File Swapping 'killer' grabs attention

[MikeHunt]

File-swap 'killer' grabs attention

Last modified: March 3, 2004, 4:00 AM PST

By John Borland

Staff Writer, CNET News.com

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.

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?'"

[DudeAsInCool]

Ive heard they had a data base and a network anti-file sharing application, but not about a filter that sits within P2Ps. I dont think they will be able to stop Bit Torrent...

[MxRob]

If what they claim actually works, well then dammit we will just have to find a way around it. We always will, they cannot stop it.

[DudeAsInCool]

Everything can be hacked and will be..

They are going to have to build a pretty big data base...the sad thing is that instead of expanding technology, applications like this are just trying to harnass it. Consumers have already adopted technology, but the recording industry is still living in a pre-napster world.

[DudeAsInCool]

Here's a closer look at Audible Magic's Technology:

For months, the digital equivalent of a postal censor has been sorting through virtually all file-swapping traffic on the University of Wyoming's network, quietly noting every trade of an Eminem song or "Friends" episode.

The technology, provided by Los Gatos, Calif., company Audible Magic, isn't yet blocking individual file trades. But that's the next step. As the company begins testing its service with more universities, corporations and small Internet service providers during next few weeks and months, this peer-to-peer monitoring and blocking technology threatens to open the next front in the online piracy wars.

With the capacity to look inside every bit of data that flows over a network--whether it's part of a song being illegally traded or a personal e-mail--this new generation of antipiracy technology is sure to prove controversial. But some administrators at universities and corporations--deluged by peer-to-peer traffic that continues to overwhelm their networks--say they're ready for this sweeping step.

"I don't really want to be looking that closely at what people are doing, and you'd probably just as soon not have me looking either," said Brad Thomas, a network specialist at the University of Wyoming who is helping manage the Audible Magic project. "But it's getting to be the only way to control our bandwidth."

For years now, the online antipiracy war has been more of a legal battle than a technological one. Record labels and movie studios have relied more on court rulings than on their own technical innovations to stop companies such as Napster, Audio Galaxy and Scour; and while those and other companies have stopped their activities, the overall quantity of online trading has abated little if at all.

Many of the technological ideas for stopping piracy have focused on traditional digital rights management, or DRM, which essentially locks a song or movie to a specific piece of hardware, or otherwise restricts how it can be used. This has proven controversial, because the technology is often susceptible to hackers cracking through the protections, and because it has had little effect in stemming trades of millions of unprotected MP3 files through services such as Kazaa.

Nor have those tools proved much help to universities, which found their networks bearing the brunt of file-swapping traffic early in Napster's rise. With fast connections and the technical savvy to set up the applications, students became a cornerstone of the early file-swapping community and remain so today. Many schools found that half or more of their network bandwidth was being used by applications such as Napster, Kazaa or Gnutella.

Traffic-management tools such as those produced by Packeteer have helped considerably. These tools prioritize data flows, so that e-mail and distance learning applications can travel without speed limits, while bandwidth allocated to Kazaa can be reduced to a trickle, for example. Thomas has used those tools at Wyoming, limiting all Kazaa users at any given time to a total of 1 megabit of bandwidth--a tiny sum if shared among dozens or scores of people downloading and uploading at any given time.

Some colleges, companies and even small ISPs have also tried to block the "ports"--a computer's equivalent of a door reserved for specific types of data--used by file-swapping applications. Modern file-swapping programs automatically bounce between ports until they find an open door, making this tactic ineffective, however.

Napster song-blocking redux?

Audible Magic's tools are among the first of a new generation that threatens to go much deeper inside the data stream, allowing a network operator to see exactly what files are being transferred.

The software lives inside a router or gateway to the broader Internet. As it is currently configured, it creates a copy of all the traffic flowing past, identifies those bits that are using FTP (file transfer protocol) or the Gnutella technology, and then re-creates those files to identify them.

The resulting reports have given Wyoming a look at what its students are actually trading and in what quantities. In one 24-hour period, for example, the most popular file traded using the Gnutella network was an MP3 by rap artist "Big Tymers," which passed the network monitor 188 times.

Audible Magic is taking the program to a next round of beta tests with another university, a corporation and a small ISP during the next month, CEO Vance Ikezoye said.

The next step for the technology is actually blocking songs and other content, instead of just monitoring--much the same way that Napster wound up filtering songs under court order in the waning days of its service. Audible Magic has a music "fingerprint" library that it says can reliably identify more than 3.5 million different audio files. In theory, songs could be blocked as the data passes the network monitor and is compared against this database of fingerprints.

"We believe that what this does is transform network devices to be content-intelligent," Ikezoye said. "That will be important. You can't just say, 'Let's block peer-to-peer.'"

In practice, this is potentially an enormous computing job that has yet to be tested on a wide scale. Blocking files means that someone has to come up with a list of files to block. Record companies have been loathe to perform that role, a massive undertaking that would require the listing of virtually every copyrighted work ever recorded, and that blocking services such as Audible Magic were updated as new songs were released.

Moreover, the computing power necessary to monitor, identify and block the millions of songs that could traverse a university network in the course of a month would be enormous and expensive, critics say.

Napster's experience in 2001 has been the biggest experiment in song filtering to date. People quickly found ways around the simplest ways of song filtering, and when Napster tried to integrate song fingerprint recognition into the filters, hurdles emerged that quickly saw the company shut its doors altogether.

The fingerprint recognition tools, provided in part by Audible Magic competitor Relatable, did block copyrighted songs, but also wound up "overblocking" so completely that even non-copyrighted files were stopped. Concurrently, sources said at the time, a few copyrighted songs that did continue to slip through, endangering Napster's status in the courts.

Moreover, privacy concerns stemming from this kind of network monitoring would likely be deep and immediate. Already the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a Washington, D.C.-based lobbyist group, has blasted the recording industry's calls for deeper network traffic monitoring at universities.

"Monitoring the content of communications is fundamentally incompatible with the mission of educational institutions to foster critical thinking and exploration," EPIC wrote in an open letter to universities in November 2002, which followed a Recording Industry Association of America letter to more than 2,000 university presidents. "Such a level of monitoring is not only impracticable; it is incompatible with intellectual freedom."

Finally, innovations among peer-to-peer software developers themselves could limit the use of the monitoring tools. Most file-swapping communications today are unencrypted, or transmitted relatively openly over the Net. If monitoring and blocking tools were widely introduced, new software programs could easily develop ways to encrypt or scramble the data in transmission in order to make it unrecognizable by Audible Magic's tools or other databases.

"Clearly that's a problem," said Ikezoye, adding that his company still would have markets in this eventuality. "It's always a concern, particularly from private corporations, to have encrypted data flowing out of your network. We definitely see an opportunity in corporations."

http://news.com.com/2100-1023_3-985027.html?tag=st_rn

[-medusa-]

encrypt and tunnel!

[Kooperman]

A Software Program Aimed at Taming File-Sharing

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Published: March 8, 2004

The record industry is hoping that a little magic will solve its problems with online piracy by file sharers.

The Recording Industry Association of America has been talking up a company named Audible Magic to lawmakers and regulators in Washington in recent weeks in an attempt to show that file-sharing networks can be tamed.

The company, based in Los Gatos, Calif., has developed a technology that it says can spot copyrighted materials while they are being passed from computer to computer and block the transfer.

Audible Magic executives say that their software can be used in devices that attach to computer networks, or it can be written into the file-sharing software from companies like Kazaa and Grokster.

"We think the technology is extraordinarily promising," said Mitch Bainwol, the chairman of the music industry group. "We said from the start that technology may pose some risks, but it offers the solution."

File-sharing companies have argued that they cannot control copyright infringement on their networks.

"I think it does change the game," said Josh Bernoff, a principal analyst with Forrester Research. "Now if you're a legislator, you're going to have to make a decision about whether you're going to protect the rights of downloaders, or of the people who own the copyrights to the music."

Record industry executives, who have said that they are against government-ordered technology fixes for copyright problems, said that they are not asking Congress to act, at least at this time. Instead, Mr. Bainwol said, his industry would like to see the "peer-to-peer" companies add the software to their wares.

"It really puts the P2P community to the test," he said. "Are they serious about becoming legitimate, or are they not serious?"

The chief executive of a company with a product that could be put to similar uses said that the file-trading companies were unlikely to sign up.

"It destroys their model," said Mark M. Ishikawa, the chief executive of BayTSP, a company that monitors file-trading activity for entertainment companies. He never developed a file blocker, he said, because "for us, it's a waste of time."

Vance Ikezoye, the chief executive of Audible Magic, said that businesses could emerge from the use of his technology, which he said could be used to help sell legitimate music, not just block the illegitimate kind.

The file-sharing companies and those that work with them are unsurprisingly unenthusiastic about the music industry's flirtation with Audible Magic. Marty Lafferty, the chief executive of the Distributed Computing Industry Association, a trade group for the companies, said the software "falls considerably short" of what is necessary to work with such fast-changing technology. "P2P is an evolving technology that can only be understood by working more closely with the developers of these applications."

But some universities are already looking at the technology. Charles E. Phelps, the provost of the University of Rochester, one of two schools that has signed a contract with the new Napster service to provide legitimate music to all students, said that he was impressed with Audible Magic's ability to allow legitimate files to be traded while preserving privacy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/08/technology/08music.html?th

[Lord_of_the_Dense]

Indies Join Major Labels in Fingerprinting Songs for Copyright Protection With Audible Magic's RepliCheck Service

LOS GATOS, Calif., Oct. 25 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Audible Magic Corporation today announced a program that enables independent artists and labels to register their music with the company's anti-piracy information service for CD pressing plants. Offered through CD replicators that use Audible Magic's RepliCheck service for verifying copyrights, the program provides registration and digital "fingerprinting" of original works for a nominal processing fee. The company has previously announced agreements with Universal Music and Sony to register their musical works.

"The song registration program gives the indie artist or label the control over their property that would usually require the huge budget or serious connections associated with being on a major label," said Micah Solomon, president of Oasis CD Manufacturing. Oasis is one of the largest independent-oriented CD manufacturers in the nation, and has registered over 200 independent artists with RepliCheck. "For minimal cost, the artist is assured their work will be identified, before pressing, by an anti-piracy/intellectual rights management system that is becoming standard among CD replication facilities."

RepliCheck combines patented technology for generating fingerprints, a proprietary technology for searching millions of fingerprints over the web in a matter of seconds, and a huge database of North American and World music to provide a unique solution to the CD replication industry. It is rapidly becoming a standard worldwide, used by companies such as Sanyo, JVC, Q-Media, Eva-Tone, Oasis CD and many others.

Read entire story here.