MySpace anti-p2p silver bullet
p2pnet.net news:- Way back in the distant reaches of time Mitch Bainwol, then the newly appointed principal spin doctor for Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG’s RIAA, was busily circulating the halls of Congress, touting a magical cure for p2p.
“It is definitely something that is interesting to people on (Capitol) Hill,” a senior congressional staffer who’d seen a demonstration and who’d “requested anonymity” said at the time, according to CNET News. And the RIAA wanted to know why the commercial p2p companies weren’t using it, or something close to it, to filter unauthorised material on the p2p networks
Sadly, many, if not most, of these small, independent firms have since been crushed by the RIAA’s masters, the members of the Big 4 music cartel.
The product was made by Audible Magic and such was the enthusiasm with which it was being promoted by the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), one could have been forgiven for wondering if the so-called trade unit had a financial interest.
Now, MySpace has announced the launch of Take Down Stay Down, an “innovative new feature for copyright holders that prevents users from re-posting video content in the MySpace community after that content has been removed at the request of the copyright owner”.
It’s being made by Audible Magic.
When the company’s supposed anti-p2p filtering technology first appeared on the scene, “The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been touting technologies offered by Audible Magic as the cure for peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing on university (and high school!) campuses,” said the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), continuing:
While we at EFF support universities taking steps to educate staff and students about copyright law and to control excessive bandwidth usage, it is important that universities are not sold expensive, ineffective solutions simply to appease the public relations needs of the RIAA. It is also important that policymakers not be misled by the bullish pronouncements of the RIAA and Audible Magic regarding the effectiveness of “acoustic filtering” technologies.
Information from public sources suggests that Audible Magic’s filtering technology is trivial to defeat. For universities, this means an investment today may well be worthless tomorrow. Policymakers, meanwhile, would do well to examine all filtering technologies closely before putting faith in the promises of vendors. A close look at Audible Magic’s technology suggests that its filtering is no silver bullet.
An exchange between Audible Magic and the EFF, quickly followed, centring on whether and not the technology actually did what it was supposed to do in the way it was supposed to do it.
In its announcement, MySpace says it’s the “first internet company to launch this type of sophisticated content protection feature, which it is offering to all copyright owners free of charge”.
It’s called, catchily, Take Down Stay Down.
“We have created this new feature to solve a problem that has long frustrated copyright holders and presented technical challenges to service providers – how to prevent copyrighted content from being re-posted by the same or a different user after it has been taken down by the copyright owner,” states Michael Angus, EVP and general counsel for Fox Interactive Media.
Says Fox:
When a content owner informs MySpace that a user has improperly posted its content onto MySpace Videos, not only is the video promptly removed by MySpace, but MySpace also creates a digital fingerprint of the video content and adds it to its copyright filter, which is based on industry-leading Audible Magic technology. If any user tries to upload the same content that has been removed, the filter will recognize the digital fingerprint and block the content from being uploaded. This way, when copyright owners remove content from MySpace, they will have greater comfort that it will stay down and not be reposted. MySpace is the first to offer this feature to copyright owners.
The Take Down Stay Down feature is also integrated into MySpace’s “Content Take Down Tool,” providing copyright owners with a comprehensive solution to identify and remove any unauthorized user-posted content in a manner that is more efficient and effective than any solution previously available to them.
MySpace says other DRM consumer control tools include:
Audio filtering, which screens audio files uploaded by users to hinder any unauthorized music uploads and is offered free to all music copyright owners.
Video filtering, which screens video files uploaded by users to hinder any unauthorized video uploads. MySpace’s launch of video filtering earlier this year made MySpace the largest web video site to offer free video filtering to copyright owners.
How long before curious hackers hack the Audible Magic technology?
Not long.
Also See:
distant reaches – P2p ops decry RIAA filter claims, March 4, 2004
CNET News – File-swap ‘killer’ grabs attention, March 3, 2004
MySpace – MySpace Launches Take Down Stay Down Copyright Protection, May 11, 2007
EFF – Audible Magic – No Silver Bullet for P2P Infringement, July 12, 2004
If your Net access is blocked by goverment restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at thIs the endSurvey: How Did Copyright Infringement Become Equated with Robbery? (of the Net) nigh?zze University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
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Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!
May 15th, 2007 at 10:36 am
surly just reencoding the video will do the job… if its able to detect the changes between a differently encoded version of a file it may be possible to create a file that will fool it into believing its blocked when its infact innocent.
i may have to surrender to the darkside and get a my space account to try this out. . .
February 7th, 2009 at 11:29 am
honestly, theres not alot of rampant filesharing going on thru MySpace. Real pirates dont go near anything as stupid as myspace, comeon
this is yet another ‘lookatme lookatme’ puff piece vomited up by the MAFIAA and promptly marched out by the lame scream media as gospel. ‘We are doing are part to ensure copyright holders have opportunities never before offered’ should read, ‘We have new, incredibly expensive, useless and annoying ways of fuckin up your day in the name of profit.’
Just to save everyone some time. This tool reads the md5 hash of the file, nothing more. Each hash is unique typically dependent on filesize, name, and type of file it is. If you block UDP in your firewall, browser, router, wherever, this lame software cant read the hash. There its hacked. Oh, another way would be to delete one second from the video/audio file and it gets a new hash, or convert it from AAC to mp3, etc. Hacked.
and they havent even rolled it out yet.
see, they are trying to set precedence, when an ISP wont adopt the ‘graduated response’ extortion, they state ‘but New Zealand did it’, and when facebook wont filter big$ shit, they state ‘but myspace did it’,
ad nauseum
February 7th, 2009 at 11:36 am
I envision this:
http://www.fundacion.telefonica.com/at/tec/tec34.jpg
when I think of the copyright trolls scurrying around looking for infringing content on the internet. Thousands of underpaid (cause you know the music industry dont pay em) little worker ants looking for something infringing. I even bet they get paid per instance they find.
‘I GOT ONE, I GOT ONE’ (everyone else applauds)
/sarcasm
stw