing the resulting tiff files will prove no match for this anti-filesharing initiative.
I also reply below your current threshold.
> They want to take the position of not filtering out all peer-to-peer [traffic], stopping copyrighted works but not the other content."
Here's the problem: how do RIAA and MPAA distinguish, legally, between copyrighted material that is permitted (fair-use), and that which is not? I'm talking about articles, fair-use media vs. illegal-to-distribute-or-possess copyright media. How do these watchdogs inform the public of such differences? The onus is truly on the RIAA/MPAA if you ask me. The story, strangely, is "Copyright © 2004 CNET Networks, Inc. All Rights Reserved," which begs to question... how can a twelve-year-old truly understand this discombobulated law?
That's the problem with the whole thrust of the RIAA argument against P2P (that the illegal trading of this copyrighted material hurts business). What about Internet articles? These articles are copyrighted works, published to the Internet by their respective owners, but quite often articles are mirrored by websites like Slashdot. Sometimes the copyright owners like this mirroring, and other times they do not (they seem to flip flop on it, depending on the source). Therefore, the lack of consistancy *should* make it extremely difficult to win a copyright case, although somehow the owners always win.
IANAL, yet my argument is that two distinct laws ought govern copy protection, because this fork-in-the-road is quite ambiguous. Firstly, how are any of us to know the status of copyrighted materials downloaded? What if we download a song over P2P, expecting the song to be one of the songs that are fair-use, and we pass the song along to a ton of other people? Secondly, how do we distinguish between the legality copyrighted articles that are online and music, and the fair-use music?
Because there exists no truly accurate copyright-status repository, I think all the people under suit from a watchdog might have some ammunition.Without a bona fide/impartial database of illegal filenames and md5 checksums to verify your current P2P files, how can you be responsible for these files?
Furthermore, if you downloaded a song from P2P, you should legally be able to upload it back to that P2P, if you truly believed the files to be fair-use, which could truly be any file.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
If this is based on fingerprinting technology it would be pretty trivial to cutoff the Type 1 and Type 2 tags, reverse the content and stick'em back on. Reverse the process after downloading. Of course you could always UUencode the song and add a zip extension to it or a multitude of other tricks to hide what your doing.
Never underestimate the power of broke, bored, determined college students.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
I attend a Big 10 School, and while
interviewing for a tech-related position with
the head of dorm network-type stuff, I was told
that well over 90% of the internet traffic (barring worms and the like) can be attributed
to file-sharing. With the tightness of funds
that today's universities are dealing with,
maybe that bandwidth money could be better spent.
Actually, it would be cheaper to do neither. The U of Rochester, up here, is doing that, and they are under constant criticism for the program. People tend not to like money being spent on music for others (Windows users who live on campus) as opposed to their education, after they had paid for the latter. I don't see why a University is liable for the actions taking place over its network anyway... Make the students agree not to do it, so you can't be blamed, and let the RIAA hang them if they do.
Simpler, perhaps, but not a particularly good idea. What gives my college the right to decide what kind of music I'm going to listen to, and whom I'm going to buy it from? Despite common belief, not all music is owned by the RIAA, and I certainly wouldn't want a part of my tuition going into the pockets of these monopolists.
I made a PHP/MySQL library that prevents SQL injection & makes coding easier!
spend money and give students a paid subscription for music downloads
Pointless so long as the RIAA refuses to sell anything except DRM crippled crap.
Even if the college did jack up their fees and force such a subscription on me, I'd still take free non-crippled files (P2P) in prefference to "free" (pre-paid) crippled files.
If they offered ordinary MP3's they'd attract more customers. The RIAA's refusal to sell a non-crippled product is purely self destructive. It's not like they've ever kept a single song from reaching P2P by refusing to sell MP3's. Using DRM only accomplishes one thing - driving away customers.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
With the tightness of funds that today's universities are dealing with, maybe that bandwidth money could be better spent.
Every college's Terms of Service says that their computer systems are for "academic use only" or some similar phrase, in part because they have to in order to get grant funding to pay for their bandwidth. You might not remember signing that TOS, but trust me, every student at a college has signed something when they accepted admission that basically binds you to everything the school ever puts out as a "rule" whether you bother to read it or not.
So, forget the dream that they have to give you totally unrestricted bandwidth as part of the price of your dorm room. They never promised that to you, so if it goes away, tough.
Colleges have mostly played dumb that P2P has been going on, trying to claim that they're just a common carrier that can't really coprehend what's fair and what's foul over their network. Once they start trying to block copyrighted content, they'll start becoming liable for whatever slips through their checkpoint.
So... that's why any blocks we're going to see going up are going to be whole-protocol blocks or bandwidth throttles. They won't be blocking in the name of copyright protection, they'll be blocking in the name of bandwidth protection...
This is a good point. Frankly make them sign a contract or a LOI stating that if they do anything illegal that they have to indemify the university of any illegal actions and take full recourse for the aforementioned.
But if 90% of their traffic is P2P why not make it all internal traffic thus eliminating bandwidth costs? If there is a way to do this for instance block the ports that P2P programs use, hell block all the ports except 80 and then setup a VPN client with all ports open but restrict traffic to being only internal. Then the bandwidth load is reduced by 90% and the traffic (which would probably cut down) might come down by as much as 60-70%.
If new items need to be introduced to the P2P networks on the campus then the students should have to go out and use their own, their parents or some cafes' then they can bring it back into the closed school network.
What do you think of that?
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I was working for Palisade when they developed the first version of PacketHound.
Actually, I should say when they stole PacketHound, since it was actually created by a coworker in his off hours, outside of Palisade. The CEO at the time fired this guy and sued the developer to gain the rights to PacketHound. Kind of ironic that they stole something that is supposed to prevent stealing!
Like Palisade's original product, called ScreenDoor, PacketHound is just a packet sniffer that sends out TCP RST packets to disrupt connections. Palisade (and Iowa State University) actually have a patent on this, even though there have been firewalls and other programs (like Snort) which do the same thing, and predate the patent.
Palisade itself is a tiny company that is milking this one patent/idea for most of its products. But they are somehow good at getting press...
That's not a legal download.
Bullshit.
Don't make the mistake of assuming all nations operate under the same set of laws.
According to the Copyright Board of Canada, downloading copyright files from P2P networks is completely legal, provided that the copying is done for private and noncommercial use. You don't even need to own the song in another format.
So yes, over a rather large percentage of the earth's total land area, it is a legal download.
maybe we just need to rename songs as .doc or .jpg. If that crap can still catch them, cram the song into real images or insert them into real office documents.
One may insert them into icmp packets (ping still allowed??). What if i encrypt all my email, will encryption be outlawed? The war on file sharing is turning into a war on drugs, we all know how effective it is.
I think anyone can still get packets and or out a given network can download and upload songs or anything. those big 5 labels are causing real damage trying to police the internet and deserves to die real fast
Alright, let me get one thing straight here. I've been in several bands over the last 10-20 years and frankly, I would fucking love it if our material was being actively traded over P2P networks, because at least then someone is listening to and enjoying what I've done. I don't care if I see a dime from P2P, cuz I didn't see a dime from the record company either. I'm still in debt, supposedly paying for the privilege of being in their 'roster' of stars. Well, fuck them. Maybe I made a bad business decision, but I feel zero obligation to think that many other 'artists' haven't also been given similar treatment. Believe me, the sooner we expose the RIAA for what it is (i.e. - a corporate protection agency) and for what it is not (artists' protection), the clearer this ludicrous debate will become.
"Look, Smithers! I'm Davy Crockett!"
iRATE is a program that downloads music that artists have put on the net. These downloads are also taylored to your own tastes, based on comparing what you like with other users. With this, there isn't a need for P2P music file sharing, and risking being sued by the RIAA, as copying this music is sanctioned by the artist. (Unsurprisingly, not much of this music is made by RIAA labels)
I would LOVE to see a university try to block that. A small private one might (and I emphize might) be able to get away with it but a big one? Forget about it.
Hell, our university REQUIRES SSH for many things. You can't telnet to the e-mail cluster any more, it's SSH only. Likewise the webmail is SSL only. You just don't have a choice, you'll use the encryption or you'll not use the system. My department is working on going to that. Going to be no telnet, no FTP, no unencrypted IMAP or pop. Everything will be SSH, SFTP (which is also SSH), or SSL. Unencrypted communications will be in-building only, or for things like the main website. You want to access any systems, you'll do it with an encrypted protocol, or use an encrypted VPN tunnel to get a local address.
So either SSL or SSH would work well. They are just too useful and used for too many things. Try and shut that down and you'll find backlash like you can't believe.