Dutch Parent Spy app
p2pnet / p2p News:- ‘Pause Parent Play’ is the heart of the major film studios’ effort to get mothers and fathers to act as unpaid movie industry cops, policing their own children.
Called the Parental File Watch program," it’s made by Denmark’s DtecNet and is being promoted by the MPAA’s (Motion Picture Association of America).
DtecNet says the application is, “aimed at parents to help them clean up their own or their children’s computers by removing infringing music and movie files through an easy to use interface. The program further allows a search of the computer, to see if any of the popular Peer-2-Peer file sharing programs have been installed on the computer."
Now, says The Register, in Holland, the entertainment industry’s BREIN pseudo cop unit is to release “free parental software” that’ll “detect file sharing programs such as Kazaa or illegal media files on PCs”.
The Dutch Parent Spy app will be available as of September 22 but, like the US item, it won’t remove files. Parents "have to do this manually if they wish," says The Register, adding:
“BREIN says that the software is basically a public awareness campaign. Too many youngster do not seem to realise that it is illegal to make copyrighted music available online for others to download and that illegal file sharing is hurting the music and movie business, BREIN director Tim Kuik explains. The website where the free software can be downloaded is owned by Dutch entertainment industry organisation NVPI.”
Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet.net
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win
- Mohandas Gandhi
See:-
movie industry cops – MPAA ‘Pause Parent Play’, July 22, 2005
The Register – Parental software to detect Dutch illegal file sharing, September 8, 2005
September 9th, 2005 at 6:14 pm
It would be funny if some cracker broke into the software download site and replaced the spy program with one that performed a DOS on the music cartel’s websites. I personally would like to see the RIAA, MPAA, and BSA put out of business by the angry populace. If this is done, maybe it would teach other cartels that the customer is always right.
September 9th, 2005 at 7:13 pm
Hmmm, where’s the app that lets children monitor what their parents do with the household computer? Thoughtcrime anyone?
September 10th, 2005 at 2:58 am
Yeah! There’s never a hacker around when you need one!
I wish the benevolent hackers of the world would put their skills to good use…
September 10th, 2005 at 5:47 am
“illegal media files” huh? Just how is this app going to know that they’re not “legal”? Perhaps anything without MS designed and xxAA approved DRM maybe? How many files for non-ms media playing software will trigger false positives i wonder?
I can see it now, everyone who has itunes on their pc and grabs this program suddenly discovers that even their music purchased from apple via the official website is now “illegal”.
Not to mention all those games that use mp3, ogg, avi, mpg or other non-drm’d file formats for audio and video.
If that is the criteria (ie non MS drm = illegal), i wonder if they actually got permission from MS to use that drm info at all? Or did they happen to “reverse engineer” the info from drm’d files they had in their posession and forget to ask MS if that was ok?
September 10th, 2005 at 6:28 am
quote:
have to do this manually if they wish…
This smacks of the other unsuccessful attempts at removing “infringing files that have been floated in the past by the likes of the RIAA. The problem was that the program was an all purpose search engine, looking for *.mp3, *wav, *.avi and the like. It was very successful in finding mp3’s, including those that were needed by the OS for sound and for those included in games that were legal apps. When an uninformed user hit the erase all it did just that and suddenly, the computer didn’t play sounds anymore. There was a reason that the previous programs died a quick and quiet death. Those uninformed computer users got really irate when they found they had to reinstall the OS to fix the problem they created by wholesale deletion of all mp3 files.
No doubt this wonderware of a program will be able to distinglish between legal files and what are claimed to be infringed files. Either that or it too will die a quick and quiet death as its predecessors have.
September 10th, 2005 at 8:49 am
I can see legal problems happing in the future. If these app’s are promoted or seam to be promoting that these app’s are so called illegal app’s. I could see developers to start suing RIAA types for defamation damages.
September 11th, 2005 at 4:47 am
hehehe that’d be sweet, sweet irony ;o) Poetic justice too.