Movie blackout for P2P networks?
Found on CNet News on Sunday, 13 February 2005
Researchers at Royal Philips Electronics are developing new "fingerprinting" technology that could automatically identify and block transmission of digital-video files, potentially handing movie studios a new weapon in its war on peer-to-peer networks.
Fingerprinting first appeared in the peer-to-peer world when a federal judge ordered the original Napster to block trades of copyright songs through its network in 2001. The company used early versions of audio fingerprinting technology to identify songs, which ultimately helped make the network all but unusable.
The trick is to make that identification process work even if the file is compressed, turned into a different computer file format or otherwise changed slightly.
What if the P2P client will create a random seed for encrypting the files every time it is launched? Other P2P users could get the key when they initiate a transfer (or do some handshakes first), but just listening to the traffic wouldn't work. Well, unless the ISPs monitor all traffic and create key databases to decrypt the traffic in realtime (but that would put some serious load on their hardware). What if the clients upload more smaller chunks which cannot be indentified simply because of the lack of continuous data? What if keys get routed through other hosts?