Music industry watch

More Audible Magic Nonsense

Sounds like Audible Magic has partnered with Palisade Systems to cross license technology so that Palisade could offer a product to prevent sharing of copyrighted materials. This system is similar to Audible Magic's network monitoring offering and is also being pushed on universities:

Palisade executives say their university customers in particular are interested in the song-blocking capabilities.

"It's the kind of thing we hear from universities or customers that act more as an ISP," said Doug Jacobson, Palisade's founder and chief technology officer. "They want to take the position of not filtering out all peer-to-peer (traffic)--stopping copyrighted works but not the other content."

I really doubt that universities are clamoring for this product. It sounds a lot more like the RIAA is pressuring universities into adopting these kinds of tools. And the effectiveness of these tools has yet to be demonstrated:

File-swapping companies--some of which have contended that filtering their networks is impractical or even impossible--said they were skeptical of the claims, noting that neither RIAA nor Audible Magic had given them a demonstration of the filtering tools. Industry trade group P2P United says it has repeatedly contacted the company asking to see the filters in action.

That kind of behaviour reminds me of SCO. They are backed by a large organization (RIAA) and refuse to provide proof of their claims. This is not surprising, since a packet sniffing tool like theirs is easily defeated by using even the simplest encryption techniques. Once P2P toolmakers get smart and start tunnelling their traffic via SSH, these network filter tools will keel over dead. Not very useless -- only useful for extracting money from universities/taxpayers and transferring it into the pockets of the RIAA.

Posted by Mayhem at April 21, 2004 11:43 AM