it appears that Overpeer was incubated and funded by South Korean conglomerate SK Group, whose other business interests range from textiles and chemicals, to optical media (that's right -- they make CD-Rs), to energy. in fact, these guys will get into bed with just about anyone: among their energy holdings is a 50-50 joint venture with the late, great Enron.
Marc Morgenstern, the New York-based company's CEO, is the former Senior VP for New Media of ASCAP -- one of the two major performing rights organizations (PROs) in the US. Zeropaid also says that Marc's the son of ASCAP vice-chair and Warner Chappell Music general manager Jay Morgenstern. PROs license music and collect royalties on behalf of composers, performers, and publishers (often Big Content-controlled entities like, er, Warner Chappell) from broadcast and live performances. while at ASCAP, Morgenstern was responsible (along with early snitchware vendor Cyveillance) for developing EZ-Seeker, a spider that trawled the Web in search of downloadable MP3s. offenders were then pressured to obtain ASCAP licenses, despite the claim that a downloadable MP3 constitutes a sale, rather than a performance. with Overpeer, Marc's taken the strongarm tactics to the next level.
exposing yet another flaw in America's intellectual property regime -- namely its propensity to award patents for dumbass ideas -- Overpeer's CSO, CheolWoong Lee, and CTO, Changyoung Lee have applied for a US Patent on their method for flooding networks with corrupted files. in the filing's abstract, the Lee boys say:
A method of preventing reduction of sales amount of records due to a digital music file illegally distributed through a communication network is disclosed. The method comprises the steps of a)producing an advertising digital music file by deteriorating or damaging a sound quality of an original music file of a record of a cooperating record corporation; and b)distributing the advertising digital music file through the communication network. The present invention provides a method of producing a digital music file with lower sound quality for publicity, and distributing it over the network before a formal record is sold, thus minimizing a distribution of the illegal digital music file with the same quality as the original music file on the network.stripping out the crap Abelman, Frayne & Schwab charge $200/hour for, we can see that Overpeer's trying to patent the act of diddling an audio file with SoundForge then sharing it on KaZaA.
overall, though, the filing's a moderately interesting look at how the agents of Big Content are working to sabotage competitors in the market for online music distribution.
