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MPAA Developing Digital Fingerprinting Technology
Danathar writes "The MPAA is looking to use digital fingerprinting technologies that in conjunction with legislation will enable and force ISPs to look for network traffic that matches the signatures. " From the article: " Once completed, Philips' technology--along with related tools from other companies--could be a powerful weapon in Hollywood's increasingly aggressive attempts to choke off the flood of films being traded online."
And ISPs are going to search for fingerprints in encrypted downloads how exactly?
It would be relatively easy for the next generation of P2P applications to add very basic encryption. Possibly based on a captcha (just a regular zip file encrypted against the random letters contained in a gif).
Or will the MPAA's next trick be to purchase legislation banning encryption.
Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. -- Bruce Schneier
Even if they managed to get the fingerprinting to work, it is dead easy to circumvent.
Instead of splitting a torrent they way it is done today, just put every N bytes in the first block etc.
Another approach can be to just encrypt each transmission from a peer to another peer with a key unique for that particular connection. XOR will work just fine. (Unless they extract the key of course, but that will require more sophisticated sniffing software).
Imagine the sheer amount of data that has to be processed...
It is sort of amusing that this technology is being developed by Philips, makers of the Philips DVP-642, probably the most pirate friendly DVD player on the market today.
We have 1TB disks coming up soon.
I don't know how many terrabytes of released music exist in the world, but I imagine it's a finite number.
We'll probably have 100TB disks, and then 10,000 TB cubes at some point in the future.
Perhaps all the worlds music will fit in the space of a cubic centimeter.
You visit your friend's house, put your cube-disk next to his cube-disk, hit "copy", and then walk home with your copy of the entire world's music.
Really, there's not a whole friggin' lot you can do about that.
Perhaps the possesion of world-music cube-disks will be the next marijuana possesion.
First I read this story today, and I swear I still want my 5 minutes back from wasting my time reading it. Then comes along this story about the MPAA developing "fingerprinting" technology. I suppose that when someone rips a DVD using DVDShrink or DVDDecryptor or any number of other programs that said program is going to copy said fingerprint wholly intact into the resulting file even if it compresses said file. Then, after I convert it to DivX format, I'm sure the fingerprint is still going to be intact. Then after I transfer it with (Insert any of BitTorrent, WinMX, IRC, FTP, etc, etc, etc, etc) the fingerprint is going to be sent intact without using a fragmented TCP packet. Assuming all this to be true, my ISP is supposed to then pick out this needle-sized fingerprint in a galactic-sized haystick.
This is pure science fiction.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Don't think so. The DMCA is there to protect media rights holders, not the common man.
... oh, wait, all privacy laws have been stripped away from US citizens since 9/11, so I guess that won't work either.
You can't, say, have a encrypted hard disk, then sue the MPAA for decrypting it when they arrest you for movie trading, based on the DMCA.
You might have a case with regards to privacy
Face it America: You're screwed.
Perhaps this will lead to a division in society between the people who know the MPAA can't take our money and those who don't. These companies exist only because of us, the customers. I have no problem at all telling them to %$#@ off, because I know entertainment is cheap and very easy to come by. Take my kid to a movie vs. take my kid to a park vs. take my kid to a ball game, whatever. Movies really are not that big of a deal. Sure I might miss great movies like Dr. Strangelove, but, ultimately, movies are just a medium for these stories and certainly not a requirement. Indy productions, stage adaptations, etc. are all different ways for the talented people out there to tell their stories. Big company execs can kiss my ass for all I care.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
IANAL and IRECTAL, but why do ISPs have to then shoulder the responsibility of policing all this traffic and enforcing this proposed law? I don't think it could even be accomplished, considering how many ISPs are out there, and how hard it would be to make them all put in the same effort and follow the same procedures. It seems to me the only way to force such an internet-wide filtering scheme would be to pass all the data through a government server (or servers), and that's not going to happen considering how everyones so used to things being the way they are now, infrastructure-wise.
The MPAA/RIAA need to realize that these measures they keep proposing time and again are futile. Even if your ISP started policing your traffic, you could switch to a smaller ISP that's being more lax in its enforcement and is "below the radar".
And how does the MPAA propose getting these digital fingerprints onto ALL media? And how long would it take for someone to figure out how to strip the fingerprint from the file?
When it comes down to it, *any* DRM in audio files is defeatable by playing it back on a high quality speaker and re-recording it with a high quality recorder. A similar set-up could be used (with more difficulty) for video I suppose as well.
The MPAA/RIAA need to change their tactics in a big way and figure out how they can give the market what they want at a price they want, so that everyone who's downloading movies and music today decides that the MPAA/RIAA's new way is easier, and downloading isn't worth the hassle. I think one of the big things they're releasing is that people will pay more for special features and other things that add value to their product which are simply unavailable online.
The MPAA/RIAA's realization will come, I just don't know how many more years it will take and how many eras we need to go through (Usenet era, Napster era, Kazaa era, BitTorrent era) before they realize that people out there are innovative enough to come up with a new filesharing means, always. Maybe the current crop of CEOs and managers need to be gone before that will ever happen.
We have implemented a box at work that monitors all traffic for 'stuff', and its slowed us down significantly. Regardless if its Internet web traffic or simple SQL queries on internal servers.
Having this stuff mandated on our isp will just about kill our connection. ( and raise costs ) Between this and spam it will drive people off line ( which might be their ultimate goalanyway, cant download if you arent on the 'pirate-net' )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Wow, is this a kind of an april's fool or something? I don't even think I need to comment much on the infeasibility of this...
Next thing you know, the RIAA will be solving NP-complete problems in constant time or something...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Frankly, I don't want to have to deal with any kind of "dispute process" or take the risk that a failure of that process might land me in court. File-sharing of music and movies isn't my problem: it's not some significant social issue that we all need to be concerned about. Racism ... sure. Health care ... certainly. Undue corporate influence in Congress ... absolutely. But ... Music? Movies? Why are we even considering subverting our national communications system to serve the needs of a few large corporations? Most of whom, I might add, are foreign interests.
... some organisms survive change, and other's don't. Let the RIAA and the MPAA and all their member corporations deal with the pace of progress like every other adaptable company that survived the advent of the Internet. Gee ... the public Internet makes "rampant piracy" possible? You're losing billions? THAT'S JUST TOO GOD DAMN BAD. The world changed around you, and in any event does not exist solely for your enrichment. Deal with it.
This is really starting to get out of hand. I mean, the entertainment industry is not some great cultural treasure that must be preserved at all costs (the people that run it think so, but they are mistaken.) This is an economic matter, no more and no less. I didn't shed a tear when Westinghouse went belly up, I didn't lose any sleep when K-Mart filed for bankruptcy
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
"This topic is absolutely chock-a-block with discussions about which burglars' tools work best to fuck over and steal from our neighbors. What next, discussions on how to cut through school zones and take kindergarten-age hostages to elude the police during a high-speed chase? "
I look at it like this. A discussion on how to preserve the privacy and liberty of those of us that do not commit copyright violations. Allowing this is like allowing the cops to tap my phone becuase my neighbor was caught committing a crime. It's unacceptable.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
A "little" off my own topic since I submitted the story....but the result of this I would imagine would be that p2p will start using SSL to encrypt the traffic (I put this in my text blurb for the story...but slashdot editors chopped it). Anyhow...this will NOT only defeat the MPAA, but MANY universities use trafic shapers to fingerprint Bittorrent and p2p traffic to keep it from saturating their bandwidth to the Internet. SSL encrypted p2p will effectively make packet shaping these services impossible.
I think the banks of the world might have something to say about that, and last time I checked, they are way bigger, and wield *much* bigger sticks than the MPAA/RIAA
The revolution will not be televised. It won't be on a friggin blog either
Quote frankly I'm having way too much fun with books at the moment. Real, Dead Tree Format books. There's some great stuff being produced, not like the pap that is a "blockbuster" movie.
I walked away from new music ages ago. I neither buy new stuff nor download anything. Because I also don't listen to the radio (*shudder*), I have no idea what music is out there. Thus I don't buy any. I'm watching less and less TV, I don't download movies and I don't go to the cinema. Movies are coming out now, I don't know what they are. When I do finally find out about them, I wonder why anyone pays money to see them, apart from being able to say they paid money and saw them.