The music industry last Friday filed suit against file-sharing operator LimeWire, charging large-scale copyright infringement. The RIAA, which facilitated the suit, took this action a year after having sent several P2P operators cease-and-desist letters in the wake of the US Supreme Court's Grokster decision, which rendered technologies and services culpable for copyright infringement if their business models depend on it.
This RIAA lawsuit offers an important insight into the kinds of technologies that the major music companies will accept as controls on peer-to-peer file sharing. After Grokster, some P2P operators that received letters from the RIAA (like eDonkey, BearShare, and WinMX) elected to shut down. Others, notably iMesh, engaged with the music industry and found a way to control content usage on their networks that the major labels found acceptable: acoustic fingerprinting. iMesh currently holds licenses to major-label music while it tests its copyright-respecting P2P service; the same is true for Mashboxx, which grew out of the ashes of Grokster.
LimeWire, on the other hand, proposed a file filtering solution based on computing hash values of music files. The scheme, which it announced back in March, is similar to one that AltNet -- a company affiliated with Kazaa -- had been proposing for some time. To say that the music industry did not take this hashing scheme seriously would be an understatement; it is trivial to hack. We view LimeWire's offer of file hashing to solve infringement problems as disingenuous, a view that the major music companies apparently share.
This development also sheds some light on the currently dark issue of the music industry's recent settlement with Sharman Networks, owners of Kazaa, to the tune of over US $100 Million. Apparently Sharman intends to work with the music industry to change Kazaa into a copyright-respecting service, as iMesh is doing. But details of how Kazaa will do this have been nonexistent. The Australian Federal Court had discussed the possibility of Kazaa implementing a keyword-based file filtering scheme to remedy its infringement. Sharman did not do this, yet the court did not hold the company in contempt, which implies that the scheme was a suggestion, not an injunction. A keyword-based scheme is not the same thing as hashing, but it is equally trivial to hack. Therefore it is likely that Kazaa will need to come up with something better in order to get into the music industry's good graces; it may be that the music industry will ask for acoustic fingerprinting.
The RIAA's lawsuit against LimeWire is understandable, given what we percieve to be the company's attitude. LimeWire is now forced to choose among cooperation, capitulation, or a courtroom.
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