Companies struggling to stop song swappers

NEWS

An attack on corporate use of peer-to-peer software is under way, as companies face increasing pressure from record labels and other copyright holders to stop employees from file trading. The latest salvo against companies came last week, when the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sent letters to about 300 US companies providing evidence of specific instances of their internal networks being used to swap copyrighted songs, and warning of potential legal liability. The RIAA for months has been pressing companies to crack down on the use of file-swapping networks. Corporations have been responding to this growing pressure in various ways, nearly all of which are giving companies increasing potential visibility into their employees' communications. Many have outlawed the use of file-trading programs, but in companies with sprawling internal networks, and hundreds or thousands of PCs connected to the Net, using high-tech tools to enforce these policies can still be a difficult task. "Part of the problem is you have a trusted (network) session that's in theory being opened by a trusted user," said Jerry Periolat, president of Apreo, a company that sells network management and monitoring tools. "If you initiate this kind of connection from the desktop, it can be very hard to catch, because it's not coming in a way that a traditional firewall is going to stop." The high-tech battle over peer-to-peer network usage has been going on for several years now, at least since network administrators at universities first started noticing that Napster use was suddenly taking up a huge proportion of schools' network bandwidth. The recent push from the RIAA and movie studios, with increasingly less veiled threats of lawsuits and liability, has added urgency to the effort, however. With early generations of file-swapping software, it was a relatively simple task for network administrators to simply block the network "ports", or designated paths, that the software would use to communicate with the outside world. Many software programs use specific ports to communicate with each other, and so this proved effective. That capability has been lost with recent generations of file-swapping programs, however. Programs including Kazaa can switch which port they use, essentially trying all the network doors available until they find one that is open. Some also use the same path used by ordinary Web traffic -- blocking this would block all of an employee's ability to visit outside Web sites, an unacceptable outcome for many companies. In response, a generation of tools has emerged that looks closely at network traffic to see exactly what kind of information is included in the data stream, or scans employees' computers to see what kinds of software they have running. Among the most popular network tools today are monitoring systems that can look inside a data stream and figure out what kind of protocol is being used to transfer the information. This tactic would not necessarily give monitors information about the data itself, but only its wrapper -- somewhat like noting that a car is a Toyota, without indicating who is driving it. That protocol information can be used to block or prioritise traffic. Rick Koenig, a network engineer at Concordia University in Austin, says he's started using tools from Cisco to identify and de-emphasise file-swapping traffic on his school's networks. "You can block it, or you can create policies to block it, or you can totally limit the amount of bandwidth that is available," Koenig said. "That's how we're doing it." Another company, called Packeteer, has found considerable success helping companies monitor their traffic flow for file-swapping and other suspect applications. That company turned profitable in 2002 based in large part on sales of its net monitoring tools. Aveo's software works differently, scanning computers connected to a company's internal network, looking for specified applications such as Kazaa, iMesh, BearShare or others that a company has decided to ban, block, or otherwise regulate. The software runs on a company's central server, but also contains a small desktop component that would live on each employee's desktop, and the two pieces work together to notify corporate administrators when banned software is running. As pressure from the copyright holders mounts, these and other similar tools are likely to become the focus of even more attention from IT managers eager to eliminate security and legal risks. "We... encourage you to adopt and fully implement employee policies and technical measures that prevent copyright infringement on your corporate network, as we will continue to monitor for infringing conduct and take any appropriate legal action necessary to protect our rights," the RIAA wrote last week in its letter to corporations whose employees were found to be using file-swapping software. "The consequences for not taking action... can be quite serious."

See the MP3/P2P News Section for the latest on everything from MP3 players to Napster and the other file-swapping services. Let the editors know what you think in the Mailroom.

Talkback

When will the RIAA use some common sense and stop prosecuting those who download songs. The record industry has gone through many changes this century, and it seems none were welcomed. When CD first came out many were skeptical of buying these, however, it became the prime medium for music, and the record labels reluctantly adopted. Now they're faced with the new form of music, MP3s. Is this any different than the change from Tapes to CDs... sure. Is this going to be the way people get their music from now until another better medium is produced...yes. So what's the issue? If record labels contributed half the money they're using to prosecute for music services where users could select an unlimited amount of songs on a monthly basis and pay a low membership fee, we wouldn't have this problem at all.

Another possible solution is changing the format of albums as we know it. Since music has first been produced, it has been recorded on albums, with generally 10 songs give or take a few. With MP3s, albums are not needed anymore. People download songs they like, not entire albums. When's the last time you bought an album that you loved all the songs? Chances are it's been awhile. Why not capitalize on an individual song rather than an album. I know, I know, this causes those 'poor musicians' to produce more than one entertaining song in their lifetime, big deal. They want to make money off their entire album in which 1 or two songs are worth listening. I guess next time I'm at work I should ask my boss to pay me for my past 2 weeks, while for the last week and a half I haven't been worth a damn.

The way I see it, the record industry must either provide a service better than what we can already get for free, or drastically change the way records are produced. If not, I guess they'll continue to prosecute and lose potential earnings until they realize how stupid they've been.

MP3s are here to stay, deal with it!

via Facebook 9 September, 2003 23:12

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