File-swap 'killer' grabs attention
Last modified: March 3, 2004, 4:00 AM PST
By John Borland, Staff Writer, http://news.com.com/2100-1025-5168505.html

A new political battle is brewing over Net music swapping, focusing on a company that claims to be able to automatically identify copyrighted songs on networks like Kazaa and to block illegal downloads.

Los Gatos, Calif.-based Audible Magic has been making the rounds of Washington, D.C., legislative and regulatory offices for the last month, showing off technology it says can sit inside peer-to-peer software and automatically stop swaps of copyrighted music from artists such as Britney Spears or Outkast.


News.context

What's new:
Legislators are hearing a pitch from the record industry about new technology that could squelch music file swapping.
Bottom line:
Audible Magic says it can identify copyrighted songs and block illegal downloads. Its technology is still being tested and could yet prove unworkable, but limited demos are turning heads in legislative offices.

More stories on this topic
The company's technology is still being tested and could yet prove unworkable. But limited demonstrations have already turned some heads in legislative offices.

"It is definitely something that is interesting to people on (Capitol) Hill," said one senior congressional staffer who had seen the demonstration and requested anonymity. "We are open to all kinds of different solutions at this point. Having the technological ability to do this certainly opens up some opportunities."

Audible Magic has predictably become a protege of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which has helped the company gain entree to official Washington circles. The group says Audible Magic's technology, or something like it, should be adopted by file-swapping companies if they are serious about not supporting widespread copyright infringement.

The RIAA's backing, and the month-long press tour, has given the technology new credibility in legislative, regulatory and university circles. After watching a demonstration at RIAA headquarters in late January, University of Rochester Provost Chuck Phelps said he instructed his technology staff to evaluate the technology for use on his campus.

The RIAA isn't pressing for legislation or enforced usage of Audible Magic's software, at least not yet. Indeed, in an election year, any serious congressional attention to the issue is unlikely. But peer-to-peer companies are keenly aware of the potential for political strong arming--and of the threat it poses to the world of file swapping.

Privacy advocates and file-swapping backers have been deeply critical of any technology that would enforce monitoring or blocking of file swapping or any other Internet service. They argue that filters could infringe on free speech and block technological innovation, all to serve the entertainment industry's relatively narrow interests.

Nevertheless, the vast popularity of file-swapping networks like Kazaa remains largely based on trades of copyrighted songs, videos and software, according to many Net analysts. Being forced to install song-stopping filters inside software such as Kazaa--much as a court required of Napster in its heyday–-could severely disrupt the ability of file swappers to freely trade songs.

In past months, peer-to-peer executives including Sharman Networks' Nikki Hemming have repeatedly told legislators that it was technically impossible or infeasible to install adequate filtering systems on their networks. Now some are switching focus, saying that even if filtering is technically possible, mandating it would be a disastrous mistake.

Requiring filters "would amount to the anointment of a specific technology as the winner in what the (recording) industry has made a file-sharing war," said Adam Eisgrau, executive director of P2P United, a file-swapping company trade association. "It is time that (the entertainment industry) be politely told that theirs is not the only social and economic interest at stake."

P2P United members have not seen Audible Magic's technology, Eisgrau noted. His group sent letters to RIAA Chief Executive Officer Mitch Bainwol and Audible Magic earlier in the week asking for a demonstration.

In an interview with CNET News.com, Bainwol said he would be delighted to do so: "The peer-to-peer community has said they are serious about filtering. But they've said they can't filter. We're saying, well, the good news is that you can."

From Napster's death to Audible Magic
The idea of filtering file-swapping networks got its first test run in Napster's last days, when courts mandated that the company block trades of copyrighted songs with near-perfect accuracy. The company first tried to block key works, but that failed when users simply renamed their songs.

Later, it began blocking using audio "fingerprinting" technology supplied by partner Relatable, and the amount of material available through the service dropped from tens of millions of files to just a handful almost overnight. Napster closed its doors to the public not long afterwards.

Audible Magic's song-identifying technology is the product of a group of former Yamaha sound engineers, who originally created the software to help movie post-production studios search massive databases of sound effects such as footsteps or door slams. In the late 1990s, they joined forces with former Hewlett-Packard marketer Vance Ikezoye and his newly formed Audible Magic startup, and turned their attention to identifying digital media files such as songs.

The company's technology works by identifying "psycho-acoustical" properties--essentially the computer equivalent of listening to the song itself. That means that the identification procedure is flexible. A song might be compressed into a lower quality recording, or have a few seconds of silence taken out at the beginning or end, or be otherwise transformed, and the technology will still recognize it as the same song, the company says.

The identification technology has already won credibility, used by songwriters' and publishers' trade association SESAC to identify when songs are played on broadcast radio in order to collect royalties. Several CD pressing plants also use the technology to track what they're manufacturing and ensure that their customers aren't trying to create counterfeit discs.

But it has been the company's peer-to-peer-focused efforts that have now brought it squarely to the forefront of the copyright debates.

Audible Magic is offering two different versions of its technology, one focused on networks and one on file-swapping software itself.

For several years it has tested a network-based "appliance," which would sit inside an Internet service provider (ISP) or business network and monitor data traffic as it goes by. If it identifies a copyrighted song, the technology would stop the transfer in progress.

A test of that technology was held at the University of Wyoming last year, but was ended after students complained about privacy invasions. In response, Ikezoye offered a university-focused version that simply blocks the copyrighted songs, and does not link specific trades to specific computer users.

That's helped spur new interest in the technology, such as from the University of Rochester's Phelps, although announced customers are still few and far between.

Inside your software?
The company's main demonstration for the last several weeks has been a version built into a piece of open-source Gnutella software. Similarly, it could be built into any other popular file-swapping package, company CEO Ikezoye said.

In that software-based version, the technology watches what songs are being downloaded, and when it has enough data to make a match--usually about a third to half of the file--it uses the Net connection to call Audible Magic's database. If it finds a match with a copyrighted song, it stops the download midstream.

Similarly, when files are put into a shared folder, the demonstration software calls up the Audible Magic database. If it finds a match, it prevents the song from being shared with other people on the network.

That second version of the software has not been tested on a large scale. While it appeared to function well in a single-user demonstration, implementing it on a widespread basis, particularly in software such as Kazaa or Morpheus where tens of millions of search requests a day are made, could have unforeseen consequences.

Moreover, for the filtering to work on a large scale, Ikezoye said that pressure--probably through legislation--would have to be put on file-swapping companies, which would be unlikely to voluntarily adopt his technology universally.

"This implementation clearly requires the cooperation one way or another of the peer-to-peer vendors," Ikezoye said.

Audible Magic's technology is far from perfect, even if it works as demonstrated. It's most critical weakness is likely to be encrypted files and encrypted networks, which its audio recognition software can't break through. Nor is it difficult to imagine hackers creating "cracked" versions of file-swapping software that have the song-recognition technology broken or stripped out, if legislators were to mandate its use.

Audible Magic is not the only company seeking to build filters for file swapping. Napster creator Shawn Fanning's new company Snocap is working on similar technology, with an aim toward giving record companies and music studios a way to make money from peer-to-peer networks.

But the file-swapping controversies are today as much rhetoric and politics as they are technology, and the last few weeks may have quietly seen a change in the file-swapping debates.

"I've achieved my objective, which is to say our technology works," Ikezoye said. "It is interesting that the question has shifted from 'Is this possible?' to 'How should this be deployed?'"

If they're planning to sneak this into updated versions of p2p applications, the only remedy is to not update your software, and stick with a version that does not have this technology.

Any other ideas/suggestions?

i better get kazaa now...

Will this work for everyone who doesn't want their copyrighted material distributed? Because I don't want mine distributed. I fully expect that Audible Magic will take care of this.

And save your current P2P software. Don't forget there will always be shit-free versions. And eMule is open source. Give it to all your infected friends legally. We'll all be fine.

"It's most critical weakness is likely to be encrypted files and encrypted networks,"

freenetproject.org




I have a question:

If it matches around 1/3 of the song it would trigger the filter, and you wouldn't be able to download it or whatever. So what bitrate is going to be analyzed? Do they actually have enough space to store 128, 196, 256, etc etc. copies of a song? If it filtered 128, wouldn't that push people to use higher bitrates? Those wouldn't match. At least it sems they wouldn't through an automated process.

LOL. This is sooooooo not gonna work

And if it does work, it would mean fewer people who could access RIAA garbage music. Power to the indies!

I'm not real clear on this: it only filters audio files? So, if several mp3s, or a full CD, were .zipped or .rarred, would it still recognize them?

In order to check that it's a copyrighted song, you have to have a database of every possible song. You also have to have a mechnicism to check for it. That is, it doesn't magically get scanned from oblivion. Odds are they won't have the software containing this information, since it would be memory draining, so it has to be on central servers.

NEWSFLASH, centralized p2p networks are being phazed out. Some connection to a central checking server would have to be made, one that would not only drain download/upload rates and cause more congestion for your ISPs, but also a connection that can be BLOCKED. Better luck next time fellas. Wait, on second thought, eat shit!

If it can be programmed, it can be broken. More money wasted trying to fix something that really isn't broke. The only up side to it is that it may get all that RIAA pop-crap off the networks.

"And if it does work, it would mean fewer people who could access RIAA garbage music. Power to the indies!"

And the second it happens, we all become proactive in letting all of our friends and others know where free music CAN be downloaded. (i.e. DMusic)

"If it can be programmed, it can be broken"

Yup.

I guess my question above isn't so relevant anymore, considering the need for a centralized server.

so they are gonna mandate this be built into a private companies software ? what ever happened to free enterprise. personaly i couldnt care less because i wont be installing it on my server and i know plenty of other ways to share files other than kazaa, it might stop some of the junk riaa files which is fine but when files are encrypted and broken down into several small files its pretty pointless. let them spin their wheels though gives them something to do

This article is an excellent submission. It makes me want to believe that this new software technology could one day become incorporated into a new idea of downloading/sharing music for a fee, by having this intermediatary software identifying the downloader of the copyrighted material.... so that the downloader will have to pay fee. In this fantasy thining, everyone is happy: Audible Magic Inc-- for developing technolgy for identifying copyrighted music, Alnet (or BPI) or others for establishing a technology for identifying downloaders to pay royalties and fees for obtaining the shared music, the Indpendent Labels and the RIAA labels for being the so-called owners of the copyrighted music, and the p2p networks for adveritising and establishing their p2p's (they would be the equivalent of how amazon.com has multiple stores).

Either case, i would be very disturbed if the riaa and congress enforced the use of this software on isp's, or force the p2p's to use it.

God almighty, any software is going to be cracked, Amen Gothic-Angel.

I hope this does work. Then when their stuff is off the networks and their sales continue to decline, they can't blame it on widespread file-sharing. There can't be underground invitation-only networks that are ruining their business...

How are they going to prevent false positives? Surely some non-copyrighted songs that sound similar enough to copyrighted works that they will get caught in this net. I'm sharing a library of over 2000 pre-1923 (and therefore pre-copyright) songs, some of which have been covered by later bands, who would only have copyright protection for their own unique performance. How will this supposed new technology avoid stepping on my rights to share public domain music?

good point undeath, that's just what I was thinking. what about pay download sites? if the software was on my ISP and I signed up for Itunes (heaven forbid) would it stop that download if it detected a song going by. I'd be real unhappy. or maybe a group will decide to release a copyrighted song for promotional purposes, will that get blocked?

then what about streaming audio? a new P2P type network could share your songs in streaming audio (so there's no downloads) and part of the software captures and copies it as it's listened to. don't know if that's feasible or not. Whoops did I just pull a DMCA blunder?

There is no such thing as an UNcopyrighted song.

This isn't the way to solve this, its gonna just piss of more and more consumers... even the uninformed ones.

"There is no such thing as an UNcopyrighted song."

Exactly. And that's what the people we're up against seem to think. Even the people who fall right into their way of thinking. I had someone tell me that my music wouldn't be copyrighted until I registered it. No matter what I told them, and no matter how much proof I showed, they still wouldn't believe it...

Los Gatos, Calif.-based Audible Magic has been making the rounds of Washington, D.C., legislative and regulatory offices for the last month, showing off technology it says can sit inside peer-to-peer software and automatically stop swaps of copyrighted music from artists such as Britney Spears or Outkast.

Oh no! What will I do without dling Britney? (sarcasm)

people just need to get all of the RIAA garbage off the networks god I'm so sick of the bullsh!t they come up with, we don't need any of their garbage.

Power to the Indies

I was kinda wondering that too, mystlw. Won't wrapping an mp3 in a .zip or .rar file effectively (and cheaply) get around this technology? To further obfuscate, one could even zip up additional files (random text, other mp3's, etc)...one could even go so far as to encrypt the mp3 and provide the keys along with it in the zip archive (or use a self-decrypting packaging). That would greatly increase the processing power required to track any kind of volume of files shared.

How many millions of dollars will they have to burn before they realize that trying to use technology to stifle filesharing rather than giving people what they want is much less productive?

I love to see these idiots burning dollars for such worthless idea. Now I am downloading mostly full albums from eMule. They are usually rared or zipped. I would say that
a) nobody would care to add this filtering to eMule because it is open source
b) even if somebody adds it, it won't work on zip or rar files.

bluerhythmjo,

What do you mean by "pre-copyright" songs? There is nothing magic about 1923 as far as I know. Corporate copyrights are good for 95 years, so your recordings would have to be older than 1910 or so before you can call them 'pre-copyright'

Of course, if your 2000 songs had copyrights which were owned by the artists, and those artists died before 1934, then the copyright would have expired.

people just need to get all of the RIAA garbage off the networks god I'm so sick of the bullsh!t they come up with, we don't need any of their garbage.

we all know that the majority of the music out on p2p's IS riaa music, sadly to say

First, this can not be implemented in open source p2p clients with any kind of robustness. After all, if a 4 line patch to xpdf can remove app PDF restrictions (find okToCopy, change 'return gFalse' to 'return gTrue', repeat 3 more times for other checks) how hard will it be to bypass this check. Even if it is binary only, it will be easily defeated as it all comes down to a basic if-then-else check, just like the old copy protection where you had to type in a random word from the manual.

I dare em.

there are filters in the blocklist manager that will block out the peeps that are shareing these audio files on the p2p networks get it and protowall at

http://bluetack.co.uk

Old technology (the simple stuff) can sometimes defeat new technology. Call in the hackers like what they did to DeCSS.

"A test of that technology was held at the University of Wyoming last year, but was ended after students complained about privacy invasions. In response, Ikezoye offered a university-focused version that simply blocks the copyrighted songs, and does not link specific trades to specific computer users. "

Be a cold day in hell before I ever used any software with that crap in it. Not that I would be too concerned, unless the P2P network were the ones to log the activity which even then it would be done in a centralized fasion that could easily be blocked.

And screw is correct, they can never invent a technology that we can not bypass, because we are the ones inventing their technology.

Corporate copyrights are currently good for 95 years, but songs recorded before the Copyright Act of 1923 were subject to a much more limited copyright, and were not grandfathered in to later copyright laws. Therefore, according to the Library of Congress "Works published before 1923 are now in the public domain."

http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/195_copr.html

Information available from the U.S. Copyright Office, Washington, D.C 20559-6000
The U.S. Copyright Office provides various circulars with information about the duration of copyright, conducting copyright searches, and "fair use." Copyright information circulars are available from the Copyright Office web site as pdf files. The following information will lead patrons to parts of the circulars which may be of particular interest:

Works published before 1923 are now in the public domain. (Circular 1, "Copyright Basics," page 6, supplemented by SL 15, "New Terms for Copyright Protection.")
Published works copyrighted 1923 through 1977 that are still in their original term of copyright or whose copyright was renewed are protected for 95 years from the copyright date. (Circular 1, "Copyright Basics," page 6, supplemented by SL 15, "New Terms for Copyright Protection." (Copyrights registered up until Dec. 31, 1963 expired after 28 years, unless the copyright was renewed. The only way to determine whether items published from 1924 through 1963 are still in a renewal term of copyright is to do a copyright search and establish that the item was copyrighted and that the copyright was renewed.)
Unpublished works created but not registered for copyright before January 1, 1978 may be protected by copyright law until the year 2002 or the life of the author/creator/copyright holder plus 70 years, whichever is longer. (Circular 1, "Copyright Basics," page 6, supplemented by SL15, "New Terms for Copyright Protection.")
Unpublished works registered for copyright before 1923 are now in the public domain.
Works created after Jan. 1, 1978 are protected for the author/creator/copyright holder's life plus 70 years. (Circular 1, "Copyright Basics," page 6, supplemented by SL15, "New Terms for Copyright Protection.")
The "fair use" provision of the copyright law allows the making of copies under some circumstances for "...purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research." (Circular 21, "Reproduction of Copyrighted Works by Educators and Librarians," page 8.)
"'Publication' is the distribution of copies or phonorecords of a work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending. The offering to distribute copies or phonorecords to a group of persons for purposes of further distribution, public performance, or public display constitutes publication." (Circular 1, "Copyright Basics" page 3.)
In many cases, works published before March 1, 1989 without a copyright notice risk loss of copyright protection. (Circular 3, "Copyright Notice," page 1.)
Works made for hire may be protected by copyright by the employer, not the employee. (Circular 1, "Copyright Basics," page 2.)
Works produced by the U.S. government are not eligible for copyright. (Circular 1, "Copyright Basics," page 5.)
Copyright searches cannot be considered conclusive (Circular 22, "How to Investigate the Copyright Status of a Work," page 5.)
Use of images outside the U.S. is governed by the laws of the country in which the material is being used. (Circular 38a, "International Copyright Relations of the United States.")

some @ssclown on the AAPL yahoo board was touting this as a boon for iTunes. The follow up message echoed a good sentiment:

If this Audible Magic proggie even works, there still remains the task to convince those former Kazaa users to using a pay service.

If this crap DID work, and it ever blocks any of our tunes from being downloaded, someone PLEASE document it and let me know because Electric Gypsy will sue them for restriction of trade. All Electric Gypsy recordings are copyrighted, (as are all music files) but we allow and encourage file-sharing of our tunes.

Also, again, if it DID work, but ONLY filtered RIAA material, then I won't complain a bit. The record industry can use DRM and do whatever else it wants to destroy itself ...I will only applaud.

Shmoo