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*

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...

[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.

Rootkit keylogger

[Technician]

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

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.

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"

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:ATTN: SWITCHEURS!

[gEvil (beta)]

No, actually he means 'Clarus'...

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.