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WASHINGTON — "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
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. Sharman: "Can't be done" 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
Los
Gatos-based Audible Magic has created a copyright filtering system that is
currently used by CD pressing plants and a small college town in 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. sn Jen -- |
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