P2P Polluter Shuts Down

Dotnaught writes "Loudeye Corp. said today it is closing its anti-piracy unit, Overpeer, Inc., in an effort to cut costs. Overpeer is best known for polluting P2P networks with garbled digital files. For what it's worth, the Internet filter at CMP Media, where I work, blocks Overpeer's site as 'spyware.'"

Comments

no point anyway

[joe 155]

Whilst I see the logic behind hiring companies like this; I don't think it would do anything to prevent piracy, at best it will make people who want to download films etc. spend longer doing it if they get a bad one, but it doesn't take that much effort to get another copy. It ends up being a way for companies to lose even more money and nothing more.

Re:no point anyway

[squiggleslash]

I'm sure that's true of the movie or song they're trying to download - you've set yourself a specific target, you're going to try and solve it, even if it takes you all day. The long term effect, though, is likely to be that people see the P2P network as less useful as a source of music.

Put it this way: you've just heard a song you like on the radio, and you want a copy. Do you, pre-polluter, go to Kazster, perform a quick search, look at the 17 rips available, download the 192kbps MP3, and five minutes later have the song, or do you go onto Amazon, search for the CD, add it to your shopping basket, check out, and 20 minutes later have an email confirming your order with the CD arriving 3 days-3 weeks later?

Now, post polluter, do you: go to Beartella, perform a quick search, look at the 48 rips available, pick one, knowing, in the gut of your stomach, it's likely to be bogus, download it, play it, it sucks, download next one, it sucks, download next one, won't start, download next one, is this a joke? Download the next one... and an hour or three later, have a 96kbps MP3 that happens to have the music and be what you're prepared to settle on because, damn it, you're not downloading any more tonight, or do you go to Amazon.com, search for the CD, add it to your shopping basket, check out, and 20 minutes later have an email confirming your order, with you sitting back and thinking "It's on the way!"?

In the latter scenario, you'd have to be increasingly desperate and/or cheap not to see Amazon.com (or equivalent) as a more enjoyable way of getting your music.

I'm not suggesting this company was particularly successful at making P2P networks like that, but the whole "Make P2P piracy a complete Pain in the Arse" scenario is one that could work if they put enough effort and resources into it. If I were evil, and I were head of the RIAA, I'd offer to knock down some of those fines I'm imposing on P2P pirates in exchange for them participating in a mass polluting.

Not really a huge victory...

[One Childish N00b]

Not really a huge victory, because the polluted files are still out there - you'd be surprised how many dumbasses don't delete fake files from their directories, and that means all their pollutants out there for the time they've been operating are still floating around, being downloaded and annoying more people - Kazaa and it's network are likely to remain entirely unusable for a long time thanks to this, and what better division to shut down than one that has done it's job, and creating an almost self-perpetuating state of pollution?

I guess the good thing is that now the jackasses that worked for these people are now unemployed - while I largely disagree with illegal P2P filesharing, I can see that it's a symptom of overpriced and 'evil' cartels and hate the fact that they employ shitheads like this, who's sole buisness is rooted firmly into the 'annoy as many people as we can for fun and profit' business model, rather than realising they'd get far more sales (and thus more profit) if they lowered their damn profit margin on every disc

(then again, they'd also save money if they signed good, existing, unsigned bands instead of manufacturing cookie-cutter Britney pop and having to pay songwriters, etc hundreds of thousands of dollars rather than getting the whole thing in one package by signing up real bands, but I can't see that happening any time soon...)

What this really means

[tkrotchko]

It means either:

a) The record companies didn't find this type of disruption cost-effective

or

b) Somebody else can do it better/cheaper

Re:Morphing and going into hiding, more likely.

[StrongAxe]

The IP blocks they use are widely known and have become ineffective against savvy filesharers.

The real problem isn't from savvy file sharers, but rather clueless ones who download the files, don't care that they are corrupted (or more likely, just download them and never actually listen to them), and keep sharing them forever.

Re:Morphing and going into hiding, more likely.

[ScrewMaster]

They try sourcing bandwidth from my cable modem and they'll get to know the dark side of my attorney, I can tell you that.

More likely it was just a simple business decision because Overpeer just hasn't really done anything to justify the money spent on it, much less in terms of reducing P2P activity. Oh sure, providing demographic data by monitoring filesharing is one thing, but all network poisoning does is generate more bad press for the media companies. Maybe somebody upstairs realized that a. it was a stupid idea to begin with, and b. wasn't working anyway.

Re:Morphing and going into hiding, more likely.

[archeopterix]

The IP blocks they use are widely known and have become ineffective against savvy filesharers. More likely, they're going to go under deeper cover, sourcing bandwidth from consumer sources like cable modem and DSL providers to spy on file sharers and pollute the networks. I'm surprised it's taken this long.

I wonder what the next move of the P2P community will be. My bet is on some kind of social filtering - prefer files that are checked by your buddies, slightly less those preferred by their buddies and so on. A decent protocol could do this without compromising anonymity - you only know your direct connections, but not their connections. The centuries old conspiracy model alive and well in the modern technology environment.

Btw, I hardly use any P2P. Most of the files on my disk come from people I know who wanted to share some music they find interesting.