Kazaa Forced To Modify Search Engine

An anonymous reader writes "Eminem, Madonna and Kylie Minogue are just some of the popular artists whose songs are to be blocked from being illegally distributed on the peer-to-peer network Kazaa following Federal Court orders in Australia yesterday. Sharman Networks, the owner of Kazaa, was ordered by the courts to modify the file-sharing software to block a list of search terms -- primarily artist and song names. The search terms are also to be supplied by record companies. The directive follows the record companies' court victory in September against individuals and organizations associated with Kazaa."

Comments

This will block legal file transfers

[bloodbob]

Here is an example of one of the song names that was a part of the complaint against kazaa "Yellow". This basicly means anyone searching for "yellow something" is going to have their download blocked.

The inteersting bit from the article

[Zog The Undeniable]

...was about Audible Magic, a technology that is supposed to identify music from a "fingerprint", regardless of what it's called, and theoretically would negate the need for a keyword search filter. I'd be genuinely interested to see how this works, given that different mp3 encoders produce different results given the same CD or can use different bitrates - and that's without OGG, WMA and other home-creatable formats.

Maybe it's a large scale meatware solution where a downloading clip is streamed in real time into a room full of music experts, probably in Bombay?

Re:A simple solution.

[Anonymous Coward]

*shrug* Just like every other form of copy protection this inconveniences Average Joe but doesn't stop a dedicated attacker. Remember the old C64 days with software that would check for bad sectors on the floppies they were distributed on? Remember "fast hack'em" which copied discs bitwise to avoid the trap? Remember codewheels and how folks dis-assembled the app to provide the answers the game would actually ask for? Remember manual checks and how folks just shared photocopies of the relevant portions of the manual? As I recall SimCity originally had a copy protection screen which required you to hold a small red lens against the page in order to read the right answer -- I seem to recall that the solution was to wrap the entire manual in three wraps of the pink Reynolds wrap before copying it with the brightness turned down a touch.

And notice how many games I haven't mentioned which have been hacked by dis-assembly alone and JMP instructions to bypass the copy protection checks.

The world is now a world where digital information is passed from point to point without any real interference. A "recording industry" is a relic of times gone by -- if they'd slim down and offer cheap recording to all then they'd be able to make a tidy profit 'cause _everyone_ wants to record something these days and studio space is not that expensive to maintain...

Control

[KitesWorld]

Like you said, it's about lining their pockets. One method : Deliberately add words to the list that end up with independant artists (who might release their music on Kazaa themselves) getting blocked.

Prevent your competition from getting exposure = preventing them from becoming 'real' competition.

Me? Paranoid? naaaaaaa.

Re:Control

[falsified]

Example:

My favorite band (And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead) has an LP named Madonna. While I believe they're on a major label now, and I don't know their stance on filesharing, anyone who wants to check out that CD can't, especially since they're sure as hell not gonna play it on the radio. (By the way, check them out. They're not death metal, despite their name.)

LimeWire, eMule, BitTorrent

[tepples]

10,000 words list? I can pretty much bet that most of these will be very general i.e. 'Kylie' instead of 'Kylie Minogue', so any artist named Kylie who want to bypass the grabing hands of the record industry and distribute themselves will now have a much harder time.

No. Independent artists can use LimeWire, which now recognizes Creative Commons licenses on shared media. Or she can use eMule or BitTorrent. But then, independent songwriters will still run into the risk of subconsciously copying a copyrighted song.