In a hearing held at the House Committee on Science and Technology covering role of technology in the reduction of illegal file sharing, the SafeMedia Corporation CEO and Founder challenged colleges and universities to eliminate unauthorised P2P file sharing of copyrighted material on their campus networks. SafeMedia also told the congress about its products designed to eliminate unauthorised P2P file sharing.
According to Fahmy, the CEO and Founder of SafeMedia, some colleges and universities are not interested in implementing policies to tackle the issue with some giving the concern of student privacy as a reason. He then explained about Clouseau, the company's global "P2P Disaggregator" technology, which plugs in as a network bridge and takes effect without affecting the network topology. He claims it works by detecting and preventing illegal P2P traffic, while allowing legitimate P2P traffic, such as BitTorrent.
At present, campuses that usually deal with illegal file sharing usually apply traffic-shaping systems, which limit the bandwidth available for file sharing to take place. Some others apply measures to identify and block the transmission of copyright-infringing content. However, according to Fahmy, traffic shaping is not that effective and does not eliminate the illegal distribution copyrighted material over P2P and that content identification systems do not identify any encrypted traffic despite 90% of P2P traffic being encrypted.
What is interesting is that SafeMedia claims Clouseau is able to block illegal file sharing protocols and networks, including encrypted transmissions, while not opening up transmission packets (for privacy) or affecting legitimate file sharing. As ZeroPaid mentions, it makes me wonder how the box is able to tell whether one is downloading an illegal Torrent such as a movie distributed via the Pirate Bay or a legal Torrent such as an OpenOffice distribution.
Thanks to GristyMcFisty for letting us know about this news. More detailed information can be read in the full story on ZeroPaid.
