AMBC Music Conference: Kevin Burmeister and the new Altnet / Kazaa - back to the stone ages of digital content? Deep packet inspection? DRM? R u Serious?

Welcome to Content 0.0? I am in beautiful Sydney Australia for a keynote speech at AMBC, the Austral-Asian Music Business Conference; for a keynote on Music 2.0 and the Digital Music License tomorrow (August 21, 2009). AMBC is a great event and I am very happy to be here, but for the past 30 minutes we were subjected to one of the most bizarre, desperate and - sorry to be so frank - ...mad schemes of how to turn digital content into money on the Internet - and of all people, by one of the original Kazaa guys, Skype investor, and CEO of Altnet and Brilliant Entertainment, Kevin Bermeister. I have recorded some of his speech on my iPhone voice-memo recorder, and may make it available later, but here is, in a nutshell, what Kevin and his company, Altnet, seem to propose (and be sure to read their recent press release on the relaunch of Kazaa):

1. Put a Cisco 'Copyrouter' into the network of each ISP, everywhere
2. Have the Copyrouter (ouch... that word alone gives me the chills) look at all traffic that is based on or runs on certain P2P protocols, and define what's being shared via the unique hashtags that each file represents. Deep packet inspection... go!!!
3. Block all traffic with hashtags that have been flagged as 'unauthorized' (i.e.... all?), and replace them with files that are DRM'ed (yes... really) and that can be downloaded only if you allow a charge to be levied by your ISP.

I won't even attempt to delineate what I think is wrong with concept because there are so many issues that they would fill this blog for the next 30 days. But the mere fact that this kind of scheme is being presented in a keynote at a leading music industry conference is, frankly, making me feel quite hopeless on the future of digital music. But maybe I am wrong...  you tell me (comment box below)

Anyway, first, Kevin seems to want all our traffic to be deep-packet inspected (i.e. monitored) so that a automatic determination of it being lawful or not-lawful can be made. That, in itself, is a bizarre and utterly unfeasible concept has already been rejected by the European Commission and almost all governments around the world (except for France), because it only points in one direction, and that is towards CHINA's version of the Internet. Police-states, Censorship and severe lack of freedom of expression and speech. Are you serious, Kevin? Is this what you want so that the major labels and studios can keep or shall I see regain total control over distribution of content rather than to license it to everyone, and share in revenues (as is, strangely enough, happening with Google and the record labels in China!)? I hope not.

Second, Kevin seems to want to have the illegal files (again.... that means all files, really) be automatically replaced with copy-protected files (did you think those were retired, too...?) that must be purchased by the user, via the ISP. 

In other words, let's just  re-insert Total Control back into the system, and force every Internet single user to a) pay whatever the price is (without having any say on that) b) use ONLY approved devices that can play back the DRM'ed content. If that's future of digital content... count me out (along with 98% of the online population I would say). Put that Content under the rock again!

This scheme is too painful even to just contemplate; I mean it's so far out that it hurts... so, over to you guys, for comments, please.

My final thought: this reminds me a lot of the recent Onion video ('Google Opt-out Village') that makes fun of how you can regain 100% of your privacy on Google. Watch it and make the connection;). More on this, soon. Update: Read GigaOm's take.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Kazaa to insert music fees into phone bills (news.cnet.com)
• Study: Deep Packet Inspection and Internet Censorship (advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org)

Comments

[Owen Kelly]

1.

This is what embarrasses me about the state of the music industry. Both here in Australia, and around the world. The fact that this idea is still being pushed around, and the fact it was given a keynote at (theoretically) one of the most important music business conferences in Australia.

I'm with you on this, it hurts just to know there are people contemplating this.

1. Putting any piece of hardware or software in/at every router is completely impossible. The internet is inherently decentralised, so it would take but one open router for all traffic to be routed through for the entire plan to fail.

2. Deep Packet Inspection? Really? This reminds me of the famous Benjamin Franklin quote "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
The safety of their old business model is not worth sacrificing the liberties of an entire population.

3. This is just beyond absurd. I would imagine illegal too. Tampering with network traffic, all for a few companies. Beyond Absurd.

Please, talk some sense into this man... someone.

[Gerd Leonhard]

2.

thanks Owen!!

[Justin]

3.

Man, it seems these guys just keep hanging on. It is obvious the music industry has been profiting beyond its means to a point of being unsustainable. Now they are trying anything to hold onto their fat paychecks. If they had any clue at all they would have been trying to solve the problems 6-10 years ago, instead in their ignorance and arrogance they figured they would be fine. Now they are scrambling, with this CMX or whatever this useless new file is. When will they start caring about their customers, honestly. No one wants DRM and anything that tries to use it will fail miserably. Hopefully they try this and lose lots of money while doing it. I don't have much good to say about the music industry, and I am a music artist myself :-S What the hell am I thinking. Now these clowns are trying to restrict everything again?? Man oh man, 1984 here we come. Orwell was a smart man. These people don't understand the path they are paving. Short term money hungry arrogant assholes. Oh well.

[John Button]

4.

Seems to me that the bizarreness of any scheme is in direct proportion to the level of desperation felt by the schemer.

[Ro]

5.

I wouldn't say Kevin was "one of the original Kazaa guys". Kevin was only ever on the Altnet side. But an interesting post and comments.

The 'new Kazaa' unfortunately does seem to be a prime example of having too many parties in the negotiating room (and forgetting that the product is actually meant to be for the consumer).

[Download Music]

6.

The ISPs already know what and when you download.

It could be an mp3 file or really any format.

Pull your head out of the sand, mate!!!

Its the future..
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10127841-93.html

"Scroggin, who sells Internet access to between 10,000 and 12,000 customers in Louisiana, heard the news on Friday that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has opted out of suing individuals for pirating music. Instead, the group representing the four largest music labels is forging partnerships with Internet service providers and asking them to crack down on suspected file sharers."

[Gerd Leonhard]

7.

Emanuel / Altnet: my head is firmly above the sand - more like... in the sky;). There is a HUGE difference between what ISPs could / can do today, and what you guys are proposing - just because the ISPs could monitor my traffic does not make it right to MANDATE DEEP PACKAGE INSPECTION which is basically CENSORSHIP in order to enforce the resurrection of an utterly oumoded and failing content business model (i.e. sell copies, control the markets and prices 'my way or the highway' central-everything, rights monopolies that are totally detached from the current marketplace etc).

The solution, Altnet + Kevin, is a LICENSE that makes sharing legal, and monetizes it, not some bizarre technological solution that makes you guys a boatload of money while transporting the consumers (AND the content creators) back to the stone-age; or shall I say forward China-Police-State 2.0...? This is a BUSINESS problem not a technology problem. Get real.

As BJ Franklin says: "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety"

[wallow-T]

8.

To the music companies, any damage to the Internet is acceptable collateral damage. :)

[wallow-T]

9.

I don't think the proposed blocking technique would affect anything other than BitTorrent: I do not think any other filesharing technology relies on #hashtags.

If the hypothetical downloader gets a complete copy of the file from one source, #hashtags either don't exist, or are unnecessary and can be freely changed to evade detection. I doubt the DPI gear can compute "true" hashtags on the fly.

Disclaimer: I'm a really low-rent geek-pretender, and I still don't completely understand BitTorrent. :-)

[Owen Kelly]

10.

*not having a go at you. the more people that understand this the better.

This proposed technology would have to apply to ever form of files sharing from:

Bittorent to
P2P to
Email to
Http traffic (websites, blogs)
FTP traffic

It would literally slow down the internet. Aside from horrendously breaking (Australian) privacy laws history tells us it would be technically impossible. All people well versed in the internet are quite away any filtering method is never good.

So the notion that a technologically impossible idea is being proposed in a last ditch effort to save a dead business model, is laughable at best and terrifying at worst.

[wallow-T]

11.

I think we are saying the same thing: I'm just stressing the technical point that the #hashtags which the scheme relies upon to examine content do not reliably exist for (from your list) non-BitTorrent P2P, email, http, ftp, usenet, etc. etc. etc. One can claim that the Burmeister solution will "apply" to all data, but if the technical hook is not there, the detection rate is zero.

(If the plan is to calculate hash values on the fly -- um, no. You'd have to reassemble the file in the router. Nobody's router has the memory capacity to do that. And latency... ha!!)

In the absence of reliable #hashtags -- which only BitTorrent depends on -- one is back to the "solutions" which claim to examine the "sonic fingerprint" of files, and those (1) don't scale well to multi-gigabit pipes, and (2) are easily defeated.