p2pnet news view | P2P | Music:- You have to laugh.

I do, anyway.

Kevin Bermiester (center) and Michael Speck have, “joined forces to invent technology they say will kill the illegal sharing of pirated content and child porn over peer-to-peer networks,” says The Age.

What’s so funny?

Bermiester is one of the faces behind Sharman Networks’ seriously trashed Kazaa P2P file sharing application — the one used by thousands of RIAA victims.

And Speck is the ex-Australian cop who led a corporate music industry team which nailed Sharman and Kazaa to the floor.

Kazaa’s bosses professed to being supporters of P2P and the P2P community, but that didn’t stop them from trying, and failing miserably, to climb into bed with the corporate music and movie cartels.

“Sharman Networks today launched an on- and offline campaign aimed at trying to talk users into backing its attempts to finally achieve its goal of moving into the corporate world, with special emphasis on the record labels and movie studios,”   p2pnet posted back in 2003.

We went on, “In a collection of cynical (even by Sharman standards) ads and puff releases under the slogan Join the Revolution, the Kazaa p2p application owner says it’s, ‘encouraging users to show their support for peer-to-peer’ and ‘changing perspective’ and ‘publicly showing support for the peer-to-peer revolution which we believe is unstoppable’.”

At the same time Sharman associate Altnet was desperately trying to peddle DRM software described by free net founder Ian Clarke as a ‘lame duck‘.

Sharman eventually paid off the Big 4 labels, Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG, to the tune of $115 million, Speck joined Altnet, and Bermeister  is reportedly backing an Israeli war game, as well as working with Speck.

Meanwhile, he and Speck have dreamed up something which, says The Age, enables the, “instantaneous conversion of infringing activity into legitimate content transactions”.

“In plain English, that means when people search for illegal pirated files they will find only legal versions, which they may then buy,” says the story, going on »»»

The legal version is delivered by the ISP, which receives a cut of the revenue, and the charge is added to the customer’s monthly internet bill.

Mr Speck said the company had completed technical trials and would launch a live trial with an as-yet-unnamed Australian ISP within a month. There was also keen interest from ISPs, law-enforcement agencies and film and music publishers in the United States and Europe.

As well as combating movie, music and game piracy, the technology can be used to block child-porn searches, informing the internet user that they have attempted to access illegal content.

According to Speck, their app works by, “cross-referencing the unique numerical values associated with content files against a list of proven illegal files provided by various sources, including contractors hired by publishers to aid in their anti-piracy efforts”.

Before the ink was dry on Sharman’s cheque for $15,000,000, Bermiester had teamed up with the Big 4’s IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industries) promoting [you guessed it] an anti-piracy thingy.

“There has never been a better time to lock down the players, lock down the points of presence and implement accurate technologies that sniff out infringing files and replace them with non-infringing files without invading privacy of users or their data,” he said in 2006.

“The technologies that will allow these results to be achieved are now available and the companies that own them poised to implement them, the objective is within grasp. With the co-operation of major content owners, the final emergence of a fully legitimized Internet distribution channel could enable the completion of convergence where security in copyright through technology heralds in a new era of growth.”

What a coincidence.

To digress slightly, do you think Audible Magic, the company behind the CopySense nonsense, will sue them?

That’d be good.

After all, “”The CopySense Appliance is the only solution that can identify and block illegal sharing of copyrighted files while allowing other legitimate P2P uses to continue,”  it states unequivocally.

Meanwhile, David Vaile, executive director of the University of NSW’s cyberspace law and policy centre and the vice-chairman of the Australian Privacy Foundation, doesn’t seem enthusiastic about Bermeister/Speck’s 75th effort to cash in on Net music.

He was concerned ISPs’ activity logs would become honeypots, “for parties such as the music industry when they wanted to start prosecutions,” says The Age, adding:

“Society was ‘moving towards ubiquitous surveillance where there’s no reason to be suspicious of any particular individual, but we have to monitor all traffic at all times’, he said.

Jon Newton – p2pnet

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 1:05 pm and is filed under Music, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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