May 14, 2004
Does Interdiction Work?
Frank’s been taking great notes at iLaw. This section from Professor Fisher’s and Nesson’s presentation stood out:
“Another stick: a ‘first in line auto-competition’ system
The objective is to protect new releases that have immediate commercial value. Preservation incentive for novelty.
At T0, the file exists only at the artist’s. Someone gets a copy, and puts it into the P2P net. As soon as that happens, it is now visible – until then, it’s invisible. So, we set up a system that searches the net, and finds the first release of the file on the network, and then – here’s the big deal – (1) the program starts hogging access to that single file excluding others and (2) notifying the poster that s/he’s been identified as the source of the infringing copy.
This technology has been developed and is being tried out. Stats for three weeks of protecting a file on KaZaA and Gnutella. 20 seeds (initial drops into the net); total sharers: 500 – others. What we see is that, on a day by day basis, there’s a big bounce when radio plays start up. And the program seems to be effective at getting people to take the file down. Only a few evaders.
So, this is a proof of concept – it is possible to inject something into the technology so that you can get ahead of the rate of “seeding” the network; downloads may behave exponentially, but uploading does not - so it can be attacked. Stopping the seeder seems to have meaningful effects – so the trick is to monitor all networks (and thus, a problem, IMHO)”
Very interesting. Again, this is a key component of the speed bumps argument. What I hadn’t seen before is any actual stats on interdiction – I’d love to see more. Putting aside methodological problems, getting such stats is difficult because no one really admits on record that they’re using interdiction.
Filed by Derek Slater at 5:49 pm under General news
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