Much ado about music

From two opposite sides of the legal battle over filesharing, Kevin Bermeister and Michael Speck have come together to launch a new application that will push potential "pirates" into a more legitimate direction.

Speck headed the Music Industry Piracy Investigation — the antipiracy arm of the Australian music industry — when Bermeister was sued for millions due for his "rather undefined" relationship with P2P site Kazaa, reports ArsTechnica.

The two are now partners in Brilliant Digital Entertainment, a company that provides search engines, social networks, or IP owners  with a way to track and deter the spread of pirated content.

The service, still unnamed, does more than just track. It attempts to intercept internet piracy at a crucial point by presenting users searching for illegal software, movies, or music the option to buy access to that same content.

The would-be pirate would pay for this access via his ISP, which adds the cost to the monthly bill - after taking a cut of the proceeds directly from the seller.

Technical trials have been completed and the company will conduct a live trial with an unnamed Australian ISP within a month. American and European ISPs, law-enforcement agencies, and film and music publishers expressed "keen interest," according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

The same technology used to block pirated music and movie can be used to block child-porn searches, letting the searcher know that they've attempted to access illegal content. The service simply cross-references the content's unique numerical values against a list of proven illegal files in its own database, plus those from outside sources.

At the point of blockage, no other information is collected so there is absolute protection of privacy, Speck said. And files that are not on the "bad list" are not blocked or impeded.

Even so, concerns linger that ISP activity logs — chock-full of searches for illegal content — could become a "honeypot" for the music industry when they start prosecuting pirates, said David Vaile, vice-chairman of the Australian Privacy Foundation.