WASHINGTON (Reuters) – “Peer to peer” networks like Kazaa could prevent users
from downloading music, movies and other copyrighted material if they had any
desire to do so, media and technology experts said on Tuesday.
Kazaa, Morpheus and other peer-to-peer networks are hailed as a revolutionary
technology that allows users to swap any sort of digital material directly, but
they have drawn withering criticism for their ability to make copyrighted
material and hardcore pornography widely available for free.
In a letter to Congress, an adult-video firm said Kazaa’s parent company had
the ability to monitor activity on the network and could stop copyright
violations if it wished.
Titan Media’s claim was backed up by two independent technology experts, who
said such filtering technology exists and could be deployed easily and
affordably.
“If you’ve got computing power to do the searches, you can also use that
computer power to do that filtering directly,” said Darrell Smith, who oversaw
the Morpheus peer-to-peer network when it shared the same technology as Kazaa.
But existing copyright filters can be easily evaded, said a lawyer for Kazaa
parent Sharman Networks.
Expert witnesses at a trial last year failed to prove that any filtering
system could work, said Larry Hadley, outside counsel to Sharman. “When those
people were deposed, it turned out to be a house of cards,” Hadley said.
CAN’T BE DONE, SHARMAN SAYS
Sharman has long maintained that it cannot control content on Kazaa because
users connect directly with each other, not through company-owned computers.
Kazaa does contain a filter to allow users to avoid offensive content.
But others said content filtering is already in use.
Titan Media, which asked Sharman last month to block 1,400 of its movies,
said Sharman can closely monitor activity on the network through “spyware”
installed on users’ computers and could block users from downloading copyrighted
files.
Hadley said the company does not have that capability.
Smith, who is now setting up a peer-to-peer network with built-in copyright
protections, said Kazaa has had the capability to block content for years.
“All of the mechanisms to be able to do some form of identification and
filtering, and also tracking of the files to some degree, was always there in
the core,” said Smith, who is now setting up a peer-to-peer network called
M-Terra Inc.
The same technology Kazaa uses to recognize songs and download them from
multiple sources can be used to prohibit that song from being shared, Smith
said.
One California company has already developed a peer-to-peer system that
blocks copyrighted songs.
Los Gatos-based Audible Magic Corp. has created a copyright filtering system
that is currently used by CD pressing plants and a small college town in Finland
which chief executive Vince Ikezoye said can distinguish between different
versions of the same song.
The head of a peer-to-peer trade group that does not include Kazaa, said
Congress should hold hearings to determine if such filters actually work or if
they are simply hype.
“If this unicorn of a program exists in the forest of software, then it is
incumbent upon the industries that keep claiming that they’ve made sightings to
at least provide video for the evening news,” said Adam Eisgrau, executive
director of P2P United.
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