The Inquisitr » p2p

Sharing on Facebook is a good thing unless it’s using Limewire

Steven Hodson — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 19:55:00 +0000

With a market share of around 35% Limewire is one of the best known filesharing applications and this was something they were hoping would become a success application on Facebook. The only problem is that Facebook doesn’t want anything to do with any application that even has a whiff of dirty filesharing connected to it.

Previously Facebook had blocked The Pirate Bay now it seems that Limewire is the next company to feel the puritanical slap of Facebook as they were informed their application’s sharing feature would be blocked by Facebook. So even though filesharing applications can be, and are being, used for sharing legal files Facebook is not taking any chances.

Speaking with TorrentFreak the Vice President of Product Management for Limewire, Jason Herskowit had this to say about the ban

Jason Herskowit, Vice President Product Management at LimeWire told TorrentFreak that Facebook has requested a number of changes to LimeWire’s Facebook integration after they introduced the new feature. LimeWire quickly complied with these requests, but that was not good enough.

“Unfortunately, this week we were contacted again. This time not with a change request, but with a notice that they were going to disable the feature,” Jason explained. “Rather than leave the users with a broken LimeWire, we decided to disable the feature before they did so. As an avid user of both Facebook and LimeWire myself, I am as disappointed by this as anyone.”

“It is unfortunate for us all, particularly considering that LimeWire and Facebook share the common vision of being ‘a place to connect and share’. We hope to find a way to work with Facebook to re-enable the features that you guys continue to ask for and we sincerely apologize for having to remove this feature in the near-term,” Jason added.

Myself, I’m not surprised in the least with Facebook’s action. The last thing they want to do is fall in the crosshairs of entertainment industry and their lapdogs.

Britain to turn 7 million people into bona fide criminals

Steven Hodson — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 20:01:04 +0000

After a weekend get together with David Geffen, a billionaire producer, and members of the Rothschild banking dynasty at their family holiday villa on the Greek island of Corfu, Lord Mandelson the British business secretary ordered a toughening of regulations against illegal file-sharing. Interestingly enough prior to this weekend get-away paid for by the Rothschild’s Lord Mendelson apparently had little interest in the Digital Britain agenda, now however he wants increasing powers granted to Ofcom, Britain’s communications regulator, that would see seven million people labeled as criminals.

Not only would the possible seven million be turned into criminals they could also face fines up to £50,000 as well as having severe restrictions placed on their, and their family’s internet access.

Whitehall sources said that Lord Mandelson has been persuaded by the need to take action to prevent copyright being breached. But Mr Watson, writing below, says: "Not only do the sanctions ultimately risk criminalising a large proportion of UK citizens, but they also attach an unbearable regulatory burden on an emerging technology that has the power to transform society, with no guarantees at the end that our artists and our culture will get any richer.

"Working on the safe assumptions that (a) people like downloading music from the internet, and (b) most people would prefer not to break the law, we should aim to map a way forward for businesses to take financial advantage of the digital market."

Source: Independent :: The Net closes in on internet piracy

Mr. Watson, the former minister for digital engagement also said in the same piece that rather than going after the downloaders it would make much more sense to go after those doing the uploading.

RIAA smacks down Usenet.com in court

Kim LaCapria — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:26:10 +0000

Usenet.com is preparing for what may amount to “hundreds of millions of dollars” in damages after losing a case brought by the RIAA in New York against the internet dinosaur.

Ars Technica detailed the laundry list of grievances of which Usenet.com was found guilty:

“A federal judge yesterday found Usenet.com liable for just about every copyright infringement claim on the books: direct infringement, inducement of infringement, contributory infringement, and (just for good measure) vicarious infringement. Not content to be loud and proud about its pro-pirate agenda, Usenet.com also resorted to stonewalling legal questionnaires, sending employees to Europe to avoid depositions, wiping hard drives, and failing to turn over e-mail after being sued in 2007 by the music labels.”

Aside from the potential for ridiculous and imaginative fiscal penalties, the case is significant for many reasons. Usenet.com was denied use of the “Betamax” defense by U.S. District Judge Harold Baer, with which they could assert that their service had reasonable applications for use other than facilitating infringement. Baer also sanctioned Usenet from invoking protection under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s ”safe harbor” provision- a clause which protects internet service providers from prosecution due to unlawful acts committed by users.

CNet quoted Usenet.com attorney Charles Baker on another significant issue possibly defined by this case:

Another precedent set by Baer, according to Baker, is that distributing material within a closed network was a violation.

“This is something new the judge bought off on their argument,” Baker said. “The way Usenet.com works is there is copying going on in the servers, there’s multiple copies being made. When a user uploads a file it goes into a server and subsequently those binary files move from server to server as they go through the Usenet network. The court has held that was a violation of the right of distribution and no court has gone there before.”

RIAA lawyers successfully contended that Usenet.com engaged in several below board practices to circumvent their judicial efforts, including hiding witnesses in Europe and destroying data. Baer was not pleased with Usenet’s actions, clearly reflected in his findings. Without the “safe harbor” defense available to Usenet, their case was tanked and Baer issued a summary judgment to the RIAA. Damages will be determined in the coming weeks, and penalties could range as high as $30,000 per infringement.

RIAA General Counsel Stephen M. Marks gloated about the verdict in a statement:

“This decision is another example of courts recognizing the value of copyrighted music and taking action against companies and individuals who are engaging in wide scale infringement. We hope that other bad actors who are engaging in similar activity will take note of this decisive opinion.”

Movie industry meet your new viral marketing department – it’s those nasty pirates

Steven Hodson — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 05:35:44 +0000

It’s been rather interesting following the ridiculousness following the ‘accidental’ leaking of the newest X-Men movie to the web. Already it has seen one data center get raided by the FBI and one Fox freelance movie reviewer lose his job. As I’ve been following this and other silliness being done by the movie industry and the entertainment industry on the whole I had an interesting thought.

What if the movie industry realized that with right approach those nasty dirty pirates out there trying to destroy the movie business single-handedly could actually the best viral marketing department around. To understand why this might be the case you need to understand how the whole pirate scene works. Luckily enough I’ve been around long enough and poked in enough dark corners that I’ve had a chance to learn a lot about this rather cool world on the internet.

First off and contrary to what all those entertainment companies and their trade groups would like you to believe 99% of the stuff that can be found in the dark recesses of the web isn’t put there for money. In some cases it might be ideological reason but in most cases it just because they can and the joy of a challenge. I know this first hand from my development days and conversations with a hacker group that cracked one of my past programs.

At first I was really pissed and wrote about it. The next morning I had a terse email in my inbox from the group that had cracked it that basically told me to use a better licensing scheme. Besides the fact that they were right I found it fascinating that they would even be willing to reach out as they did to a developer. It ended up that we had a long email conversation where I made them the offer of making the finished product available to them 48 hours before the official release for them to crack.

Now before you start shaking your head thinking the cranky old fart is nuts understand that there is a solid reason for this. The simple fact is that good software is going to get cracked – it is inevitable. The problem comes in when you get some hackers who then load up the cracked version with all kinds of bad stuff. I had checked the crack this group did of my software and it was a good clean crack. So as a developer if you know that your product is going to be cracked would you want that crack to cause damage or just do the job.

Don’t worry I’ll get to the movie part in a minute – this is background information that will help you understand my point.

The one thing that a lot of people don’t know is that within the world of all piracy there is a hierarchy. You have usually four or five top level groups that specialize in different things. You might have one that does just applications, another will just do games and yet another will release the highest quality movies – no cam’s for those guys. From this top level everything trickles down with other smaller groups adding in their own inferior or trojan laden versions.The even smaller groups just re-issue the stuff from the other groups. This is a distribution chain just like in the real business world.

On top of this is the fact that once one group releases a quality crack or a quality copy of a movie that it the one that gets propagated outward from that point on. Rather than having a hundred different copies you will generally only have one or two and that is because of the natural competition between the top groups to be the first out with a quality product – just like real businesses.

So we come to the movie piracy problem, except that it isn’t really a problem. If you do any serious research you will discover that the most highly pirated versions of movies were also the ones that made the most money at the box office. The Dark Knight is a perfect example of this and regardless of what the movie business propaganda might say that movie made a huge record setting box office while at the same time being one of the hottest movies being downloaded.

As well there were a lot of terrible cam and telesync version of the movie which probably had people not realizing what they were watching walking away unimpressed by the movie. This is the part that could hurt the movie industry and one that should be taken care of but it could be done in such a way that the movie companies could be assured of the quality being seen. It would also because of the code of first out with a quality release among the different groups limit the number of versions of the movie gotten other ways.

In fact if the movie industry did it right we would probably see a drastic reduction in the number of cam and telesync copies that get released once a movie hits the theater. The reason being that if it is known that one or possibly two groups will be releasing a high quality version either just before or during the movie theater run people would pass on the inferior quality product.

Now how could the movie industry utilize this perfect distribution channel to their benefit?

Well the important thing to remember here is how movies make their money – it’s all about the buzz you can create around the movie. What better way to get that buzz than to have people seeing it and talking it up among their friends. Oh and that old argument about why would anyone pay to go see a movie that they can get for free – it’s bullshit plain and simple. The Dark Knight and many other modern blockbusters have proven that.

But to create buzz like the one that now surrounds X-Men Origins: Wolverine all it would take is the movie company to reach out to one of the top pirate groups that specializes in movies and work out a deal. They get a top quality version of the movie as long as they get it into the distribution chain as quickly as possible so that no bad copies get a chance to be released. They could even get clever with by adding on a trailer at the end encouraging people that liked the movie to go see it as well in the theater.

This is totally out of the box but the truth of the matter is that piracy isn’t going to go anywhere and no three strike law is going to stop them from being downloaded. So maybe the time has come to think outside of the box and use every distribution channel at your disposal to create good buzz about the movie instead of alienating your customer base.

You got to admit it would be interesting to see happen and I bet the results would be to the benefit of the movie industry.

Inaugural day sneakiness from CNN

Steven Hodson — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 20:53:10 +0000

What will probably go down as one of the most significant days in US history has come and gone with Barak Obama now sitting in the Oval Office of the White House. Another marker as well has to be the number of people who watched this historic moment on the Internet. Streaming video of the event was spread around the world from just about every major news organization but it appears that CNN may have set the stage for future online events being streamed much better.

According to a post by Brian Livingston over at Windows Secrets the main reason CNN’s coverage of the event was technically ahead of the game was because as part of watching their streaming video of the event was the installation of a peer-to-peer (P2P) client on your computer. The way it worked was when you selected to view the live stream from the CNN site you would have seen a dialog box asking you to allow the installation of the Octoshape Grid Delivery enhancement for Adobe Flash Players. This dialog doesn’t show for their regular video – only for live streaming events.

So what is the Octoshape Grid Delivery enhancement?

Well, it is basically nothing more that a P2P client that runs in the background and when you surf to a site that utilizes this P2P technology your machine become a node that streams the content as well as lets you watch it. Some folks might not see anything wrong with that but when you stop to consider two very important facts one has to wonder – as did Brian Livingston in his post – why more of an uproar isn’t being made of this.

The first thing to consider is that by installing the Octoshape Grid Delivery module you are turning your computer into a broadcast station for any content utilizing that technology. Whether you like it or not you make your computer a part of a P2P network that provides no notification that you are in fact streaming data (video or sound) outward. They are using your bandwidth without your explicit permission not to mention – your knowledge.

On January 20th the traffic was so high that the Internet Storm Center reported that the traffic on Port 8247 – the port being used by the P2P program – was thousands of times higher than usual

Now granted, some folks might be okay with that (I’m not) but here’s another point to consider – especially as we move into a world of Internet provider bandwidth and data transfer caps. All this activity on the 20th would have gone against your caps and doing so without your knowledge. This kind of sneaky use of P2P technology doesn’t bode well for the future when you suddenly get a notification of either overage charges or speed downgrades from your ISP because you have used up your allotment for the month.

As Brian points out in his post

Costs to end users. Many ISPs around the world restrict how much bandwidth users can consume. Those providers charge by the megabyte for any traffic above that level. Users who installed Octoshape’s app and served traffic upstream as well as down may get an unpleasant surprise in their next monthly bill. Octoshape anticipated this in the company’s EULA by saying, "You are responsible for any telecommunication or other connectivity charges incurred through the use of the Software."
In addition, ISP terms of service usually prohibit customers from using their Internet connection to host a server.

Make’s me glad to have watch the Inauguration on YouTube but I can also say I won’t be watching any live streams from CNN anymore.

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Brand Asset Digital brings contextual advertising to P2P networks

Duncan Riley — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 00:49:40 +0000

Advertising on file sharing sites has always been a difficult market. Most mainstream advertisers don’t want their brands tied into illegal content, and nearly all the big ad providers prohibit their ads from being shown on such sites. The vacuum has been filled by fringe players, with advertising for porn and gambling taking the places that would usually be reserved for Adsense units or mainstream display advertising.

Brand Asset Digital aims to go where most fear to tread, with a contextual advertising network that targets search results on file sharing sites.

Brand Asset Digital’s P2Pwords allows advertisers to target promotional messages to users based on what they’re looking for on services such as Limewire and eMule. A user searches for a term like they would on a traditional search engine such as Google, and they are offered a list of results. Mixed into those results are contextually delivered adverting messages.

The LA Times interviewed the founder Joey Patuleia, who said of the market: “This is the most unleveraged, unbranded, unmarketed space in the history of the Internet.”

In a quest to reach users where ever they are, advertisers may be finally softening their stance on advertising such as this. Advertisers who have already used the service include Vitaminwater, General Motors, Dial Corp and a few dozen independent music artists. The unknown is how the movie and music industry will respond; they won’t be happy to see companies such as General Motors advertising on P2P sites, in turn helping to financially support many of these services.