File-swap 'killer' grabs attention

Found on CNet News on Wednesday, 03 March 2004
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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.

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.

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.

Some sort of DRM plugin for an open-source P2P application? Why shouldn't users simply remove those lines from the source and compile it then? Or somebody simply created a patch. Plus, you can also block the access to the database in your firewall.