Mashable!

or so they say. According to the Wall Street Journal, Nielsen has partnered with Digimarc to create something called the Digital Media Manager; a service offering media companies the ability to track copyrighted video content online.

How does Nielsen plan to tackle the tough task of tracking copyrighted video? Well, they’ve got the expertize on analyzing data, and they’ve already digitized about 95% of US TV programming for the purpose of their ratings service, which definitely helps. Still, many have tried – Audible Magic, for example – and haven’t exactly succeeded, mostly thanks to the fact that today you can effortlessly encrypt data which makes it impossible to analyze. We’ll have to wait and see what Nielsen and Digimarc have in stock. One thing is certain: this move will not make them the most popular company around.

WSJ claims that Nielsen has approached Google and News Corp with their service, which is nearly finished and might be officially announced as early as today.

Ars technica

A handful of consumer groups, including members of the Savetheinternet.com coalition, have asked the Federal Communications Commission to stop Comcast from interfering with BitTorrent and other P2P traffic. A new complaint (PDF) filed by Public Knowledge and Free Press accuses Comcast of “secretly degrading” P2P traffic, calling it a violation of network neutrality principles, and asks the FCC to enjoin Comcast from blocking P2P traffic in the future.

The complaint comes in the wake of revelations the Comcast is using Sandvine to actively interfere with and block some BitTorrent, Gnutella, and even Lotus Notes traffic. The ISP is using forged TCP reset packets, which tell both ends of a connection that the other party has reset the connection, to accomplish the task. Comcast admits to managing traffic on its network to ensure a “good Internet experience” for all of its customers. The company argues that its management techniques will occasionally “delay” traffic, but denies that it blocks or degrades traffic, despite evidence to the contrary.

Ars technica

Anirban Banerjee, Michalis Faloutsos, and Laxmi Bhuyan collected more than 100GB of TCP header information from P2P networks back in early 2006 using a specially-doctored client. The goal of the research was a simple one: to determine “how likely is it that a user will run into such a ‘fake user’ and thus run the risk of a lawsuit?” The results are outlined in a recent paper (PDF), “P2P: Is Big Brother Watching You?”

CNET News.com

An AT&T executive on Wednesday sought to defuse fears that forthcoming tools aimed at identifying pirates on its network will harm the average Net surfer’s online experience.

The planned tactic is “not about heavy-handed tactics that go after the vast majority of our customers that want to consume content legally,” AT&T assistant vice president of regulatory policy Brent Olson said at an antipiracy summit here hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “It’s about making more content available to more people in more ways going forward.”

Zeropaid

Server operators start closing down operations there after courts rule can be held liable for $28,000 USD in damages for each song it facilitates the illegal sharing of.

Over the past two weeks, ED2K users have been noticing that their very-reliable German-based servers have been disappearing. First, about a dozen “Big Bang” servers started refusing connections. Shortly afterward, the half-dozen “DonkeyServer” servers stopped indexing the users’ files.

With no word from the operators as to why the servers are no longer functioning, network users worldwide have been speculating as to the reason.

Now it appears that the root cause of the server disruption has been linked to a recent judgment by a regional German court in Hamburg (Az. 308 O 273/07). The ruling clearly defined a monetary value for which to hold server operators liable for the illegal file-sharing of copyrighted music they facilitate.

Even though a server may not contain any actual portion of a copyrighted song, if the mere facilitation of the copyright infringement is found to have occurred the server operator can then be held liable for 20,000 Euro (about $28,000 USD) per song!

Ars Technica

A new peer-to-peer music service developed by a “team of enterprising college students” has a novel twist on the music sales business: give users a cut of the sales. Grooveshark is currently in beta and claims to have signed a number of independent labels up for its service. All the sales traffic will go over a P2P network, and users will be “rewarded” for sharing their music.

P2P-based music stores are nothing new. Indeed, a number of P2P networks have tried to go legit after running afoul of the RIAA, none with any notable success. The most recent example is LimeWire, which recently announced plans to begin selling MP3s encoded at 256Kbps. LimeWire has managed to sign on a couple of notable distributors, including Nettwerk Productions, home to Avril Lavigne, Sara McLachlan, and the Barenaked Ladies, among other acts.

There are a couple of significant differences between LimeWire and Grooveshark’s business models, however. First, LimeWire will start out as a direct-download site, with the P2P component coming later. Also, Grooveshark’s virtual tip jar feature appears to be unique among the P2P music stores.

Grooveshark is banking on users being attracted to the idea of getting a cut of the action when someone downloads a track from their PC. At 99¢ per non-DRMed MP3, the user’s cut isn’t going to be much more than a few cents after the artist, label, and Grooveshark take their share, but it may be enough to convince some music fans to sign up for the service and share some of their bandwidth.

ARS TECHNICA

The news for the motion picture and television industries is not so good. BitTorrent has become far more popular: “We’ve seen real, dramatic growth in BitTorrent usage,” notes Garland. That has resulted in a greater average population of seeders and leechers per torrent. In May 2006, the average torrent had 817,588 people participating. 12 months later, that figure had jumped to 1,357,318 seeders and leechers: a 66 percent year-over-year growth rate.

Reuters

Top online video service YouTube will soon test a new video identification technology with two of the world’s largest media companies, Time Warner Inc. The technology, developed by engineers at YouTube-owner Google Inc, will help content owners such as movie and TV studios identify videos uploaded to the site without the copyright owner’s permission, legal, marketing and strategy executives at YouTube told Reuters in an interview on Monday. The so-called video fingerprinting tools, which identify unique attributes in the video clips, will be available for testing in about a month, a YouTube executive said. “The technology was built with the Disney’s and Time Warner’s in mind,” Chris Maxcy, YouTube partner development director, said, adding that, since early this year, Google has been testing audio-fingerprinting tools with record labels. These tools will be used to identify copyrighted material, after which media companies can decide if they would like to remove the material or keep it up, as part of a revenue-sharing deal with YouTube, which can sell advertising alongside it. Once proven to work, the technology could be used to block the uploading of copyrighted clips, YouTube product manager David King said. It aims to make the tools widely available to any copyright owner later this year. YouTube has come under fire from several other traditional media companies, which say it has dragged its heels in offering reliable ways to identify video clips uploaded by regular users without permission. Unable to reach a distribution agreement, MTV Networks-owner Viacom Inc.  sued Google and YouTube for more than $1 billion in damages in March, charging the company with “massive intentional copyright infringement” after demanding the removal of clips of its popular shows “Colbert Report” and “Daily Show,” hosted by comedian Jon Stewart. Media companies have eyed the wildly popular video-sharing site as a mixture of opportunity and threat as they seek to reach consumers wherever they spend time. On one hand, they view YouTube as a powerful promotional medium to drive viewers back to television or their own sites. On the other, YouTube’s traffic has soared as users upload copyrighted shows globally onto the service. Nine months ago, YouTube said such tools would be made available to media companies for testing by the end of 2006. But the reliable identification of content has proved a complex task that required Google to develop its own technology tools. Maxcy said other media companies planned to test the technology, but he declined to name these other parties. “There are a couple,” he said, referring to Disney and Time-Warner. “There are more that we can’t talk about right now,” he said. YouTube officials said they have quietly been testing ways to help identify the audio tracks of video clips with major record labels using technology from privately held Audible Magic as early as the first two months of 2007. These tools will be made available to all content owners later this year depending on the results of the tests, YouTube executives said on Monday. “It’s typically not something we talk about,” Maxcy said, adding, however: “We wanted to clear the air.” Maxcy said that over time, Google planned to add additional layers of technology to better spot content on its service.

Los Angeles Times:

AT&T Inc. has joined Hollywood studios and recording companies in trying to keep pirated films, music and other content off its network — the first major carrier of Internet traffic to do so.

The San Antonio-based company started working last week with studios and record companies to develop anti-piracy technology that would target the most frequent offenders, said James W. Cicconi, an AT&T senior vice president.

The nation’s largest telephone and Internet service provider also operates the biggest cross-country system for handling Internet traffic for its customers and those of other providers.

Market capitalization
Cisco: 162.24B, Time Warner: 78.95B

2006 Gross Profit
Cisco:
18.747B, Time Warner:
17.811B

Cisco addresses legit P2P in Supervisor enhancement – CBRonline.com

Cisco Systems has unveiled both a product enhancement and a series of architectural templates to enable enterprise networks to address the challenge of legitimate peer-to-peer apps such as the Groove feature in Microsoft Office.

The product side of the announcement involves a deep packet inspection capability, delivered via a hardware upgrade to the Supervisor engine on its flagship 6500 switches, essentially introducing additional Cisco-designed ASICs to handle “DPI at multi-gigabit rates,” said Neil Walker, the company’s head of product marketing for core and foundation technologies in Europe.

There arises a need to be able to differentiate between good P2P and bad, which is where the Programmable Intelligent Services Accelerator (PISA) upgrade to Supe32 comes in. “It’s akin to what we’re doing on the carrier side with the P-Cube technology for broadband policy management,” said Walker.

“There the carrier can determine who you are, what you’re doing and the bandwidth you’re consuming to do it. In this case, we’re enabling enterprises to enable wanted P2P and block the unwanted,” he went on. “For instance, two employees might be allowed to exchange IM messages, but not if one of them has just accessed some sensitive data on an internal database.” PISA is not, however, in any way based on the P-Cube technology, but rather the result of internal development, he went on.

via zeroPaid

Qtrax, the upcoming first legal ad-supported P2P network due to launch this September, has announced today that it has added content from Sony BMG Music Entertainment to its offerings of free MP3s.

Through this agreement, Qtrax users will be able to access songs for a predefined number of times for free, most likely five when it comes to the most popular artists. Each time a user plays a track, the Qtrax player will also offer fans click-to-buy purchase options. Users will also have to view some sort of advertising before each song is played.

“We are pleased to announce that we have completed this agreement with Qtrax, and look forward to working with them as part of our ongoing campaign to build new opportunities for our artists within the digital marketplace,” commented Thomas Hesse, President, Global Digital Business & U.S. Sales, Sony BMG Music Entertainment.

Qtrax, which plans to debut in September, already has deals in place to offer content from Warner Music Group and EMI Group as well.

Michael Geist – The Unintended Consequences of Rogers’ Packet Shaping

For the past 18 months, it has been open secret that Rogers engages in packet shaping, conduct that limits the amount of available bandwidth for certain services such as peer-to-peer file sharing applications. Rogers denied the practice at first, but effectively acknowledged it in late 2005. Net neutrality advocates regularly point to traffic shaping as a concern since they fear that Rogers could limit bandwidth to competing content or services. In response to the packet shaping approach, many file sharing applications now employ encryption to make it difficult to detect the contents of data packets. This has led to a technical “cat and mouse” game, with Rogers now one of the only ISPs in the world to simply degrade encrypted traffic.

VPN networks, any SSL encoded traffic (including your mail service), and privacy are the victims. See the next post to put this news into context.

Kevin J. Delaney. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Apr 17, 2007. pg. A.1

“It’s out there — you just have to hunt around for it a bit,” says the 28-year-old Mr. [Sam Martinez]. Like many similar sites, YouTVpc relies heavily on video-sharing sites outside the U.S., such as a French outfit called Dailymotion and Ouou.com in China. Mr. Martinez estimates that about 40% of the shows and films on the site — including episodes of “Desperate Housewives” and Fox’s “Prison Break” are provided by Ouou.com.

Last year Mr. Martinez’s childhood friend, Mr. [Billy Duran], built on the idea and created a site called “VTele” as an assignment for a computer-science class at Central New Mexico Community College. Through it, users could view TV shows and movies that he and Mr. Martinez copied from DVDs and uploaded to the school’s computer servers. The 23-year-old Mr. Duran says he got an “A” on the project. But within a month, the site attracted so many users that some of the school’s computer servers crashed. Administrators threatened Mr. Duran with expulsion.

Mr. Duran dropped out of Central New Mexico, and the two friends relaunched the site in September. At first it relied on volunteers to store video files on their own servers, until a user pointed Mr. Martinez to Dailymotion. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh — gold mine!’” recalls Mr. Martinez. “We had all 18 seasons of ‘The Simpsons’ in two hours.”

Read the rest of this entry »

ShareMonkey :: Find the file origin of p2p movies, mp3s, software and other fileshare downloads

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We can tell you what album, dvd, game, application or book your download came from – all you do is right click on a file in Windows and choose “Where is this file from?”.

p2pnet.net – the original daily p2p and digital media news site

WiPeer was developed to allow communication, “in a peer-to-peer manner, between mobile computers, when either there is no access point, or when the access point costs money, or when for privacy reasons, the users do not wish to utilise the access point,”

CNET News.com

Like other online publishers, Kink.com has had to puzzle out ways to deal with the perennial problem of copyright infringement on peer-to-peer networks and Usenet. Kink.com’s solution is live shows. In some ways, it’s is a throwback to a more analog era, back when the Grateful Dead encouraged taping and sharing of live concerts (while still charging admission). The band Phish follows the same model today by authorizing taping and Internet sharing for “non-commercial purposes.”

Earlier this month, Kink.com began streaming live 1080i high-definition video–at a time when mainstream sites such as CNN.com offer jerky, blurry pre-edited clips at roughly one-tenth the resolution of high-def.

At least this is what proprietary software people prefer…

Microsoft executive: Pirating software? Choose Microsoft!

At the Morgan Stanley Technology conference last week in San Francisco, Microsoft business group president Jeff Raikes commented on the benefits of software counterfeiting. “If they’re going to pirate somebody, we want it to be us rather than somebody else,” he said. “We understand that in the long run the fundamental asset is the installed base of people who are using our products. What you hope to do over time is convert them to licensing the software.”

Copyright vow going down the YouTube | FT business | The Australian

YOUTUBE’S failure to complete a key piece of anti-piracy software as promised could represent a serious obstacle to efforts by Google, its new owner, to forge closer relations with the media and entertainment industry.

The video website, the internet sensation of 2006, promised in September the software would be ready by the end of the year. Known as a content identification system, the technology is meant to make it possible to track down copyrighted music or video on YouTube, making it the first line of defence against piracy on the wildly popular website.

YouTube’s offices were closed for the New Year holidays. While providing no further details about when the system would be made formally available, it said tests of the system had been under way with some media companies since October 2005 and the system remained on track.

Mike McGuire, a digital media analyst at Gartner, said there was likely to be little patience for missed deadlines.

“The technology industry really has to start living up to the media industry’s expectations,” Mr McGuire said.

Newswire / Press Release: GetByMail Releases New Remote Access and File Sharing Version GetByMail 1.5 – Software | NewswireToday:

Using GetByMail you can stay at home and have access to your office computer and vice versa simply through your e-mail account. You can get remote directory listings and tree view, download/upload files and directories, perform change dir, make dir, rename and delete operations, capture remote computer desktop screens, run remote applications, shutdown, reboot and logoff remote computer. During download/upload operations files and directories are automatically compressed and split into small pieces to assure reliable transmission. GetByMail gives you a unique ability to share files on your computer with other people simply through e-mail. It is an excellent solution if you want to share files with people who do not have access to FTP, P2P or are behind firewalls. With a help of GetByMail you can get through the firewall without any hassle. GetByMail only requires a unique e-mail address for every PC where the program is installed. No complex network configuration, no dedicated IP and no additional FTP software are required. Most popular Internet E-mail (POP3/IMAP/SMTP) and Microsoft Exchange Server e-mail configurations are supported.

p2pnet.net – the original daily p2p and digital media news site:

The “Tape it off the Internet” project is currently in the final stages of the closed Beta program. TIOTI might very well be a realistic representation of what the future of TV will look like. The TIOTI project approach to socialize and optimize your TV Download experience. TIOTI combines great design, TV-torrent tracking, favorites, recommendations, RSS feeds, tagging, groups, wiki’s, and a lot more ‘Web 2.0? stuff.