p2pnet.net News:- P2P United has hand-delivered a letter to RIAA boss Mitch Bainwol demanding immediate access to ’song-recognition software’ demonstrated to Congress as proof that porn and copyrighted material can be filtered, contrary to commercial p2p operator claims that it can’t.

Representing the five major commmercial p2p applications, the p2p lobby group wants to test the technology - produced by Audible Magic - in the wild, "particularly given that an integral part of its intended application appears to require the redesign of the software developed by the members of P2P United," it says in its letter, going on:.

"Please consider this a formal request for immediate access to the program and to all appropriate demonstration databases so that we may arrange for it to be independently evaluated by both governmental and private experts."

Bainwol is quoted as saying "Audible Magic proves (filtering) can be done" in a CNET story here.

"This is not speculation; it’s a real live technology that’s on the market today. If the peer-to-peer community is serious about becoming legitimate, one would think they would explore this kind of technological tool to help address the piracy problem."

Last year senator Lindsay Graham and four other US legislators contacted P2P United calling for its member companies to develop filters to stop "illegal material" such as porn from being traded online.

Introducing filters into centralised apps such as the old Napster would be possible. But one of the main points about programs developed by P2P United members FreePeers (BearShare), Manolito P2P (Blubster), LimeWire (Limewire), Grokster Ltd (Grokster), MetaMachine (eDonkey2000) and Streamcast Networks (Morpheus) is: they’re decentralized.

This means users looking for material to trade or simply access search a number of individual computers on individual p2p networks until they find what they want. This same decentralized search process make it impossible for ‘filters’ to track searches.

To write programs able to interdict porn or anything else would mean completely changing the characteristics of existing p2p software, which would in turn mean changing the nature of the existing commercial p2p business.

And that’s obvously impractical, say the owners of the p2p applications.

The letter also calls on the RIAA to stop characterizing the Audible Magic software as "innocuous" and a "filter".

It’s neither innocuous nor a mere filter, says P2P United executive director, Adam Eisgrau.

"Specifically, based upon published reports, the members of P2P United are deeply concerned that the technology your industry has endorsed is not only not an innocuous ‘filter,’ but actually is more fairly understood as a warrantless wiretap designed to divert and privately inspect potentially every file requested by a P2P user, resulting in, among other things, de facto censorship, and centralized communications bottlenecking," says the letter, going on:

"Moreover, given that peer-to-peer software has been found as a matter of uncontested fact in federal court to be used substantially for and substantially capable of non-infringing purposes that do not implicate recorded music (or, indeed, copyrighted material at all), we believe that lawmakers and the public are due a clear explanation as to why the public should be required to subject their electronic communications to ungoverned surveillance by an understandably parochial industry collective.

"We also ask that you be clear regarding whether you also propose to subject the other principal means of distributing copyrighted material without authorization to similarly mandated surveillance? These means, as identified by the US Department of Justice before Congress, of course include popular e-mail and instant messaging programs like those developed by AOL/Time Warner and the internet, itself."

Audible Magic describes itself as, "a copyright information company that provides content monitoring and anti-piracy services for the media and entertainment industry" and says customers include the RIAA. It says it also has, "relationships with many of the major labels, industry organizations, and digital media companies" which have have enabled it to build a copyrighted music database holding data on more than 3.7 million sound recordings.

"This database provides the basis for Audible Magic’s monitoring and anti-piracy services," it says.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2004 at 10:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. 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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