P2P Program to Match Files to Product Origin

Keiron Waites writes "A program to match p2p downloads with the original products they came from has been released. ShareMonkey is free software for Microsoft Windows, with an additional plugin for the Shareaza p2p application. ShareMonkey lets you right click on a file and choose "Where is this file from?", which will direct you to a listing of products that carry the file. ShareMonkey is a service for those p2p users that download copyrighted files in a "try before you buy" capacity and is an attempt to bridge the gap between copyright infringement and subsequent purchasing of a product."

Comments

Hey what's that option there?

[Mr EdgEy]

Sounds risky. *Scrolls past to the Download option*

Re:Hey what's that option there?

[john g the 4th]

I'm sure the 5 people who honestly download copyrighted content on the internet to "try it before buying it" will enjoy this service.. but I doubt anyone will pay for it. Especially since they are downloading free content from the internet to begin with.
People get paid for this.

Re:Hey what's that option there?

[Gr8Apes]

I believe strongly you're mistaken, or you know a bunch of freeloaders.

I have downloaded content to see if I like it. It's been about 50/50 on whether I like the remaining content enough to buy it. I really wish I'd done that before purchasing "Who Killed the Zutons?". (The answer, btw, is "The Zutons")

Why do I buy it if I already have it? Because MP3s in generally sound like crap. Why do people buy songs they hear on the radio? Same reason. Hint, if you really want to, you can record radio tracks and slice and dice, but the quality's so poor there's no reason to. VHS tapes can easily accommodate 8 hours of FM quality audio.

Re:Hey what's that option there?

[Xymor]

So, as long it's low quality, it's ok to freeload?

Will those people sharing lossless flac files will burn in hell then?

Re:Hey what's that option there?

[Gr8Apes]

Guess it's been a while since I've downloaded any music... :)

But, when you're looking for something new and on the fringe, you usually don't find FLAC files from what I experienced at the time. But, I would buy what I like anyways, in support of the artists. I bought She Wants Revenge based on three songs I heard, and overall I'm pretty happy with them. There's a couple like the Zutons that made me wish I'd downloaded them first, because the single acceptable song on the CD didn't make it worth buying the entire CD. I could have lived without the single songs.

So far this year there hasn't even been any music interesting enough to download, from my perspective. We're already through a quarter of it, and that's pretty bad.

Re:Hey what's that option there?

[brouski]

I do happen to know a bunch of freeloaders.

They're called "average people".

Re:Hey what's that option there?

[john g the 4th]

Generally.. if someone plans on buying something, they are going to buy it regardless of how it sounded online. Granted there are a few times where someone will hear something they downloaded, and say, "Hey I need to get that," but rarely will someone download material like this as an attempt to "try it out" before buying it. A good example is that guy (you know him... we all do) that will download a movie 5 times to find a good quality version of it, and eventually give up and buy the DVD in the end. That same guy will get a DVD quality download of another movie, and never spend a cent (save the $1 for the DVD media to burn it on) on that movie. Its not freeloading.. its human nature.

Re:Hey what's that option there?

[Crunchie Frog]

I really wish I'd done that before purchasing "Who Killed the Zutons?". (The answer, btw, is "The Zutons")
Awww man, Put spoiler tags at the top of your post next time. j/k

This 'could' be a good thing...

[mulvane]

I try before I buy on most everything. If this works as described, I could possibly find a cheaper solution than I am usually accustomed to. On the flip side, it could be used as a fingerprint tool to id the content you are trying before you buy and either delete or disable it somehow until you can prove you own a valid license for use. Time will tell.

Re:This 'could' be a good thing...

[nystire]

I'm just wondering if the "Notify the **AA" option can be disabled or not. :)

Re:This 'could' be a good thing...

[cultrhetor]

I'm surprised - we made it three posts in before whining about the cartels who had NOTHING to do with this software.

Re:This 'could' be a good thing...

[hey!]

Well, we've been discussing some interesting trends here recently.

(1) the inability of the recording industry to find a sustainable business model for the Internet era.

(2) the death of the album, tied to the fact the industry only knows how to sell pop artists whose métier is the three minute pop single.

Something like this might well be a cure for both problems.

The industry could release songs into the P2P universe where they'd be freely shared. The songs would sell pay downloads of collections. Of course people could start sharing the pay downloads, but I think this is less likely to happen if they make the pay download iTunes simple and iTunes affordable. If it's even just a little bit of a PITA to get the whole album downloaded, and the entire album is less than $10, then they'll sell a lot of albums. The important thing is to give consumer impulse a free reign.

The problem with the recording industry as I see it is that they're facing a perfect business storm, of which downloading is a part, but other factors play as well, some of which are of their own making. The biggest problem with the industry now is a broader cultural crisis in music: as commercial radio is increasingly dominated by big companies running robot stations playing a small number of formats, there is less and less room for idiosyncrasy and therefore less room for creativity.

Less creativity means that product innovation stagnates. Does there need to be more than, say, 100 new pop tunes a year, or a 100 new country-pop tunes?

Commercial radio and downloads (say through iTunes) offer the same end use: somewhat random sequences of short singles tracks. They are not going to be able to go that well a third time and draw out significant new profits.

The death of independent radio makes it hard to sell anything but singles. Corporations aren't going to risk valuable air time to play something that takes more than five minutes of attention, especially if it gets in the way of packing the maximum commercial time into the hour.

Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the death of classical radio, which, aside from public radio (which is incresaingly turning to talk formats), had been a labor of love for a number of small stations. It would be in the music company's interest to promote interest in classical music, because while many people might download the opening movement of Beethoven's fifth, if you succeed in interesting them in the symphony, you've sold an album. Likewise millions and millions of people would download "The Ride of the Valkeries", but if you've hooked them on the whole opera cycle, you've hit the jackpot.

Re:This 'could' be a good thing...

[DJCacophony]

...nothing TO YOUR KNOWLEDGE to do with it

Re:This 'could' be a good thing...

[cdrguru]

If I understand you correctly you are proposing that people would pay for collections of stuff they could download for free and the value proposition would be that they wouldn't have to hunt down all the songs in the collection. Now maybe if you had an album of 10 songs and only one of them was freely available some folks might buy the album with the other nine.

But I certainly don't see any disincentive to share the results of that purchase. You are still trapped by the "let's share" meme that pretty much means any digital item should be sold for its reproduction cost - zero.

Rootkit keylogger

[Technician]

Wow, most of my songs are from Media Sentry! ;-)

Re:So it's legal now?

[mulvane]

Talk about not RTFA. But damn, did you even read the post? Its not by Microsoft, its for Microsoft.

Wait.....

[LordPhantom]

I'm not a lawyer, but I can't see this being embraced by many copyright holders for the simple reason that accepting this would to some degree weaken a legal defense of their copyright and/or damages in future litigation.

Re:Wait.....

[uolamer]

I dont see this being embraced either. From what i can tell this is simply a silly way for the makers of this program to make money. I use it on a file example.XviD.avi and they send me to amazon.com using their referral code for that movie. It does hash the file and sends that along with the file name, so over time they might be able to do a better job. I just dont see it working that well, if your using it, you probably already have a good non-drm version of it. Why buy it at that point?

Re:Wait.....

[LordPhantom]

Well, remember the focus of this is on Software, not movies (IIRC), so in the case of software, things like support, etc. Not to mention some level of guilt in not paying for something that's actually useful to you (especially in the case of reasonably priced software).

Isn't this service kind of redundant?

[Odiumjunkie]

If you're the type of person that would download and run an undocumented installer from a pretty much unknown source on a Windows box to find out where your files are from, let me save you some time:

Your warez are the intellectual property of eastern-european content producers, and all have filenames like "BRITNEY_SPEARS_NAKED_FUCK_SEX_ANAL_REAL_GENUINE_H OT_ACTION.JPG.GIF.EXE"

Re:Isn't this service kind of redundant?

[DjRenigade]

This si FUCKING Crazy!!! Oh i know. let me try this prog for a while(insert Ip Logger)and let the owner find my ass qiuckly!!! HELL NO!! Bunch of dumbasses!!!

Love the lack of a privacy statement

[RobOnt]

Looooove the lack of a privacy statement on the website for the software.....

Finally...

[mattgreen]

I can track down the origin of this readme.txt file I downloaded several years ago. I feel quite dirty about it to this day, and consider it one of the great mistakes of my youth.

Fantastic!

[fragreaper]

...now I can see how much money I have saved!

Re:I wonder how long before this is hacked...

[aussie_a]

Who cares, they're pirates and therefore not deserving of protection. At least, that's what the RIAA has taught me.

Re:My question:

[hacker]

Can you download into a non-shared folder? If not, then it's not the p2p for me (which is why I only use bittorrent for distros).

Uhm... Bittorrent is p2p, because as you're downloading, its uploading your already-fetched blocks to other p2p clients awaiting receipt of those blocks. You don't need to have files in a "shared folder" to share files over Bittorrent (or most p2p protocols, in fact).

Re:ATTN: SWITCHEURS!

[gEvil (beta)]

No, actually he means 'Clarus'...

Re:This has been around for ages

[DJCacophony]

Software companies don't lose money by letting people try the full version instead of just a portion of it. Restaurants do. Thus, shut up.

Re:My question:

[DJCacophony]

I think the OP meant, could he download files into a folder that could not be subsequently uploaded from?

license?

[pmsyyz]

Isn't it actually freeware instead of free software? I can't get to the website to check and it doesn't have a Wikipedia entry.

Re:This has been around for ages

[DJCacophony]

You are obviously ignoring the alternative, offering time-limited demos that offer the full feature set, instead of offering time limited demos that offer a crippled feature set that nags you whenever you try to do any of the standard functions, only 1/10th of which are supported in the demo.

Re:My question:

[voice_of_all_reason]

I'm pretty sure most clients force sharing of the download directory (emule). So either you have to move them out immediately after downloading or think of something clever. And they auto-share incomplete stuff.

Re:My question:

[Wavemaker]

No, they dont. You can share whichever folder you want, even none at all.

Come on, really? I'm not impressed

[shadowspar]

OK, so I don't own a Windoze box, but they have a web-based service called ThankBand -- you upload an MP3 file and it (supposedly) tells you where to buy the music. I've got some J-Pop tracks lying around that I've never been able to figure out the artists for, so I go and give it a shot -- the songs had filenames like f12dac3oiawj9ret.mp3 and I can't seem to get any search hits for the bits of the lyrics I can make out.

Uploaded file: (j-pop)unknown - unknown.mp3

• Unknown Road
• Mission Top Secret, Destination Unknown
• Deep Unknown 2 - (10:45)

Hrmph. Well, no surprise, that one's a bit obscure. Let's try something slightly more widely known:

Uploaded file: (DDR)King Kong & D. Jungle Girls - Boom Boom Dollar.mp3

• King Kong & The D Jungle Girls - Greatest Hits
• Super Eurobeat '91
• I Love ZYX: Italo Disco Collection, Vol. 5

Heeey, not bad! I wonder...

> cp "Jewel - Standing Still.mp3" foobar.mp3
Uploaded file: foobar.mp3

• FOOBAR: An artificial intelligence based finite element system
• Corporate - A Pack of 2 DVds
• Dr. Seuss - The Hoober-Bloob Highway

What? Oh, don't tell me...

> cp "Natasha Bedingfield-These Words.mp3" fredmbogo.mp3
Uploaded file: fredmbogo.mp3

• Sorry, there were no results found for your file. Please try locating the album below.

> mv fredmbogo.mp3 "Ozzy Osbourne - Crazy Train.mp3"
Uploaded file: Ozzy Osbourne - Crazy Train.mp3

• Essential Ozzy Osbourne
• Black Sabbath: Greatest Hits 1970-1978
• Blizzard of Ozz

Yeah, that's what I figured. Come on, guys; the motive is laudable, but any dumbass can go and type a filename into Google. To get a mention on the front page of Slashdot, you should really have to do better than that.

Re:This has been around for ages

[ragabash13]

Ice cream. Baskin Robbins has those tiny pink spoons.

Re:Come on, really? I'm not impressed

[jetxee]

That's impressive. Thank you for testing and review. That's why I am reading Slashdot, because I am too lazy to do things like this myself.

Doesn't matter.

[ScrewMaster]

ShareMonkey is a service for those p2p users that download copyrighted files in a "try before you buy" capacity and is an attempt to bridge the gap between copyright infringement and subsequent purchasing of a product.

Doesn't matter. They'll either get the crap sued out of them, or be forced to give up their logs to the RIAA, which will just result in another round of "settlements."

No thanks.

Re:My question:

[ScrewMaster]

Most of them enable sharing by default, which behavior seems to be what has enabled most of the RIAA lawsuits. Turning it off is a good idea, all things considered, if you live in the U.S.