File Sharing • Buzzsonic.com

Archive for the "File Sharing" Category

Dec5

KazaaGate Copyright Trial Trundles On

Posted at 11:44 PM • No Comments

The expected three week long trial of Kazaa continued in Sydney, Australia with the music industry seemingly holding the upper hand by the end of the week. Major record labels, Universal Music Australia, EMI, Sony/BMG, Warner, Festival Mushroom and 25 additional applicants are suing Sharman Networks and associated parties–including Altnet, which delivers so-called “piggyback” technology with Kazaa, Altnet associated Brilliant Digital Entertainment, Sharman CEO Nikki Hemming and Altnet chief executive officer Kevin Bermeister and two technology directors–over alleged music copyright infringement made using the Kazaa software.

The labels hope to stop illegal P2P file sharing and to recover compensation for past infringements, says Michael Speck, general manager of the Music Industry Piracy Investigations unit of the Australian Record Industry Association.

The best coverage of the trial has come from Garth Montgomery’s lighthearted daily blog at Australia Personal Computer Mag where complete transcripts of the days proceeding are made available as PDF downloads as well as the writers rants and what he calls “anti-journalism’ pokes at applicants and respondants alike. He also deserves the credit for coining the term Kazaagate .

Music industry attorney Tony Bannon told Australian Justice Murray Wilcox that ownership of Sharman, which has been kept secret through its registration on the tax haven island of Vanuatu, is in fact controlled by Kevin Bermeister, CEO of Kazaa partner Altnet. Bannon said there is “ready inference that Kevin Bermeister is in fact the ultimate controller of Sharman,” ZDNet reported.

The music industry presented a number of key witnesses in effort to prove that Kazaa could indeed filter out copyrighted material despite denials to the contrary. Nigel Carson, a computer forensics investigator from KPMG, testified that it is possible to locate the physical computer and user of the machine by tracing the IP address. Carson said that if a company like Sharman Networks wants to trace a specific user who shared unlicensed music files, it would need to store the date and time that the transaction was done.

More potentially damning was the evidence given by Tom Mizzone, vice president of data services at New York-based MediaSentry who had been hired by the RIAA in March 2003 to search Kazaa for users located in Australia and download evidence they were swapping copyrighted material. Up to 600 scanners were turned to the task, and the internet addresses of the users recorded and checked against a database of internet service providers in Australia.

The court also heard that the major record labels were engaged in a program of actively disrupting the file-sharing network by bombarding it with billions of decoys and spoofs that pose as song files. The success of the spoof war meant as few as 7 per cent of a given artist’s tracks found on the network were usable, according to record industry memos.

Mizzone said that MediaSentry is also able to detect the copyright-infringing music files made available for download in the Kazaa system’s shared folders. He told the court that his company is doing what any ordinary user of the Kazaa system is able to do. Aside from detecting files, he said, they can also communicate with the users via the applications built in instant messaging.

Kazaa’a main defence inevitably seemed to rest on the previous legal precedent set in the 1980s. The much used Sony Corp. vs. Universal City Studios ‘Betamax case’ ruling in 1984 which said electronics giant Sony wasn’t liable when people used its Betamax videocassette recorder to copy movies illegally because the technology had significant uses that did not violate copyrights.

Federal Court Justice Murray Wilcox dumped 12 of the 14 of the respondents’ affidavits for the civil trial, saying they were not relevant to the case about copyright infringement. The rejected affidavits contained details of how Kazaa could be used to exchange legitimate materials. Wilcox said he agreed that Kazaa could be used for the sharing of licensed materials and that court time should not be wasted discussing the issue.

Judge Wilcox set aside Sharmans objections on Friday against more potentially damaging alegations in an affidavit containing a report from Dr. George Barker, director of the Australian National University’s Center for Law and Economics, Intellectual Property and Copyright.

According to the report, the Kazaa system is a “marketplace” that brings together people who have copyrighted works and people who want to make unauthorized copies of those works. The report adds that Kazaa “designs the rules, facilitates the ‘market’ for exchange of copyright works, and enforces or has the capacity to enforce the rules of that market.”

US. technical experts were due in Sydney over the weekend to debate whether its song files could be filtered to restrict the illegal flow of music on Kazaa’s “peer-to-peer” network on the Internet, the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper said on Saturday. The trial continues on Tuesday.

Further Coverage

Daily Despatch-KazaaGate [APCMag.com]
ZDNet Australia:Hot Topic, Sharman [ZDNet.com.au]
Report Asserts Kazaa Makes the Rules [CNet News]
Sharman Counter Attacks [MacWorld.co.uk]
US. Experts to Examine Filtering Web Songs [SignOnSanDiego.com]
Trial to Unmask Kazaa Owners [Wired.com]
Kazaa Faces Allegations in Copyright Trial [NewsFactor.com]
Witness Assaults Kazaa Filter Claims [CNet Asia]

Related Reading

Appeals Court Holds Grokster Not Liable [PCWorld Australia] August 2004
Digital Piracy – Definitive P2P Piracy Figures for Year 2003 [ITIC.ca]
RIAA, MPAA Appeal Against ‘Grokster is Legal’ Ruling [the Register] August 2003
Judge:File Swopping Tools Are Legal [CNet News] April 2003
File Swapper Eluding Pursuers [Washington Post] Dec 2002
Napster vs. the Music Industry [HK-Lawyer.com] June 2001
RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia Systems Inc. [Gigalaw.com] June 1999
RIAA, Diamond Sweep Away Suit [Wired.com]
Enforcement Bots-Who Does the Dirty Work? [No-ip.org]
CBS Songs Ltd. v. Amstrad Consumer Electronics 1988 [Xenoclast.org]

Dec3

Napster Guru Fanning Breaks Snocap Silence

Posted at 11:46 PM • No Comments

After months of quiet background development and some (mainly) unsubstantiated stories more recently, ex-Napster founder and P2P poster boy Shawn Fanning finally broke the veil of silent mystery surrounding his new P2P start-up Snocap today with the official launch of the company with a press release and the unveiling of the company website which filled in some of the blanks about their proposed plans for the much talked about new venture.

Fanning and major record labels are hoping that the peer-to-peer filtering software that his company have been developing will legitimize the revolution Napster started back in 1999. Snocap claims to be the first music licensing platform that will allow music download services and P2P networks alike to allow any track to be delivered or shared in the knowledge that the copyright holder gets paid. The software works by attaching a digital fingerprint to media that determines whether it can be shared and at what price.

Snocap has developed a proprietary content identification service system using technology licensed from Philips Research Labs which uses audio fingerprinting and scans downloads as they pass through the Snocap system and compares them to music in the company’s database. If there’s a match, the royalty rate is decided and usage rights applied. Philips have been working on the fingerprinting technology for a number of years and it is already in use by mobile music specialist Musiwave and music recognition database Gracenote.

“There are some good authorized online music services but they have limited content and a comparatively small number of users. There are unauthorized services that have content and users orders of magnitude higher, but the service they provide is inferior and they are at odds with rights holders. Snocap is the means to bridge that divide for the consumer.” said Fanning.

The company also confirmed rumours that it has signed a landmark agreement with Universal Music Group to provide technology and database services for the online distribution of the company’s entire catalogue. Universal has already begun to register its catalogue with Snocap. EMI and Sony BMG are reportedly in active negotiations.

Snocap received a $10 million round of financing led by WaldenVC, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm that has a strong focus on digital media companies, and Morgenthaler Ventures, a leading national venture capital firm focused on information technology, internet services and life sciences. According to WaldenVC General Partner Art Berliner, “Snocap represents the future of online music. We are excited to work with Shawn Fanning and his team in greatly expanding the boundaries of the digital media universe.”

The Snocap team is comprised of three of the old coding team from the Napster days, Fanning himself, Ali Ayder and Jordan Mendelson and headed up by venture capitalist veteran Ron Conway, who also invested in the original Napster.

The Snocap system will incorporate its technology into various P2P clients, In order for it to work, peer-to-peer networks must agree to build Snocap’s technology into their software, wether that will include current market leaders like Kazaa, Grokster, eDonkey and Morpheus depends on those companies agreeing to dumping their old ‘revenue model’ of free. So far the first P2P application using Snocap technology is expected to be Mashboxx, with an early 2005 launch date.

‘Rival’ P2P filter Audible Magic CEO Vance Ikezoye told the L.A. Times, “There will be peer-to-peers that are able to make that transition and compete, but technology is not the problem; it’s the business model, how do you convert somebody who’s getting something for free?”

Related Stories

Shawn Fanning’s Snocap Touts Vision of P2P Heaven [the Register]
Napster Founder Goes Legit [MercuryNews.com]
Napster Founder Basks in Funding, Label Support [CNet News]
Shawn Fanning’s New Tune:Snocap [BusinessWeek.com]
Napster Creator Touts Legal File Sharing [Forbes.com]
Napster Creator Reveals Next Step [BBC News]
SNOCAP Melts Barriers to Growth in the Digital Music Marketplace [BusinessWire.com-Official Press Release]
EMI Records Join the Snocap Queue [MusicbizNews24.com]
Napster Founder in Major Label Talks [MusicbizNews24.com]
Paid P2P Options Gain More Traction [MusicbizNews24.com]
Content Identification Audio Fingerprinting Technology [Philips Research]
A Highly Robust Audio Fingerprinting System [Philips Research] 9pg PDF

Napster Background

Napsters Back, What Did Silicon Valley Learn? (Oct 2003)
the Download on Napster (August 2003) [Alwayson-Network.com]
Napster Becomes Dot-goner After Sale Blocked (Sept 2002) [MercuryNews.com]
Napsters CEO Splits on Sour Note (May 2002) [BusinessWeek.com]
Inside Napster (August 2000) [BusinessWeek.com]
It’s a Rad, Rad Napster World [Darkridge.com]
All the Rave : The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning’s Napster [JosephMenn.com]

Nov29

Kazaa Copyright Trial Begins in Australia

Posted at 12:01 AM • No Comments

The long running saga of the music industry’s copyright battle against the worlds most popular peer to peer file sharing software Kazaa moved to Australia today as case number NSD 110, Universal Music Australia Pty Ltd v Sharman License Holdings Ltd got underway in the Federal Court of Australia in Sydney.

At the start of a trial over the legality of Kazaa software, the court was told today that Kazaa had 100 million users worldwide, sharing three billion music files a month. Five major Australian record companies-Universal, EMI, Sony BMG, Warner Music, Festival/Mushroom and 25 other North American, European and Australian record companies -are suing Sharman Networks, which develops and distributes the software, for copyright infringement.

The labels contend that Sharman was fully aware of how the software was used and did nothing to stop copyright infringements. Lawyers for Australia’s recording industry branded the popular Kazaa file-swapping network “an engine of copyright piracy to a degree of magnitude never before seen”. Kazaa’s owners, Sharman insist that while they urge users not to commit music piracy, they have no control over what people do with the popular “peer-to-peer” software they provide.

Tony Bannon, representing Australia’s major record labels dismissed Sharman’s defense, saying Kazaa’s owners actively take steps allowing users to filter certain files from the network such as those that could contain viruses or pornography but not the files containing copyrighted songs. Bannon said the owners of the P2P software were seeking to get rich from advertising revenue based on the volume of traffic on the Kazaa network, while painting themselves as crusaders for music fans. Mr Bannon said Sharman’s actions were “all a charade” because it was interested only in making money from the copyright-infringing behavior of its users.

Each file traded on Kazaa has a unique digital fingerprint in the form of an MD5 hash a mathematical signature produced by running an algorithm across the contents of a file. This signature allows Kazaa to identify how many users are sharing the same file so that it can be downloaded from many places at once with complete integrity. If Kazaa were really trying to become a legitimate service, an obvious first step would be to block the MD5 hashes for known pirated files, argues the music industry. The reliability of P2P filtering technologies are still conclusively unproven however and are still under constant development.

Kazaa already has one major court victory under its belt, with the Dutch Supreme Court ruling in December 2003 that Kazaa’s then Swedish owners could not be held liable for copyright infringement. A possible difference in the Australian case is the recording industry’s invocation of the controversial, Anton Pillar Law that allows litigants in civil copyright cases to gather evidence. An Anton Piller order is granted when a judge is persuaded that there are reasonable grounds evidence may be destroyed if advance notice is given.

In February, after a six-month inquiry by the Music Industry Piracy Investigation unit of the Australian Record Industry Association, the record labels, organized under a cloak of absolute secrecy secured the Anton Piller order permitting a surprise search of Kazaa premises, to avoid any potential loss or destruction of evidence and legal authority to gather evidence without police being present. The information gathered has yet to be revealed.

The true owners of Sharman remain a mystery. Although it has offices in Australia, Sharman was formed in the island state of Vanuatu, a no-tax haven where the secrecy of private companies is sacred, improper disclosure of financial information to others is subject to criminal prosecution and tax information is not shared with any outside jurisdiction.

The Federal Court case, before judge Murray Wilcox, is expected to stretch over three weeks.

Nov24

Paid P2P Options Gain More Traction

Posted at 12:47 AM • No Comments

Three of the four biggest record companies in the world have signed “a pact” with peer-to-peer start up company Peer Impact it was revealed today. Universal Music, SonyBMG and Warner Music have all agreed to licencing agreements with Wurld Media, the Saratoga Springs, New York company developing the Peer Impact system for launch in the new year. Wurld Media are said to be in negotiations with the remainder of the ‘big four’ major labels, EMI.

The announcement continues the general thawing in the major labels reticence to work with P2P companies. Top label executives have increasingly said they are willing to support file-swapping networks, as long as no pirated songs appear alongside authorized works, something which seems to have blocked any agreements with Altnet (the KaZaa/Sharman subsiduary). This month alone there has been talks and deals and rumours of talks and deals between EMI and Universal (Snocap) and SonyBMG (Mashboxx, powered by Snocap).

Back in May of this year, US royalties organisation the BMI inked a royalties deal with Australian P2P software company QTrax which made it the worlds first licensed Gnutella based file sharing network.

Not a lot was revealed about Wurld Media, either in the press release or on the companies website. A cursory search in Google (bless ‘em) for “wurld media spyware’, however returns some interesting results and reveals that this is not Wurld Media’s first foray into the world of P2P. Back in 2002 Wurld Media were getting busy with another popular (though not with the major labels) P2P company, Morpheus. A Browser Helper Object (BHO), developed by Wurld Media was one of the ‘bundled extra’s’ that piggy-backed into a users computer along with the Morpheus software.

Morpheus automatically installs Morpheus Shopping from WURLD Media, which monitors your on-line shopping, redirects your web browser to alternate sites when you attempt to visit certain shopping sites, and diverts redirects sales commissions belonging to other referring sites. Morpheus also installs Cydoor and IPinsight, which monitor your Internet usage and display advertisements. Uninstalling Morpheus does not automatically remove these applications. from Wellesley College ResNet

Nov23

Freenet Creator Unveils Dijjer P2P

Posted at 1:39 AM • No Comments

If you had to name the P2P file sharing applications that have sent seismic shockwaves through the music industry (and as broadband catches on, the film industry) in terms of column inches and court appearances, Napster (in its original untethered form) and KaZaa would be the names that came to mind. Next down the list would quite possibly be Gnutella and some of its variants, including Bearshare, Limewire and Morpheus.

Dijjer the new P2P client from Freenet founder Ian Clarke

Gnutella was written by Nullsoft founder (makers of Winamp and Shoutcast) Justin Frankel who Rolling Stone magazine once called “the worlds most dangerous geek”.

Just as geeky but not quite as ‘dangerous’ is Ian Clarke another P2P software pioneer and the man best known for Freenet which, unlike other peer-to-peer networks, is primarily intended for decentralized content redistribution, to combat censorship and allow people to communicate with near-total anonymity rather than act as a search engine for free Eminem and Britney Spears downloads.

Clarke has recently unveiled his latest project, Dijjer a new open source P2P content distribution tool designed to allow the distribution of large files from Web servers while virtually eliminating the bandwidth cost to the file’s publisher.

The work in progress is aimed at anyone who needs to distribute large files to large numbers of people but who can’t afford to pay for the bandwidth that this would normally require .

Dijjer also offers ‘sequential downloads’, so if you tried to download a video through Dijjer you could start watching the video before the download completed. This is because Dijjer behaves like a web server, pieces of a file are download in-order and fed to your web browser when they arrive, allowing your browser to start displaying content before it has completely downloaded. Kind of like a Bit Torrent that streams, though one of the reasons behind the project was Clarkes dissatisfaction with apps like BitTorrent.

Nov22

Weed Downloads Find Home at Ebay

Posted at 1:50 PM • No Comments

An audio format that is gradually gaining in popularity in recent months is Weed. Weed is a proprietary digital music codec that allows interested music fans to download a song and play it three times for free. They are then prompted to pay for the “Weed file” the fourth time. A no risk try before you buy set-up.

Each time the song is downloaded by a new listener, the Weed file resets itself so the same rules apply: three free plays, then pay. The music can also be transferred to any Windows portable media devices.

Songs cost about a dollar and can be burned to an unlimited number of CDs, passed around on file-sharing networks and posted to web pages.

Seattle based Shared Media Licensing, launched the Weed format in December last year and in laymans terms Weed is small piece of software that ads Digital Rights Management or fingerprinting to audio tracks in the Windows Media format.

Weedshare allows users to distribute songs in a manner that resembles P2P. However, all songs distributed by Weedshare are licensed from rights owners and protected by the Microsoft DRM technology to stop unauthorized reproductions. In many ways its not unrelated to the audio finger printing technologies being developed by companies like SnoCap, Audible Magic and Relatable, amongst others.

In addition to distributing Weed Files (which number over 80,000) from its home website, Weed recently joined eBay’s digital music distribution program trial with its own store on the auction giants website. There was also a distribution hook-up with leading independent distributor CD Baby back in June and amongst the artists signed up to use the burgeoning distribution format are Chuck D, Heart, Sir Mix-A-Lot, Built to Spill, Kristin Hersh and one Sananda Maitreya, previously renown as pop star Terence Trent D’Arby.

Related Reading

File Sharing Growing Like a Weed [Wired.com]
Its a . Wrap [MusicbizNews24.com]
What is the Term Super Distribution? [MusicDish.com]
An Intriguing Business Model: Superdistribution and Weedshare [DigitalMusicNews.com]
96 Decibels
[96Decibels.com]
A Highly Robust Audio Fingerprinting System [Philipsstudy ] 9pg PDF

Nov22

Kazaa Adds Free Internet Phone Calls

Posted at 1:46 PM • No Comments

Sydney, Australia based P2P company Sharman Networks today launched version 3 of its of controversial file sharing software Kazaa, this time integrated with VoiP application Skype which enables users with the software (and a headset and microphone) to make free phone calls worldwide. The newest edition of the file-sharing software, also sports enhanced search capabilities and a trial membership with blog service provider TypePad.

Kazaa claim that over 300 million people have already downloaded the Kazaa application and are using P2P technology legally to purchase licensed music files, videos, games and ring tones, though the percentage of that 300 million that actually use Kazaa to buy legal content wasn’t released. Recent research from Comscore Media Metrix suggest that Kazaa’s once all conquering user base of 30 million has dwindled down to 16 million in the face of the increasing legal action and the popularity of more anonymous P2P apps like Bit Torrent and eDonkey.

Kazaa has been heamoraging users in their droves in the last year under sustained legal action from the RIAA who have been targetting users of the software for illegally sharing music files with other users of the software.

Luxembourg based Skype was created by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who famously also authored Kazaa, part of the underlying FastTrack file sharing network (which included Morpheus and Grokster) before selling the Kazaa software to Sharman in January 2002 after being blocked by copyright action in the Dutch courts in December 2001.

Nov20

EMI Revenue Down But Paid Downloads Skyrocket

Posted at 2:06 PM • No Comments

EMI, the worlds third largest record company with acts including Coldplay, Radiohead, Nora Jones, Robbie Williams, Starsailor and Kraftwerk announced a drop in first half yearly revenue this week.

EMI’s digital music revenues more than quadrupled in the six months to September 30 on the success of mobile phone ringtone sales and online stores like Apple’s iTunes. Digital sales of 12.2 million pounds in the first half, up from ï¿½2.1m a year earlier, now represent more than 2 percent of group turnover of 851 million pounds, which was down 11.4 per cent on the year-ago half.

EMI shares surged upwards 10 per cent on Friday on the London Stock Exchange the days top percentage gain. EMI Chairman Eric Nicoli said: “We have already seen a significant year-on-year pick-up in our sales since the end of September. “This, along with the strong growth of music DVDs and the explosive growth in our digital market activity, leaves us well placed to maintain our market share for the full year.”

“We have seen an improving trend in the global recorded music industry. The industry decline of 1.3% for our first six months represents a significant improvement on the 9.6% decline seen in the same period of the previous year. The legitimate digital music market continues to expand rapidly and we remain confident that digital represents a key driver for future industry growth.

EMI, as a progressive and innovative music-content company, remains committed to embracing and maximising the opportunities presented by advances in technology and changes in consumer trends.” Said Nicoli in a statement on the EMI Groups website.

Nov20

EMI Records Join the Snocap Queue

Posted at 1:58 PM • No Comments

EMI are the latest major record company said to be in talks with SnoCap, joining rivals such as Universal Music Group and SonyBMG in embracing a legal version of the internet file-swapping technology behind most online piracy. Last week Universal were the first major record company to officially announce a deal with Snocap, while SonyBMG also admitted preliminary talks with former Grokster president Wayne Rosso about his latest venture, tentatively titled ‘Mashboxx’, which is also said to use the new technology being developed by the former Napster developers at SnoCap.

EMI Join Universal and SonyBMG in Snocap talks
In the Times Online this morning journalist Nic Hopkins revealed that, “Alain Levy, chairman of EMI’s recorded music division, said the company was in advanced negotiations with Snocap, a San Francisco company launched by Shawn Fanning, the Napster founder and former internet music pirate which has created a legal version of peer-to-peer (P2P) file swapping.”

“We are in discussions with Snocap. We are very close to a deal. We think its a very interesting technology. There’s definitely something in it,” Levy said. But he added that while P2P would fill a gap in the market for digital music distribution, it would not replace subscription services and internet stores.

Snocap is a technology embedded in a P2P network to block sharing of unauthorized works, including unlicensed music and pornography and facilitate commercial transactions. Snocap has been working on ways to identify songs, as they are traded through a file-swapping network, including using a technique called audio fingerprinting, which monitors the sonic characteristics of music files.

That fingerprinting tool could be integrated into the file-swapping software itself in several different ways, sources said. When a file is being downloaded, the software could check its fingerprint and then compare it against a database Snocap operates, for example. Once an identification is made, the download could be blocked, unless the computer user pays a fee, as if they were downloading a song from iTunes or another digital song store.

Up to now the major record companies have opposed licensing their content to file-sharing software firms, refusing to offer their artists’ music for sale while unauthorized, CD-quality versions of the songs are being traded for free over the same networks. Still, the recording industry is interested in turning millions of computer users now swapping music online into paying consumers on ready-made online distribution networks.

Related Reading

Record Companies Join Online Domain of Top Pirates [Times Online]
Universal Music Licences Catalog to Snocap [DRMWatch.com]
Fanning Snocap Saga [P2PNet.net]
Shawn Fanning is Back into Digital Music [Slashdot.org]
Music Rebels Seek to Tame P2P [CNet News]
Grokster Sony/BMG to do Legal P2P Service? [the Register]
Sony-BMG, Grokster Deal [P2PNet.net]
Sony Eyes P2P Venture [Digital Lifestyles]
File Sharer Eyes Major Label Coup [Wired.com]
Napster to Use Audio Fingerprinting [Internet.com-2001]