|
I'm endlessly amused by the entertainment industry's notion that you can identify "infringing content" with a program. (And a bit worried, maybe, because the people making the ultimate decisions about this are possibly less technologically aware than my teenager.)
They can't tell the difference between "a copy of Tales of Beedle the Bard downloaded from the darknet" and "a copy of the same book that I scanned & OCR'd myself." And of course, they'd have trouble identifying the book in txt form, titled tobtb_jkr.txt, instead of a traditional ebook format. (They might have a scanner that looks inside the text document. *MY* that's a lot of wasted processing time. It takes quite a long while to view the contents of every text file on a hard drive--comparing them against an outside database would be an incredible drain on resources.
I have no idea how they think they could identify DRM-cracked content; the filename may not be the same; the filesize won't be the same; the metadata may-or-may-not be the same (and there's no crime or even infringement in having metadata that matches something else). I suspect what they want to do is visit the torrents, grab something popular, and scan people's computers for copies of that exact file; p2p networking requires identical copies to be most effective. (Filesharing services like Rapidshare & Megaupload don't, so people would start renaming & otherwise tweaking those files in order to prevent an exact match in case of digital search.)
Of course, they're only talking about "infringing" content that relates to professionally published, mainstream books/songs/movies; they're not interested in preventing infringement against small indie publishers or individuals.
|