Woodstock win todays award for cluelessness

This isn't really worth the time to pick it to bits, but just in case anyone is tempted...

Woodstock�s Approach to Digital Audio File Borrowing and Lending

Patent-Pending Technology that Replicates Physical World

Woodstock Systems has developed a set of patent pending technologies to replicate the physical world digitally, across the Internet. The technologies allow one friend to authorize another friend to borrow music from their PC. When one borrows a music track, it is streamed, in real time, to their PC from the lending machine. During the lending process, a full copy of the digital audio file is never created; either on the borrowing device or the lending device. Only small temporary chunks are streamed as needed. The chunks are never fully assembled on the destination device.The chunks only reside in the RAM of the computers. They never are stored on the Hard Drive or in any form of semi-permanent or permanent cache.
All chunks are encrypted during the process, making it impossible to make an exact digital copy even if the chunks could be captured and reassembled at the borrowing device.

1) Hook up an audio cable. Press record.

2) Capture the audio at the driver level, and spool to a file

While you have the track borrowed, the lending machine designates the entire album on which the track belongs to as �borrowed�. The borrowed album is then virtually in possession of the borrower. All devices except the one borrowing device are restricted from rendering (playing) any track from this album. Even the owner�s PC where the full file resides cannot listen to the track while it is borrowed. This provides all the same controls and restrictions as in the real world when someone physically borrows a CD.

Why on earth would anyone install this ramshackle Rube Goldberg software when they could IM an MP3? Where's the incentive?
What happens when the connection goes down and suddenly you're locked out of your own songs because someone borrowed them? This makes Microsoft's notorious one-machine key WMA files look user-friendly.

A Secure User to User Network

We believe that the Woodstock approach creates a powerful mechanism enabling consumers to discover new music from their most trusted source, their friends.

As long as they don't want to listen to it together, and are both online simultaneously.

Additionally, unlike other P2P solutions, the Woodstock System�s audio file technology is structured as a true User to User network. Only users specifically authorized by the owner of the lending PC can access a lending PC. This is not an open P2P network where anyone around the globe can access your music tracks.This is a secure, private system in which there is no central database or central �nodes� where an index of music tracks can be found.

No-one can find anything. That's a feature?

Only users who have been specifically authorized to borrow tracks from a device can access and see the content or indexes of content on that device. Though the music is streamed in real time, this is different from Internet radio in that only one device can listen to an album at a time. It is a one-to-one streaming technique. One-to-many streaming is fully restricted. For the music industry, it creates a very powerful Digital form of Word of Mouth marketing while legally and ethically respecting the rights of the artists, labels and related copyright holders.

Word of mouth needs fan-out to have a chance of working at all. These restraints would kill it dead, assuming anyone was daft enough to install software that stops them playing the songs on their own machine in the first place.

Key Points:
One User at a Time: Only one device can listen to an album containing the audio track at anytime. If someone is borrowing a track, the album cannot be listened to on the device which lent the track, or any other device.

Hang on, you lock me out of the whole album now?

Intellectual Property Status

The technologies described are Patent Pending.

Good. I hope that stops anyone else doing something equally foolish.