[wordup] Hitting P2P Users Where It Hurts

[Adam Shand]

I have no idea how much Overpeer would charge but my guess is that their 
services are "exceedingly not cheap".  It makes you wonder though, maybe 
if they spent the money creating a good online mechanism for actually 
dsitributing music legally ... P2P music trading would stop being such a 
big deal.

I know that most of the times I use one, I'm doing one of two things.

  * Trying to listen to a song I have stuck in my head, or resolve a
    fight about the lyrics.  In either case a free low quality recording
    would do fine and often leads to a purchase.

  * Looking for obscure stuff by favorite artists that I'd have no idea
    how or where to find in a music store.  In which case I'd be more
    then happy to pay for a decent search engine and option to buy.

Adam.

From: http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,57112,00.html

Hitting P2P Users Where It Hurts
By James Maguire
02:00 AM Jan. 13, 2003 PT

Most of Marc Morganstern's top clients won't publicly acknowledge hiring 
his company.

And, for his part, Morganstern can't reveal the names of clients he 
describes as the leading music, film and game-development companies. As 
part of their contract with Overpeer, of which Morganstern is CEO, all 
parties sign a confidentiality agreement.

Why the secrecy? Unable to snuff out file-swapping networks in court, 
record labels and other media outfits are shifting their 
anti-peer-to-peer crusade to a new venue: the file-trading networks 
themselves. That's where Overpeer comes in.

Overpeer "intervenes on behalf of our clients to protect their content 
from piracy on P2P networks. And, in certain cases, we also may help 
them build relationships with potential customers who happen to be on 
the P2P site," Morganstern said.

Yet these media companies seem to feel the public relations 
ramifications of hiring Overpeer aren't completely positive. On some 
level they understand that P2P users are also potential customers -- 
record buyers, video renters or gamers -- and don't want to alienate them.

According to Morganstern, who is a former vice president of the American 
Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, Overpeer is the leading 
antipiracy company in terms of "the number of acts of piracy we avert 
through our technology."

Overpeer protects "literally thousands and thousands of titles of 
multiple content types right now for various clients," he said.

But Morganstern won't reveal exactly how Overpeer's technology works. He 
will say only that the company uses an "extensive network of servers," 
and that "there are several different techniques we use to intervene and 
make it very difficult to find and download pirated material. It 
involves software and hardware and proprietary information."

Overpeer's patent application offers a few more clues. The application, 
which credits Overpeer board members Cheol-Woong Lee and Chang-Young Lee 
as inventors, describes the methodology:

1) Search for digital music file on network.

2) Collect illegally produced digital music file.

3) Edit illegally produced digital music file (damage sound quality).

4) Distribute digital music file on network.

Morganstern said this description is "not completely accurate," but 
declined to say how it errs, citing the need to keep his company's 
technology under wraps.

Based on the patent application, Overpeer appears to be distributing so 
many defective copies of a given file on P2P networks that users have a 
hard time locating an undamaged copy. This technique, called "spoofing," 
has been used by disgruntled musicians and other anti-P2P saboteurs for 
years.

But spoofing on a grand scale is a different matter. According to Mike 
Goodman, broadband entertainment analyst at the Yankee Group, it's not 
complicated to be a network-wide spoofer, but it does require extensive 
resources.

To make a spoofed file "persistent," that is, omnipresent on a P2P 
network, requires 10,000 copies of the file, Goodman said. Additionally, 
since P2P networks are set up in clusters of 100,000 machines, a 
professional spoofer needs enough always-on servers to connect with each 
of a P2P network's clusters.

In Goodman's view, spoofing -- at any level -- won't stop file trading. 
"It's a continual game of one-upmanship between the music industry and 
the file-sharing services," he said. "And the music industry is on the 
losing end of the deal.

"Every time new spoofing comes out, we see file-sharing services come 
out with a way to counter it. You cannot lock content, not in the 
digital world."

But Susan Kevorkian, a consumer technologies analyst at IDC, sees 
Overpeer as an effective tool for lessening P2P networks' appeal. She 
continually monitors file-swapping services and finds that "it has 
become much more difficult to find the file you're looking for the first 
time around."

This "will make people who would otherwise be habitual users think twice 
about investing their time in the P2P networks," she said. "As the 
quality of the files on the free P2P services go down, it makes the 
offerings from the legitimate online services, like Pressplay and 
MusicNet, that much more attractive."