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SDMI Technologist Talal Shamoon Interview
A reader writes "Salon has an interesting interview with one of the brains behind SDMI.
Watermarks in music? Talal Shamoon, a key technologist for the SDMI, says that he's found the key to protecting copyrighted tunes."
i want cds to go away.
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
Ah ah indeed, you're so right. You know what would be the only way for them to actually ENFORCE their secure bullshit? That would be to make the songs playable only closed, proprietary devices ... that means no PC playback. Hey, remember how DVD was cracked, back in the days (oups, that was last year). So in their little dream land, those guys are fantasizing about a secure digital future where everybody will be nice and play their little Britney Spears songs on the little secure device. A bit like the Chinese version of the Internet.
And as always, there's the old stand-by with an SBLive!
Until the RIAA makes sure that this stuff comes out of an end-to-end hardware-secure solution (like someone already said), we're still going to get perfect digital rips, thanks to things like the SBLive!
(One also wonders how difficult it would be to code up a driver for a soundcard that existed solely in software, and whose sole purpose was to dump the output stream to disk?)
If they wish to limit themselves to watermarking, then they'd have to design a watermark that doesn't leave audible artifacts but is robust enough to survive transmission through analog air. I sure wouldn't want to bet my livelihood on them coming up with one.
Indeed. Especially when you consider how MP3 is lossy enough to screw with any inaudible but present watermarks.
> 4.Fact #4: If you can identify unneccesary data, you can remove it.
Any decent compression will remove the watermark automaticly...
I'm guessing the idea here is to imbed the watermark on CDs etc...
When someone rips a CD to an MP3 the compression will automaticly remove the watermark. It probably appears as unheard (or byond our hearing) noise.
Example Sound is "Really loud" watermark is "extreamly quite poping" you never hear it but it's there.
Here comes compression. Unheard sound? Yank.. Not in this MP3.
Even simple filtering would yank that example...
If it's not accually in the audio stream but in the data then it'll never survive being converted to an MP3.
Say your protecting an audio stream. I tap in and record whats comming off my chip (kmix RecSource master volume). I MP3 it...
All I need is your trusted client.. a program to control the audio on my sound card (kmix or the mixer built in Windows will do) and any audio recoding tool.
Convert to an MP3 using reasonable compression.
The watermark is history...
If the watermark is fluxuations in the sound that are to minnor to notice. Again removed.
Ideally lossy compression removes everything you don't hear. In the real world it ends up having an audioable effect and removes a few things you DO hear.
But compression is vital if you are gona trade MP3s over Napster. And thats what they are trying to prevent right?
I don't actually exist.
Really great points. Could someone moderate that message up?
It's disappointing to see such an otherwise brilliant man so completely taken in by the media companies' need to protect their works -- a need which has never been convincingly demonstrated; to protect works which, strictly speaking, aren't theirs to begin with, but the originating artist's.
However, digital watermarking does have an important use in the infinite abundance of the digital universe, and it's not what Mr. Shamoon has been led to believe. Watermarks have a compelling use not as a basis for copy protection/management (erroneously referred to as "rights management"), but rather for reputation management.
Think forward to an age where everything -- including physical objects -- can be copied infinitely and perfectly at zero cost. Attempting to control copying in such a world becomes utterly pointless, not to mention childishly foolish. However, being able to track down the original artist(s) behind a given work will become extremely important. One way to do this is with difficult-to-remove watermarks. By scanning the work and recovering the watermark, you are able to identify the original artist, possibly to negotiate with them to do additional, similar work, and you're able to make this identification no matter how many hands the work has passed through. Thus, the artist is assured that their reputation will be preserved, and the recipient of the work knows they can track back directly to the originator rather than a faceless publishing house.
If Mr. Shamoon were to re-think his strategy from identifying and protecting copies (again, a pointless exercise in the digital universe) to identifying and protecting artists, I think he would find a good deal more support from artists, technologists, and consumers.
As for this new SDMI stuff, be very alert for it, as the media corporations are arm-twisting high-tech companies to cram it into everything. For example, Intel is working very hard to incorporate SDMI-like "features" into IEEE-1394 (FireWire). Also, the new Digital Flat Panel signalling standards from the Digital Display Working Group have space in the specs reserved for similar copy protection measures.
Personally, I can't understand why the high-tech companies are giving these guys the time of day. They won't be buying these devices; the consumer will, and the consumer has already made it clear they don't want this stuff.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Chiasmus. Sounds like a skin complaint. But it's not, is it? It's a rhetorical device. Is it your real name? If so, I apologise, and will represent you at no cost when you sue your parents.
But, I suspect, it's a name you chose to hide your real identity while you post inane comments.
I would apologise for calling you a bigot. In fact I will. When you prove you're not. But the attitude expressed in both the posts here seems to indicate that you consider that mocking someone because of their name is somehow acceptable. Maybe it is. Maybe I'm out of touch. Or maybe you need to grow up, move out of that sad little corner of the world you live in and get a life. Appreciate some diversity. Learn to accept that we're not all called Bubba. And, frankly, (I hate to break this to you) in most places, it's unusual for your brother to be your uncle as well.
Sweetness and light,
Chaz
Why not? I think that if the consumer were alowed to choose which rights they wished to purchase, and what cost would these would entail, it would be no less intuitive than, say, long distance plans (I'm not throwing this up as an example of something which is easily understood, but rather something which is deemed "understandable enough" for the general public).
It wouldn't have to be unwritten. It could be something along the order of "this song costs $2.00, plus $0.25 for each additional playback device, 5 addition devices for $1, volume pricing available. Rights to an addition playback devices can be purchased at any time after initial sale". I think this would be quite understandable, even if it is different than the way things currently work.
-User
Emacs is for experts. Pico is for beginners. VI is a disease.
... Nuff said.
========
Stephen C. VanDahm
Remember, this is watermarking, not encryption. So someone from a hotmail account releases a SDMI watermarked work. Just WTF are you going to sue anyway? wAreZdUUd3z@hotmail.com?
A watermark is useless unless it points to a pirate.
And if the watermark bugs you, why not just nuke it. Run a diff on two versions and discard any differences. Even if you have to do it downstream of a SDMI sanctioned player.
X.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
The real problem of introducing a secure music -- not even to question whether it is technically feasible -- is that there is 100+ years of unprotected media in wide circulation. Secure music would help in the long term (20+ years), but definitely not in the short term. A wholesale media change from CD to secure digital format would take at a minimum 10 years, as the sheer penetration of CD's was so successful.
I like CD's a lot, and vinyl also, but I do welcome the advent of a new technology, as long as it is technically superior (MP3 is far inferior to either). Of course, the people who develop this standard realize that they will have to make the product substantially better to make up for the lack of convenience, so I don't anticipate this being a problem.
The key word is disenfranchisement, meaning "deprivation of a privilege, immunity or right" . Regardless of the empirical or anechdotal evidence we may have as to the root cause of music trading, the fact remains that the public has been deprived of:
- The right to pay a fair price for exactly the music they want, no more.
- The right to both time- and space- displace the purchased music and listen to it in any and all the audio appliances they own.
- The privilege of choosing from among the entire spectra of music, not just selected genres or unsigned artists.
- The right to integrate music into their culture, to treat it as any kind or manner of culture is treated: examined, commented, exchanged, emulated, deconstructed and reintegrated.
At a risk of sounding Katzian, I think it's a good insight, and one that is apt to be co-opted into any real-world discussion on digital music.THS
---
THS
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"Poor girl looks as confused as a blind lesbian in a fish market." - Simon R. Green
"Fair use" is a technical term of copyright law, which is in fact where "that is written". It specifies that it is fair use of copyrighted material to quote it, parody it, or make copies for personal use.
As to fair use being some sort of natural right, the courts and legislature in the U.S. might not agree with your idea. Fair use exemptions are intended to feed a democracy with a stream of accurate and useful information about important things, and to prevent copyright holders from unduly restricting that flow. By guaranteeing the legality of appropriate uses, they're guaranteeing a healthy democracy as well. And since the Founding Fathers in the USA believed that democracy was an inalienable right, they might well assert that fair use was in fact also an inalienable right.
Kurt
But that's nonsense and based on selling snake oil. Watermarking technologies fundamentally aren't robust, and even if those kinds of "open" players with some rights management ever made it to the market, within months, people would hack the managed content and make it unmanaged. The industry would then scream "crisis" and "starving artists" and release the next version of the player such that it only plays music that has identifiable keys, keys held by the major record labels and nobody else.
In fact, Shamoon states clearly himself that he doesn't expect open players to survive, so all this other stuff about watermarking etc. is just posturing:
Once that happens, the incentive for hardware providers (often in conglomerates with content providers anyway) to produce players capable of playing open formats will go away, and you'll be left with proprietary formats, proprietary closed-source encoders, and authoring controlled by a few big companies.
Oh, and if that is not enough, after throwing out all your LPs and buying everything in CD format (guaranteed to oxydize out of existence in a few years), we are now supposed to pay for all that music yet again in the form of some future encrypted format that we can do even less with. How greedy can these people get?
On the plus side, their greed may kill their business. More and more musicians will find it easier to just record and publish outside the mainstream media conglomerates. And streaming Internet access (wired and wireless), as well as small, general purpose wearable computers, will make control of player formats meaningless.
What the industry should do is forget about all this player and encryption nonsense and simply gear up for a future in which everybody can have their own personalized radio station, with just enough ads thrown in to cover the costs but not enough to bother people sufficiently to switch to something else.
Oh, yes, that probably means lower profits. But the music industry right now is an anachronism, like weavers or blacksmiths were after the industrial revolution. It used to take lots of sound engineers, record factories, broadcasters, producers, etc. to get a piece of music to the end users. These days, it takes none of that. Of course their profits should be much lower because their product has gone from being a premium product that's difficult to produce and distribute to something that's almost free to produce and distribute.
Even if such a scheme were started by the artists themselves, it would still be illegal under current law (far more illegal than using Napster, in fact!) because teh artists don't have distribution rights to the music. The label does. Artists surrender LOTS of control just in order to get signed.
--
______________________________________________
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
"Do I think that Gnutella will move in where Napster stopped? I personally don't, the reason being that Gnutella requires you to set up a direct connection with an individual you've never met."
:)
And what, with Napster, you can set up direct connections with all of your friends?
"So where the dangers surrounding Napster, regarding viruses and child molesters, were moderately nebulous, they're going to be very severe with Gnutella."
Did I read that right? Child molestors and viruses pose a threat to Napster? Good freaking God! As for Gnutella, viruses might pose a threat, but that's why there are these things called virus scanners.
Well, judging by the interview, if this guy is indeed a key technologist for the SDMI, then there's nothing to fear
--
--
The real Raunchola isn't cool enough to have any imposters
If you are right, and I don't think there is a chance in hell that you are, then the law will (and should be) changed.
Failing that, music distributors simply need to implement the same sort of EULA agreements that the software industry are so enamoured with. Instead of just buying a cd at a store, you get your cd and sign a contract at the register stating that you will not distribute the music contained on the disk, and specifing the penalties for doing so (say, $25,000 per violation). This nice bit about this is it removes the issue from the messy arena of copyright law, to just another contract.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
the legal, ethical, "right" thing to do, which is to jump through the music management industry's hoops and use controlled distribution, management, and playback mechanisms.
Huh??? The ethical thing to do is to get your music from Napster (or copy the CD if you need higher quality), and then directly pay those artists whose music you really enjoy via something like fairtunes.com. That way, you get to exercise your fair use right to try-before-you-buy, and a $5 donation via fairtunes is over 5 times as much as the artist would get in royalties had you spent $18 for the CD. Plus, you can do your part by sharing the music which is important to you with the rest of the world.
Happily, because of the AHRA this is every bit as legal as doing what the RIAA would have you do: buy all new devices to pay-per-listen to lower quality music which denies you your Constitutional fair use rights, all in the name of perpetuating the RIAA's obscene profits and stranglehold over the distribution of music they had no part in creating. I think it's pretty obvious which approach is the more ethical one.
moderate up maybe ? Very informative !
I was thinking that as well. Crappy cookie-cutter pop music sung by a teen bimbo with overinflated boobs, and an overinflated sense of self importance? Just because some people are dumb enough to listen to, not to mention buy, that crap doesn't mean the entire world cares. :)
_____
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
The author is not clueless; he's being very calculating. He knows that people are wary of the big, bad internet, and that these same people are the ones who can't help but open binary attachments in their mail. They just aren't smart / thoughtful / informed enough to figure out that Gnutella won't do anything on its own. If millions of people will believe some stupid hoax about a virus that erases your hard drive, they will also believe that you can get a virus through the internet with Gnutella. It may be FUD, but it's semi-believable FUD for a lot of people.
Walt
P.S. There is some small risk in other people knowing your IP, but it ain't safe to be connected to the internet if that's an actual risk for you.
All the talk I'm hearing seems to be about securing music, such that only the buyer may listen to it. I think it's well accepted that this is a misguided attempt, as it simply makes things more difficult.
BUT...
Suppose they took this watermarking technology they say they have an use it for just that - watermarking. When you buy a track from the record company, it would be invisibly watermarked with your tracking information - but keep it in mp3. Simply watermark the signal. While copying is easily possible, it discourages the average joe from posting his song to the net, as it can be tracked back to him. It also would still allow trading between friends. Fair use or not, that's another story...
I don't know whether this can be done with audio, though they seem to be claiming it can. It's been done with images for quite some time now. (Digimarc and the like)
Yes, there are many holes in this idea, but it has a chance of being accepted by the community. (vs. SDMI... blech)
See you, space cowboy...
But then again, it could be feasibly possible to add thousands of different watermarks, making it impossible to tell who pirated it.
Only if the watermarks you put in in correspond to actual people. I assume that the watermarks will be some sort of ID number, not your name in ASCII, so you won't know which numbers have actually been assigned. I you just make up watermarks at random, you'd probably have no better chance of making one that corresponds to a person than if you made up credit card numbers at random.
What makes you think that people putting this stuff out over Gnutella or Freenet will in any fashion be using a credit card or bank account that can be traced back to them? Were you SDMI suppporters born this stupid or what?
He didn't say he supported the SDMI or thought it would work, I think he was just frustated with all the people who are thinking that watermarking encrypts the song.
The only way this might work is if everbody was assigned a unique id that was watermarked into the mp3 (or whatever format) as it's being downloaded. Of course it wouldn't take someone long to compare several songs with different keys in them before they hit on the encoding sequence and publish a crack.
As stated before his solution would work if the whole system was under some control but that's not likely to happen. Why would I want to add restrictions to the music I download when there is a ton of it free out there? Even if online method of music transport is shut down there still are friends!
I downloaded a copy of Tom Jones and The Cardigans version of "Burning Down The House" a week or two before the North American release. The bastards put a voice sample right in the middle saying "For evaluation only from the Undernet" or something very similar.
I mean, for f*cks sake, if you're gonna pirate MP3s, why go through the effort to put crap like that in?
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
ALl crypto cannot be broken. I merely stated that there is no format that can be practical enough in size to send over the net and secure enough not to be relatively easily crackable.
As for the watermarking, you can either ignore it (your MP3 will still play)
The watermark is not intended to keep you from playing the audio, it's intended to discourage distribution in the first place by making the purchaser of the SDMI music traceable. Of course, people could buy SDMI music with stolen credit cards and distribute that, but they'll probably just buy the CD and rip that. CDs are not going to be phased out anytime soon.
If someone offered you music in a system that would
- stop working when someone declares a mysterious "phase 2" start
- have built-in chain-letter marketing mechanisms
- require "protected" players and wires to transfer
would you even consider using it? No music can be that good!
In Murphy We Turst
I think the people who are behind the SDMI initiative well know that the 40-bit encryption used on CSS is easily broken with any Pentium III/Athlon 600 MHz or faster CPU.
However, if the "watermark" code is 128-bit encrypted, then you can essentially make it almost unbreakable. After all, in order to break 128-bit encryption, you either need a very powerful supercomputer or a 400-plus node Beowulf cluster running in massively parallel fashion on a high-speed LAN, and even then it would take five to six hours just to break the encryption. This is of course way beyond the means of almost every hacker and cracker on this planet.
This is why I expect by 2010 most commercial digital media to have at least 256-bit encryption.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
All you need are 2 or three copies of the song and run fd on them to list all the differences.
surely the watermark will involve some kinda of ciphering or message-digest wont it?
I am laughing frightendly.
Shaloom is sitting in his high chair pulling humongous amounts of money for participating in setting up a new faulty system. Shaloom, when you wash your hands, don't let them see you laugh.
People so distant to reality decides the future which sooner or later breaks apart. Why? Perhaps because those people weren't the one to decide. Instead we would need an open system, a mixture of the napster, gnutella systems and the one I commented earlier. (reply to 1st post regarding destinympe). If the users doesn't like it, it is not for the users to use. (happens to some extent with windows though, but people learn from their mistake in this case, regardless of what the heads might say). Lets do it right. Lets do it with honour.
-John
If this man really thinks that child molestation goes hand in hand with mp3 . . .
He doesn't really think that--it's even worse! He's knowingly trying to help spread the meme that only the worst kind of perverts criminals use peer to peer file sharing.
The idea is that the decode device puts an inaudible unquie watermark in each instance of the song, which is traceable to you (the owner of the decode device). So put all sorts of Y-cables, filter through all sorts of microphones held up to your spearker, keep converting from analog to digital and back, but as long as that signal is there (which will exist as long as the audio is reasonably high quality ... and when it's not, it's not worth copying), it is traceable to you.
The responsibility is not on Freenet or Gnutella. That's the point. This technology does not matter how it is distributed, but who originated the copy. The responsibility is on the person who originally violated copyright and gave it someone else.
All they need to do is track the number of copies on Freenet (or whatever swapping channel is used) which originated from you, then multiply by the price, and then sue the pants off you for that amount, since it is trivial to show you did that much financial damage.
I will remind you that this very technology has been used to track and prosecute people who have illegally pirated pornographic images from web sites and put them on other sites.
Where is it written? Amendment I, United States Constitution:
Most of the States have similar clauses in their own Constitutions. For instance, the California Constitution says:
So even the Beautiful People's Republic of Hollywood has fair use, regardless of what the SDMI wankers say.-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
Watermarks are only undetectable if you can't distinguish them from the background. If you have 2 or more copies of the same work, but with different watermarks, you can compare them to get a much clearer view of what the watermarks are...
As a brute-force example, if you get 100 copies with different watermarks and average them together, each watermark is reduced by a factor of 100. This will also actually reduce the *total* watermark noise by a factor of 10 (20dB), giving a measurable (and probably audible) improvement in audio quality.
If you want to be a little more refined, take the difference of 2 copies. The music will cancel out, leaving the difference of 2 watermarks; the problem of distinguishing watermarks from music has been reduced to distinguishing watermarks from each other -- much easier. You can then decode the watermarks and remove them completely from the original.
You can still make watermarks work by burying the watermark below an additional layer of noise. If you can't distinguish the watermark from the additional noise, you can't remove it. Unfortunately (for the watermarkers), this will drastically reduce the volume/data available to hide the watermark in, and make it more vulnerable to averaging and more subtle distortion techniques.
Frankly, I doubt audio tracks have enough room to make this technique practical. Video might, though.
Forget fair use unfriendly - this shit is just USE unfriendly, fair or foul.
Anything that makes you think about your "rights" to use something before you use it is just something that gets in the way of the music, and will (I think) cause SDMI to be burnt, black toast before the year is out. The Music Clip from Sony (one early, though proprietary, example) was widely panned because it is so damn difficult to use. I don't see how any other SDMI hardware / software will be any different.
Think of it this way: do you want YOUR music experience to be like a website you have to log into every day??
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
Sigh ... this technology is not encryption but is an ID device. Think of it as a "serial number". Copy it all you want but the serial number, traceable to you, is still there.
www.destinympe.com
:)
and 1st post too
Isn't Gnutellanet being stopped right now due to some kind of DoS attack (randomized request packets & such)? Have they figured out how to fight those attacks yet?
This will add another big batch of spammers to the pot. All those kids who were grabbing Metalica off Napster will now be spamming you with ads, because if they get 500 people to buy the new album, they get it free! Oh boy...
They are lying when they say they want CD's to die
Actually, I'm inclined to believe them. Remember how tapes were better than CDs for RIAA, because tapes wear out? With CDs, once you buy it, it's yours forever. Hence the bigger price tag on CDs.
But look at the description of the SDMI technology... "very flexible rules" Hmmm... like "this song expires at the end of the year".
MojoNation
Burris
If there is one thing that SlashDotters should have noticed by now is that there is no "Watermark" that cannot be broken. I'll use OpenDVD as an example. DVD, as I recall, was also supposed to be uncopy-able/unplayable without the breaking some software locks.
Why would this be any different?
If i'm not mistaken, this is about distributing music online, not via CD. Napster fans for ages have been saying "we want to be able to get our music online, without having to buy a CD"... Well, this is their next attempt at an answer. And individually watermarking downloaded music is not at all that unfeasible.
Or maybe it is... There would probaby be some way that 10 people could buy a song, and then average all the bits together to get rid of the watermark, or something like that. I'm not a programmer, so i don't know the terminology... Food for thought...
Just remember, they're not talking about watermarking CD's and tracking CD sales, they're talking about fingerprinting downloads...
As you say, the watermark algorithm need not be "secret". If your device has your private key in it, it can therefore determine where (frequency and time (location and duration)) the watermark is hiding. If it doesn't find on there, then your player doesn't have the right to listen to the music. If, further, the location is found using the RIAA's public key, nobody could create a "valid" music clip without the RIAA's private key, so you can't just watermark stuff pointing to a random individual.
-User
Emacs is for experts. Pico is for beginners. VI is a disease.
Would it maybe be possible to remove an unwanted watermark from digital music by getting a large number of copies of a track, each containing a different watermark, and averaging/mixing them together so the watermarks cancel each other out or interfere with each other? Just an idea.. -Lorenz
And what you want is technology that basically examines an open MP3 file that's being transferred to a portable device and decides whether or not it should be admitted to the portable device.
That's not watermarking. That's copy protection by another name. This, with the "secure wire" and "secure codec" comments, indicate that the objective is to produce music which gets marked up at each transfer stage and becomes unusable after a limited number of transfers.
That's the same method that they tried to apply to DAT -- make the hardware OEMs build transcription security into each step. Remember DAT?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Emusic.com does exactly this - $1 per track (less if you buy a whole album at once), and half goes to the artist. Selection is mostly limited to independant artists, but there's some major-label content there (albeit usually just older stuff)
While the SDMI seems like a good idea, unfortunately it's too little, too late. Because of the music industry's years of vehement opposition to anything resembling an online strategy -- first shutting down mp3 web sites, then Napster -- they've inadvertently created a market for systems like Gnutella and Freenet, which are virtually unstoppable because of their decentralized, distributed nature. This is the music industry's equivalent of the unstoppable "superbugs" that might result from the overuse of antibiotics -- and now that they're here, there's no way to put the genie back in the bottle.
No matter what ingenious encryption or watermarking system is used, it boils down to this: at some point, between the 0's and 1's and the analog output, the music must be decrypted/decompressed/whatever. There is nothing -- repeat, nothing -- that will ever stop people from capturing the signal somewhere in the chain, recording it as an mp3, and putting it up on Gnutella. Sure, there might be some quality loss -- but since that doesn't seem to bother people now, I doubt it will bother them then.
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
SDMI comes along with its totally-secure music system, it becomes widespread and reasonably cheap... then all we need is another norwegian kid to break the encryption (well it's already been done i think).
:)
The DVD situation was really quite useful for us. They picked an encryption system that marketting people portrayed as wonderful, unbreakable and ergonomic.
We dont want them to come up with what is actually an unbreakable music system - we should encourage them to use weak crappy protection
Anwyay it stands to reason that unless u need a dedicated decoder card in your pc that they cant really have any control over the music since your soundcard drivers will be given a complete decrypted stream.
I am not a smart man so forgive me if I missed something. I see in the interview that Mr Shamoon admits that this new technology does nothing about the Millions of downloadable songs out available already. That being the case what is to encourage users to and song traders to switch over to the new format? If i intend to make MP3s(or whatever its replacement is) to trade to my friends why on earth would i not just use a piece of software that left out the watermarks? what motivation do i have to switch format? this does not eliminate the problem it just takes it out of the spotlite and pushes it underground where it was before Napster. it may stop Joe Luser but the folks who are really into this will continue unabated. thats just my opinion, i may be wrong.
-- Hail Eris
No client is brain-damaged enough that it will accept code (vbs or otherwise) from its nearest node without asking for it
Of course, MS Outhouse is braindamaged enough to actually run the bloody things without user intervention. Enjoy.
Fair enough, sir, assuming you are not a troll. Pray tell me why? Factor out the cost of the cd for a second. Now, CD's are: easy to use, extremely portable, have great sound quality, reasonably durable. The only problem with CD's is if something happens of your own fault (e.g. you scratch it to death or lose it or smash it...)
Now look at the options present with 'digital music.' It's highly compressed, thus losing some degree of quality which may or may not be significant. It's easily damaged or lost by conditions that aren't your fault (bad file transfer, crashes, hard drive problems). It will be highly encrypted and beyond your control if people like Shamoon have a say in anything to do with it. And worst of all, DIGITAL MUSIC IS NOT TANGIBLE! You can not carry it around, move it from place to place (if the RIAA implements SDMI and only through media even then), feel it, or look at it. And if a problem comes up with your hard drive or media or internet connection, it's gone for good and knowing the RIAA you're expected to buy another copy. There's just something about the thought of paying money for an encrypted file and having no tangible backup of it that just makes me foam at the mouth.
So is that why you want with the end of cd's?
Emerson Willowick: Thinker, Writer, Human Being.
First off, this is insane ... how many people who own MP3 players are going to voluntarily cripple them by installing "phase 2" software? A show of hands, please?
...
Well, the genie's not really out of the bottle. This is one of my big problems with the way people analyze this market. If you see it as a war between pirates and content creators, then it's under a completely different light than how I think it should be seen. Really, these are market conditions that have caused a black market to emerge. People are copying music because they feel somewhat disenfranchised with the options they have at their disposal in the digital space. It's up to the content industry to create value in the digital arena and they've made phenomenal steps in that direction.
I must disagree. This is a war between people who want to share music, and people who want to prevent others from sharing music. Too bad for the RIAA that Congress legalized all non-commercial music copying in 1992!
The Court of Appeals, in reversing the Napster injunction, basically told the lower court that it was completely wrong in its interpretation of the law, and explained how the law should be interpreted.
So what is the RIAA going to do, when either this court, or the appeals court, hands down a ruling that the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act completely legalized music sharing, and that the monetary interests of the RIAA have been completely accounted for by the collection of royalties on blank media, as provided for in the AHRA, and clearly spelled out by Congress, both in the law itself, and in the legislative history?
People will stop feeling guilty about using Napster, when they realize that the industry has been lying to them, and actually has been collecting royalties for 8 years on blank digital audio media, and then the war -- the war for people's minds -- will be over.
SDMI is just another attempt to use technology to make it physically impossible for consumers to exercise their legal rights. I think that SDMI products will die in the marketplace.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain
So where the dangers surrounding Napster, regarding viruses and child molesters, were moderately nebulous, they're going to be very severe with Gnutella.
He forgot to mention the communists, terrorists, hackers and cannibals.
This guy is going to make a packet before the music biz finally expires. I just hope he doesn't manage to screw music lovers in the process.
Kids, don't try this at home
The correct way to light a bonfire is with paper, kindling and small twigs. It is however somewhat amusing to watch someone try and light a bonfire with petrol. 30 seconds of 10 foot high flames then nothing but slightly blackened logs. Got some free beers out of fixing that one (Donnington '88)
Rich
you said: "This is another example of the 'Trusted Client' problem There ain't no such puppy as a trusted client. There can't be."
That's exactly what the DMCA is for - to legislate everything into trusted clients. Okay so it may not actually stop anyone with a clue, but so long as it doesn't get onto the click-and-drool interface where Joe Average can work it, the monopolist types are happy.
A lot of these abbreviations seem to have simple pronounciations that come about. SCSI being pronounced as "scuzzy" being one. I've heard a lot of people pronounce SDMI as "sodomy" and others pronouncing it as "sid my." Is there a correct pronounciation?
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
Most MP3 players (including my homebrew design) use the MAS3507D or STA013 chips.
If these chips were to start checking for the SDMI phase 2 watermark, it could be game-over for most of the portable players. Of course, these chips are firmware upgradable, and they have no interaction with the user interface, so it's hard to see what they could do with them.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
the problem with marking mp3s is the same problem with licensing software -- only the rightful user will have problems. once i've shelled out some money for a product (legally obtained), i want it to work for me and not against me. why should i have to worry about encryption when i want to listen to a song. why should i have to think about a licensing/registration issue when i just want to use the program. only the pirates make good on these "purchases" while honest people get the shaft.
At worst, the RIAA and their cronies might boogerfuck ALL audio hardware to the point that only `approved' content can be used. So fricken what?? Get some high quality resistors and caps, a microcontroller and a little bit of firmware to run it....Oh yeah, and it can be built small and easy to use. Duh!! If they press hard enough, I'm sure decent recipes for fabricating good old fashioned speakers will turn up too. Everybody who has to skills to at least follow the instructions for such a kit raise your hands.
Gee, what these RIAA guys have for brains and what comes out of my asshole have an interesting resemblance to each other.
Be careful what you wish for :-)
It's very easy for a malicious piece of Windows code to attempt a firmware upgrade on most IDE hard drives. The `upgrade' won't work, of course, but it will screw the hard drive - to the point you need to return it to the manufacturer. Not nice.
I'd almost agree that anyone dumb enough to download and run `britney.exe' (or .vbs, or whatever) deserves to lose their hardware. Now, if it were `shania.exe', I'd have more sympathy... ;-)
Do I think that Gnutella will move in where Napster stopped? I personally don't, the reason being that Gnutella requires you to set up a direct connection with an individual you've never met.
This man is ignorant.
So where the dangers surrounding Napster, regarding viruses and child molesters, were moderately nebulous, they're going to be very severe with Gnutella.
I stopped reading this article after I got to this statement. If this man really thinks that child molestation goes hand in hand with mp3 sharing, then I have no respect for him, dissertation on audio compression or not.
Drug dealers don't sell aspirin.
That's the bottom line when it comes to music distribution. For the metaphorically impared, what I mean is this:
Aspirin is fantastic, I want it, as do many other people. As long as pharmacies offer aspirin at a reasonable price, quality, and convenience, I have no need to find a black-market drug dealer. By the same token, if you could buy pot at the drug store, why would you go to a dealer, or grow your own?
It's the same for music, except that the (music industry/record store etc.) doesn't carry cheap/good/convenient music - thus I'm forced, no, I'd rather go get it illegally.
That leads to two conclusions regarding piracy:
- people will pirate music until:
1) They get better value from legal means
2) They are too many deterrents
Talal's best view was that the industry needs to add value to the digital music experience.
yea, and the only way for this to work is to dupe the buying public into buying tainted hardware. Hopefully they'll look at DIVX for a good example of how much the market likes that. I'm sorry, but I will not pay more to make sure that my music costs more. Or at least not consciously.
The SMDI is a pipe-dream, and my guess is that you will reach armed rebellion before you stop people from trading MP3's. The recording industry is still treating this the wrong way, I'm sure (because I've been told) that there are others within those member companies that really want to explore some interesting ideas, but the dinosaurs at the top won't admit that they have no f-ing clue about what is going on.
--
+&x
Sorry, I meant what you were talking about. Forgive me for lack of clarity.
"Even genius needs a competent technique."--Robert Fripp
So don't use RIAA boogerfucked hardware. Just how hard is it to get a microcontroller to talk to a DAC? To decode mp3? For that matter, general purpose computers are getting smaller all the time. We'll just listen to our mp3s with our Journada 2005 with the "Homebrew DAC" attachment. They can't win. They're probably deluding themselves that they can harass every hardware hacker on the planet.
The watermark keeps whispering "buy quality, buy riaa, buy quality, buy riaa" in the background.
sulli
RTFJ.
On "Joe's Garage", Zappa predicted that in the future, music would be illegal. It seems as if that will shortly come to pass. I think he also said "...and maybe later, we'll all be gay", which also seems to be coming true.
Å The real child molester we should fear is Viacom.
Life is not always fair. However, due to the nature of information it's unfair to the people who wish to exert control. If I memorize a book written by someone else, it takes laws to _prevent_ me from using however I please. And even with more laws than you could count, once I've memorized it, no one short of God himself can stop me from 'rereading' it, as it were, as much as I want.
The laws are limited to copying (and then only sometimes) because otherwise they'd be ineffectual. And if there's one thing that no one likes, it's a law that's impossible to enforce. Many judges will overturn such laws because they're harmful to society, IIRC.
The most natural way is that which grants no control at all. The most likely best way is that which lets the author control the first sale, and then gets the hell out of the way.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Give me any watermarked file, and I'll bet I can defeat it. For example, if it's an image file, a slight rotation of say 0.5% will fix it. If it's a music file, I'll just feed the audio through a board and re-record it.
(btw - why was the above post moderated down to 0 as 'overrated' ? Are you moderators telling me you couldn't find enough troll posts to mod down and you had to take out one where the guy is ACTUALLY on topic?)
What's stopping you from converting your cd's to mp3 and making mp3 cds? Besides, I'm sure higher density media will take over at some point anyway.
I want music, not empty bits and bytes that I can't even touch or control.
Emerson Willowick: Thinker, Writer, Human Being.
...based on any PKI, watermark, what have you, I can break in 5 seconds: in the time it takes me to run a lead from my speaker jack to my microphone. But hey, atleast they will learn a lot while trying. :-)
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Even with secure file formats, it is still possible to capture the raw data as it is going to the sound device. Then it is just a matter of converting it into another format, such as MP3. Am I missing something?
What about products like this one that let you listen to radio on your PC, and then record the songs into mp3 format?
"No prints can come from fingers / If machines become our hands." -- Jack Johnson
I dunno... if this Towel Shamu or whatever is saying that there are severe dangers surrounding the downloading of actual child molesters via Gnutella, well then, I think we all need to be very, very worried indeed. I know I am worried enough to write a letter to the editor of my local paper, to that nice magazine supplement that comes with the Sunday paper, AND to the local TV news station. I am confident these institutions will be able to get the word out in a clear and reliable manner.
Listen to Toe Schmoo, people! Don't let child molesters be downloaded via Gnutella!
(fine print on "big four" record label contract) WE OWN YOU. WE ALSO OWN ALL THE MUSIC THAT YOU WRITE OR RECORD FROM NOW ON FOR ETERNITY, AND WE INTEND TO DO ANYTHING AT ALL, NO MATTER HOW ASININE OR UNHOLY, IN ORDER TO REALIZE A PROFIT. YOUR PAYMENT WILL THEORETICALLY BE 5-10% OF RETAIL PRICE FOR EVERY RECORDING SOLD, BUT IN ACTUALITY MUCH LESS BECAUSE OF KICKBACKS AND DEALS WITH DISTRIBUTORS AND RETAILERS. WE WILL ADVANCE YOU (six figure sum) AND YOU WILL PAY FOR PRODUCTION, MASTERING, INDEPENDENT PROMOTION, AND LIVING COSTS. WE WILL RELEASE YOUR ALBUM WHENEVER THE HELL WE FEEL LIKE IT, MAYBE NEVER. YOU WILL REPAY US EVERY CENT OF THIS ADVANCE OUT OF YOUR 5-10%. YOU MIGHT REALIZE A NET PROFIT OF SEVERAL THOUSAND DOLLARS IF YOUR ALBUM GOES PLATINUM, BUT PROBABLY NOT. WE UNDERSTAND THAT RIGHT NOW YOU ARE THINKING OF HITTING THE BIG TIME AND GETTING BLOWJOBS FROM STRIPPERS IN THE BACK OF YOUR LIMOUSINE. WE ADVISE YOU TO CONTINUE LIVING IN YOUR FANTASY WORLD UNTIL YOUR CAREER TANKS AND YOU ARE FORCED TO RETURN TO YOUR PATHETIC INDIE RECORD STORE TO MAKE A LIVING.
No... you'd probably be able to go to a RIAA kiosk in any store which sells music and do it there, with the option to do it at home too. Plus, DIVX required you to have a phone connection to watch a video - you would only need to connect to the RIAA (or whoever) to add/transfer a license to a new device - hardly something you need to do as often.
-User
Emacs is for experts. Pico is for beginners. VI is a disease.
nja.
Hardware can be made pretty hard to reverse engineer. A couple of months ago, playing devil's IANAL (grin), I suggested that the industry would move to a decoder/decryptor/DA-conv on a chip. Make the packaging tamper-proof, and you have a system that is not really feasable to hack.
I'll leave it up to cypherpunks to work out a protocol that allows both disconnected use and pay-per-play, but back of the napkin indicates that it should be do-able. You'll need to give it battery backed memory to resist replay attacks, f.ex.
Since the output of the secure packing is analog, the input is secure digital, the pirate would be reduced to re-comressing re-sampled data. Presumably this will turn enough noses so that it isn't an option. (not that I can tell the difference, eh)
So, it can work, but infrastructure is a bitch.
Johan
While I can't claim to know everything the RIAA has ever said or done, I haven't encountered this personally. While I thank you for your link (I really do appreciate it when people back up their statements), I don't see this as FUD (unless they are stating outright lies). And, yes, there is more than the implication that you might be sued for using your personal computer in connection with music, they state this pretty definately. So....? A computer can do amazing things, limited only by the time a process takes and the intelligence of a programmer. It is quite conceivable that an individual could make copies of copyrighted materials and break the law doing so, and be sued for this.
From the linked to RIAA document: The only difference with computers, then, is with regards to the liability of the manufacturers, not the consumers, since they are not covered by the AHRA. Given the legal precdent set by the AHRA, however, as long as the consumer's use of a computer was for private, non-commercial use (which is all the AHRA applied to for the consumer anyway), it is unlikely that the RIAA would prevail.
It's possible, of course, the the RIAA is evil mean and spiteful, I just don't care for it when discussions start off with that assumption as a given, especially when this logic is used to justify piracy ("Gee, I don't like the RIAA, I think I'll break the law!") when the laws themselves aren't necessarily evil mean or spiteful
-User
Emacs is for experts. Pico is for beginners. VI is a disease.
And I don't think that fair use clause includes redistribution of music, only recording for personal use.
The law does not say personal use in its fair use clause, it says non-commercial use. There is a critical difference, as non-commercial use does allow things like tape trading among fans, etc. Clearly, swapping digital music as is done on napster would fall into this same non-commercial usage. It would be a severe stretch to say that fair use applies to one medium and not another, a stretch which I do not think the courts will, in appeals, be able to uphold.
This may not get napster off the hook (they are, after all, a commercial venture) but it does get the end users off the hook, as well as distributed architectures such as gnutella and freenet.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
You would think with all the parity checking methods available in digital media they would use a technique that completely removes the watermark during the decryption process.
As technical professionals we slashdotters have no trouble understanding how easy it would be to program secure servers for digital media transfer. The politics involved in the war against the internet are a bit more complex, but still pretty basic. When I am in a more skeptical mood I just write it all off as just the big players not wanting to make a major investment in the internet. After all, they have long standing business partners such as providers of paper, glue, binding CD's tape etc. that would be hurt if people downloaded instead of bought a physical media. Eventually these big players will embrace new technology, but for now it is easier to run a story about kiddie porn or a D&D holocaust to scare away public sentiment from the internet.
I see this along the lines of "well, the piracy is still small, and not yet dangerous. However, if we don't attack it now, it'll be a larger target with more momentum". I think it's the whole "ounce of prevention" thing. You know, detect the tumor when it's small, that kind of thing. Besides, if RIAA were complacent, their customers/members, whose stuff is being pirated, would scream bloody murder (well, most would). Those that wouldn't can release their music to the world for free on their own anyway.
-User
Emacs is for experts. Pico is for beginners. VI is a disease.
Lacing digital music (or video data) with watermarks is a good ides... for about 30 days. It'll take most hakerz & algorithm geniuses that long to figure out the code. By then a few proggies will hit the hakerz sites that will allow you to decrypt encrypted data not to mention it is even possible to create independent hardware decrypters to defeat such a system
Remeber the fiasco we had when Xing made DVD players which allowed it to play encrypted DVDs? Then a few weeks later a bunch of hakerz made it possible to rip DVDs using Xing technology?
The solution to this marvellous new technolgy is to let them create and market it. It won't be long before they somehow screw up and we use their own technology against them.
-----
We simply can't count on an organization that's funded mostly by the record industry to develop a standard for music interchange that consumers will benefit from.
$50 says that whatever these folks come up with will, for the same amount of music, end up costing the consumer just as much (OR MORE) in the long run.
The only real disincentive to "piracy" is being able to conveniently obtain a quality copy at low cost.
My time is valuable to me. I certainly do have much better things to do than search Napster for music. And it can be a chore to find anything other than mainstream music on Napster. I recently tried to find a piece from Mozart's Don Giovanni. I tried Napster's own servers, I tried several OpenNap servers and I even tried a few others. Nothing.
Rather than waste time searching Napster for incomplete, fuzzy mp3s, I'd much prefer paying a reasonable fee and being assured of a high-quality, fast-downloading digital copy I can call my own. And I don't think a "reasonable fee" is $1 per song as some people have suggested.
The idea is to compensate artists, not create bigger and richer ones. A token $0.01 will go a long way if the music is good enough and in demand.
We don't need these stupid watermarks crapping up songs and creating a new generation of inferior "pirate" copies. What we need is a new paradigm for music distribution. One that doesn't GOUGE customers and that FAIRLY compensates the artists, not their keepers.
--
Cars are concrete, physical. Music is abstract, logical. Big difference.
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
SDMI will work fine, as long as you can prevent people from re-encoding the audio stream that comes out of their speakers... in other words, never. This guy is the mathematician. Even if they somehow monkey up an inaudible watermark that survives the re-encoding, there will always be players & file-sharing systems that don't look for a watermark, so SDMI will never work. QED.
The funny thing is that everyone knows this, especially the people designing it, but I'd still put better than even money that SDMI will go into production anyway. My guess is that it's just one of those doomed projects that everyone is still stoically plugging away at so they can collect their paychecks. I'm actually quite disappointed in Hemos for not acknowledging that this technology is bullshit right in the story.
We need lyingbastard.com, a site devoted to debunking tecnological arguments that can be debunked in one paragraph or less. Knowing the US, though, it would be shut down for "libel."
Then it'll download virii and ch!ld pr0n, spread it all over their hard drives and report them to the police.
http://www.blitzbasic.com/
Graphics3D 640, 480
You seem to forget that Numbers...sorry, Customers...sorry, Music Lovers will want to pay way over the odds for the benefits being offered, just like the man says. Don't you want to support your Favorite Artist like a Good Number, er...Customer...er...
http://www.blitzbasic.com/
Graphics3D 640, 480
An American friend has informed me that the wonderful city of Reno (which I beleive is your home), in the thrice-blessed state of Nevada has state-supervised brothels and the highest incidence of syphilis in North America.
I am truly sorry. I didn't know.
But, on the bright side, I hear they're doing wonderful things with antibiotics these days. If it's too late for you, then think of the future generations.
> Fact #1: To hear it, you have to stream it.
> Fact #2: If you can stream it, you can copy it.
Yeah, this reminds me of something said, I think by Rob Malda, on geeks in space, with regard to DVD-Audio. The big music companies were holding off due to fears of piracy.
The quote was along the lines of:
"In order to listen to it we have to be able to decrypt it.
If we can decrypt it, we can rip it."
(This may not be verbatim.)
This is so true.
The only thing that is different about this is that the watermark is mixed in to the audio, not just the file - so if you decompress to a 16bit sample, and recompress back to a mp3, you will probably not lose the watermark.
The clever thing about this is that it still uses the mp3 format, instead of trying to replace it, like people ([cough] Micros~1) have in the past.
Interestingly, this is not a new idea. The Daily Telegraph, in the UK used to have a computing section, which used to run a 'Techno Turkey' column. I remember reading about a similar type of copy protect tapes/vinal recordings. Sadly, I cannot remember why it failed. Probably lack of uptake.
Anyone else read about this?
What they arent saying is that the next step is legislation to enforce that any new system capable of digital sound reproduction made/imported has to check for these watermarks.
I dont see how they wont lobby for this, the same has happened for analog video... so dont think it cant happen. Better be carefull with your portable mp3 players, they wont be making em like that for long.
I hope the whole thing backfires on them spactacularly.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
[WARNING: Rant. Sorry.]
The industry doesn't trust their customers not to pirate their music.
Customers, in turn, don't trust the industry not to sell "scientifically derived profiles" of your psychological state to your bosses, your friends, and eachother, based on the music you buy. It only needs to be accurate enough to sell; nobody in the industry's going to get fired when you do.
So you've got a watermark. What's in it? If it ain't the identity of the licensed listener, in some form, the watermark might as well not be there at all.
That's why MP3 has been allowed to spread so far, incidentally. The end result desired is per-user tracking. A few years of piracy should have worked to make the public accept per-user tracking. But the piracy was too good, and the privacy was too lacking.
They're reaping what they've sowed. Greed in fighting privacy regulation has decimated the inviolate personality(one of the better concepts trumpeted by Slashdot recently); the widespread support for that atrocious e-signature bill is simply disturbing.
Show me an industry that supports touch-tone phone presses as legal signatures in a court of law and I'll show you an industry that's losing touch.
What a tragedy, a soap opera, or a comedy of errors, depending on your perspective.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
"Little Caesars? You do pizza?"
I think history pretty much shows that the odds are stacked against this outcome. When people went from listening to nothing to listening to phonographs, it was a clear improvement. When people went from listening to phonographs to listening to CDs, it was a clear improvement.
But there is no reason to adopt SDMI formats over CDs/mp3s. There is no improvement in several areas:
I can see the conversation with a sales clerk: "Oh, you want me to buy the more expensive model which sounds the same, but is a complete pain in the ass to use. I hope you don't mind if I just buy the CD player"
The only way people will adopt SDMI is if they are extorted into it by the RIAA companies by raising the price of CDs and lowering the price of SDMI content. But as far as people voulentarily adopting it because of "value being added to the online SDMI experience" or whatever the hell this guy's talking about, I don't think it's going to happen.
Ahh..... but, what if the reverse is true? That is, you can't play the music unless a valid watermark is detected? What if all portable devices (Diamond RIO/Memory Stick walkman/etc) require a valid watermark? If "valid" is defined as, say, signed by the RIAA or BMI, or something, you're toast. Now your "highly ordinary WAV file" isn't worth anything, since the hardware "everyone" is using can't play non-signed music. Sure, you can still play the music on your computer, but you can't burn a CD and play it in your car, or on a trip, or whatever because CD's died out in ~2005 and everyone uses solid-state players which check for the watermark?
They could still allow independants to publish music for these devices, by issuing a signature key to an indie band which the RIAA has signed. Then, if the key is used to sign pirated material, the indie band might be liable for the misuse of the key, or perhaps we all have to update our devices monthly to get an updated "revoked" list or something.
I'm not saying this would work, but there's more to this than simply saying "well, duh, I can stick a microphone next to the speaker..." -User
Emacs is for experts. Pico is for beginners. VI is a disease.
And what you want is technology that basically examines an open MP3 file that's being transferred to a portable device and decides whether or not it should be admitted to the portable device.
And so this portable device that I own, that I bought, that I'm holding in my hand, can still only be used in such a way that the people that I bought it from like.
What if gas stations sold gas that only worked if it was in a car? Oh, most people wouldn't have a problem, but what about the person who takes it out to a bonfire to start a fire? Why is the person I bought it from deciding how I should use it?
Unethical as it would be, it would be so tempting to play their game and fight stuff like this the dirty way. Write software that supposedly supports it, but is broken in some fundamental way. Circulate FUD. Circulate broken SDMI music files. Make it so damn difficult and impractical to use, that no one bothers to even try.
--
You might be thinking of SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) :)
--
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
The guy's name is Talal Shamoon! In case you missed that, the guy's name is Talal Shamoon!!! Let's all make fun of him.
Yeah! Let's do it! His name isn't 'Bubba'! Let's take our pick-ups down their *now* and beat up on the fancy-pants. Hey - he did well in math at school - he's sure not one of us! Hand me mah shotgun, Ma! Ah'll be back for hot grits later!
I despair. You have devalued *anything* you *ever* say again, for the rest of your sad, bigotted little life.
Enjoy your future on Social Security.
Now, who is trolling whom?
Remember, you won't have the encoder
Damn straight. Unless an encoder shoud ever fall into the 'wrong hands'. Then, it's open season. A system like this can *only* work if there is a secret algorithm. (alright, theoretically it can, but unless they implant chips in us all...)
And (this is important) a system that relies on a secret algorithm is not secure. Once the algorithm is public, the game is over. Insert billions for new game.
The only way SDMI can be done is if *every* file transfer requires a new key. Theoretically possible, but not realistic.
A small bet: If SDMI is not cracked wide open within one year from now, I will buy you a beer.
Peace, Love and MIPS.
Do the power analysis. It requires a minimum of kT energy to flip a bit, where k is Boltzmann's constant (1.38 * 10^-23 joules per Kelvin) and T is the temperature your computer is running at (the background temp of the universe is about 3.2 K).
It would require an optimal computer [*] about 250 megawatts of power [**] and a full year of time to break a 128-bit cipher.
[*] We don't have anything close to this.
[**] 250 Mw is a hell of a lot of power. Don't ask me how you'd keep your computer from melting down from the heat. Or how you'd keep it at 3.2 K, for that matter.
128-bit ciphers are secure for the indefinite future. I don't expect anything short of enormous advances in quantum computation to make a dent in them.
Perhaps this would normally be posted anonymously, at 0, but I wanted to request that the parent post be moderated down. It contains a broken link and a totally uncalled-for perjorative. Oh well, at least Bowie managed to refrain from throwing in a link to Propaganda (outside of his sig, of course).
What the hell, might as well be a productive member of society. I think this is what Bowie was trying to link to.
Thanks for your attention.
In english, you cannot keep the only potential teeth of SDMI, watermarking, a trade secret. That only leaves patents as a protective mechanism (and any company involved in SDMI is going to use a protective mechanism ;).
Despite their common malignment in slashdot, a significant benefit of patents is that anybody can read any issued patent and learn how to implement a technology, since a specific requirement of a patent is that it teach how to create what is patented.
Therefore, the algorithm used to watermark SDMI compliant music will be open to any cracker/DSP guru who has a bone to pick with the recording industry. It will be completely possible to write a filter to remove any watermark which it is possible to insert in digital audio, and events such as DeCSS show that once someone makes it, nobody can control such a technology ;)
I want them to stay. MP3's are fine, but I still want a tangible product, otherwise I'm not willing to pay. I'd never pay for a MP3, even if they sounded as good as CDs.
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
I can see the conversation with a sales clerk: "Oh, you want me to buy the more expensive model which sounds the same, but is a complete pain in the ass to use. I hope you don't mind if I just buy the CD player"
... equally if not more restricted.
You are largely correct, unless of course the music industry pulls an MPAA and effectively subsidizes the new format/technology by offering at or below cost to customers, as you alude to. But I think the scenerio may go a little differently.
There's a reason DVD is so cheap compared to laser disks, despite being newer (and in many ways better): it has built in access control (CSS) the studios love, and you can't record on it. The industry would like nothing better than to see VCRs disappear or become crippled (e.g. Tivo -- how many people do you know with libraries of tivo recordings? Zero, because there is no data persistence at all), and one big step in that direction is to offer a non-recordable format with superior sound and picture and get everyone excited about it.
If the RIAA were to do something similar (say, sell CDs for $18 each, while Audio-DVDs with draconian access controls BUT superior audio quality are selling for $8 each), people might well flock to the new medium.
Granted, this won't work for SDMI (initially), but the strategy would be to depricate unencrypted CDs in favor of DVDs (in much the same way vinyl was depricated), then leverage the DMCA to make all non-approved digital formats (e.g. mp3, ogg) effectively illegal, as ripping music to those formats would be "circumventing a copy protection scheme."
Lo and behold, suddenly the only music is on access-restricted DVDs you can only play in your consumer DVD player or Windoze box, or in pay-per-hear SDMI format
Hopefully the customer won't stand for this sort of thing, but this is exactly what I would expect the recording industry to try, and I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss the possibility that they might actually succeed in doing so.
I think the napster/mp3 thing is a short term battle for them -- they aren't ready to ditch CDs yet (we can thank the DeCSS authors for that), and this delay has probably thrown what digital strategy they did have into some disarray. Hopefully we as consumers will keep in in disarray, forever.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Unfortunately 'they' are offering 'us' large sums of money to be corrupted, or they are convincing 'us' that unless we conform to their way 'we' will not sell anything.
Case in point: RIO. Diamond's first few RIOs were MP3 players, they were sued by RIAA. Diamond won and continued to sell the RIO, however their new & improved RIO has been corrupted by SDMI.
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
I have seen Intertrust all over the news lately, this article, the Wall Street Journal yesterday etc. But I have not been able to get a call back from anyone at Intertrust to get technical details, APIs, manuals, test versions of the products or anything with concrete information that a developer needs. Their web page (www.intertrust.com) is mostly marketing fluff telling me all the great things that can be done but no tech info.
Actually, I don't believe this is the way SDMI will work . There is actually a lot of specification for it on their web site. Rather than not play songs that are not watermarked, they will begin to watermark CD's with a special "do not play" mark. So, in theory, the SDMI players will still play your existing MP3's but not MP3's made from "new" CD's (i.e., ones after they begin watermarking.) The players should also play any MP3 by a band that didn't watermark without any problem. In theory.
I wouldn't worry too much about SDMI though. It will sink faster that DiVX. In fact, it's already pretty much dead in the water. Lot's of companies signed up, but no products. They wanted to have them out last Xmas, but as far as I can tell right now there is only a single Sony SDMI unit available. More importantly, lot's of non-SDMI players are already on the market. So I think this battle has already been lost.
Note this description of a SoDoMI feature:
<begin>
You can do things like super-distribution, for example, where you can e-mail the song and say, "If you get 10 of your best friends to buy it, I'll give you free tickets to the Britney Spears concert next month." So you get on AOL and you e-mail the thing to 50 of your best friends and so on. And with InterTrust you can go down as many levels as you want, so they can e-mail it to 50 of their best friends, turning the consumer into a distributor of sorts. We think offers like that are going to be very compelling.
<end>
Yep. Spam strangers and win prizes. Wonderful.
But it's just as easy to make the same argument the other way, isn't it? Let's see...
"What the heck is all this talk about 'copyright'? People seem to think that just because they wrote a song, they should have the right to control what other people do in their own homes, on their own computers. Hell, the bits I'm listening to aren't even the same ones the author created... they're my own bits, arranged in the same pattern. I paid good money for this P3 and this DSL connection, and I'll use it any way I damn well please."
Not that I necessarily agree with the above, of course... my point is that "rights" are largely a matter of opinion and convention. Rights concerning 'property' that doesn't really physically exist, doubly so.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
From the linked to RIAA document:
...
The manufacturers of the devices [not consumers] receive statutory immunity from infringement based on the use of those devices by consumers. It also means, however, that neither manufacturers of the devices [computers], nor the consumers who use them, receive immunity from suit for copyright infringement
In the RIAA's wildest dreams!
Here's what the Appeals judges had to say about this when they overturned the Napster injunction:
The court reached its conclusion that Napster users were engaged in direct infringement in part because:
o it ruled that 17 USC 1008's protections only applied to copying by specifically identified devices rather than, as this Court said in RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia Syst., Inc., 180 F.3d 1072 (9 th Cir. 1999), to all noncommercial copying by consumers.
If you want to know your rights, don't go to the RIAA looking for information.
Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
As long as they're selling CDs, the watermark won't make a difference. All it takes is one person to go buy the CD anonymously, and then they can put it up on Gnutella for everyone else to get. Eventually it will be everywhere, and no one will have had to buy a watermarked digital version. Certainly there will be people who will pay to download the watermarked version, but it will do nothing to stop the free trading of music.
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
It's the A udio Home Recording Act of 1992.
I think the poster is right on some points (e.g., the RIAA has been collecting royalties on digital media since this became law), but misses some others. The appeals court ruling in the Napster case isn't a ruling of law, but just a stay of the injunction. We'll see how that plays out (I wouldn't put money on Napster). And as I understand it, computers and computer-based media are exempt from the Audio Home Recording Act, so no royalties are paid on computer CD-Rs, for example (that's why audio CD-Rs cost more, and computer CD-Rs don't work in an audio CD recorder, AFAIK). So computer-based digital recording probably isn't protected by the fair use clause of the Audio Home Recording Act, either. And I don't think that fair use clause includes redistribution of music, only recording for personal use.
NB: I am certainly not a lawyer.
"I believe that the cult of the particular brings only death - for it bases order on likeness." St.-Exupery
I don't think this logic works... since most portable CD players can't read CD-RW and many can't read CD-R, you could say that, by default, most current players will, by default, NOT play music unless it's released by the recording industry's format (i.e. the pressed CD). I don't see this as much different, except that the issue of playability is moving out of the realm of the physical and into the logical. Most people don't complain that their tape deck doesn't play a CD (physical media mismatch), why would they complain when their memory stick device can't play bootleg files (logical media mismatch) except that they have to spend money now....
-User
Emacs is for experts. Pico is for beginners. VI is a disease.
The public isn't completley stupid. DIVX died after all, because everyone realized what had happened..
And also, don't forget about the phase-1/phase-2 players.. The idea is that every player has an embedded shutoff switch, after which it WONT allow MP3's to play anymore. Then, come in a few years, every CD released has that trigger embedded in it.
Hmmm, thinking on this . . . and in the spirit of compensating the author and not an unrelated third party, what if there were somehow a watermarking technology that replaced the ID3 tag (title, artist, album, etc). That would go a long way to prevent what might soon be a problem of bands which offer music freely from having another, malicious, entity change the name of the artist to something more personally beneficial.
Now what if this technology was somehow incompatible with SDMI (overwrote its pattern, yeah, we're talking star trek physics here, I don't know SDMI that well). Useful, beneficial, informative, and removes a detrimental factor.
funny munging
No Slashdot reader will download these but the average Napster user would.
Sure, this same thing could be done with a rogue Napster client, but you'd have to have a fixed set of "songs" that would generate a match. With gnutella, any search is fair game.
Shamoon remains on the sidelines, working to create a system that he thinks users, recording artists and the record labels will all choose not because they have to, but because it's better.
.. I can see why record labels would love to fall for the myth of 'Secure' digital music, but I for one don't want another layer of interference, or software to muck up playback compatability.
Uh huh.. Right. So give me the choice between a SDMI and non-SDMI protected digital audio player and see which one I choose.. Exactly how is SDMI going to improve music from a consumer point of view?
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Vices - what I lack in originality, I make up for in volume.
When I read the last paragraph of this interview, I nearly leapt out of my chair. I, as a consumer, DO NOT WANT CDs to go away! I still have and play old LPs (these are titles that will never be available in the CD format). If this guy thinks I'm going to start replacing CDs with some new digital format he's got another thing coming. And I'm sure he'll hear from thousands of other music enthusiasts as well.
I'm positive that the replacement format will require payment every time I download their watermarked MP3 format files. Whoops! My hard disk crashed. Whoops! The batteries died (or whatever). Guess I'll have to repurchase my music collection. I got the impression that an ulterior motive of the SDMI might be to corner the market on digital audio players just the same way that the CSS got a stranglehold on the licensing of DVD players. Next thing you know, you and I are paying royalties per listen.
Also, I'm already not any fan of a new format that is a step backward in terms of sound quality (MP3s are that sort of step as far as I can tell). I wonder how long it will be before people begin noticing that they can, indeed, hear a difference in the sound of watermarked audio files after all. Some of us consumers aren't half deaf.
Let's hope that the marketplace has the sense to make the SDMI watermarked audio format Dead On Arrival.
--
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
The problem is that is will always be possible to access the plain audio stream (think redirecting /dev/dsp to a file in Linux). That being said, you can then encode the result in MP3 and share on napster, sure it won't play on you SDMI-approved device, but I'm sure people won't stop building MP3 player devices.
As for the watermarking, you can either ignore it (your MP3 will still play) or try to remove it. They don't say much about it, so I don't know how hard it would be. What I know is that, in theory, a "perfect perceptual encoder" will get rid of it. Think of it, if the watermarking info if impossible to hear and you have a "perfect perceptual coder" that encodes only the information you hear, it will completly remove watermarking without altering the sound at all (well, it will alter it, but you will not be able to hear it).
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
-User
Emacs is for experts. Pico is for beginners. VI is a disease.
Ok, this plan sounds great....Except they arn't considering all the alternative thoughts...Napster has established a voice in mainstream media and if they say that this is bad then hell, nobody is going to cooperate...I know if this surfaced that slashdot and other geek fortresses would set up instant boycotting....And rightfully so.
::
But just for note,
Who the fuck is going to spend their time sending spam to get _brittney_spears_ tickets? Arg.
-Swift
-Swift
So are they going to put a unique watermark on every CD pressed? And then are they going to keep a record of who I am when I buy it? What if I buy the CD at a record shop and pay cash? Are they going to make it illegal to buy CDs without showing identification? What's to prevent someone from buying a CD anonymously, ripping it, and then distributing the MP3s to their heart's content? Maybe we'll have to start licensing people to use CDs so we can keep a record of who has which watermarks. Or maybe, the idea is to get rid of physical media entirely. Never mind the billions of $$ people have invested in audio equipment. How many years is it since the introduction of CDs, and yet you can still buy brand new cassette tapes? I don't think CDs are going away any time soon, and as long as I can buy a CD anonymously with cash, I can rip the songs and distribute them, regardless of any watermarking scheme.
-Vercingetorix
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
So far there are two tracks (pardon the pun) to this discussion:
(i) Watermarks can be filtered out without serious damage to the content. I am not convinced either way.
(ii) That if they do, then it requires person specific keys for each recording - and the implications that has for the continued existence of CD's and for privacy of what you are doing.
So, is (i) true or false ? (ii) Do you think "the Man" could get away with this ?
Winton
I mean, what the heck is all this talk about "fair use"? People seem to thing they are born with all these rights which include, among other things, the right to do whatever they want with someone else's IP simply because, to them, they think it's an obvious right. It may seen intuitive to some that when you buy a recording of music, that you're purchasing the right to the underlying sound to use however, wherever and whenever they please. What sense does this make? Where is that written?
This doesn't mean I think that it's any more intuitive that purchasing a recording means purchasing the rights to listen to a recording, say, a given number of times, or only on a given device, or only at a given time, or whatever, but I don't particularly find it any less intuitive either. I may like it less, but that doesn't make it "The Way Things Should Be"(tm).
-User
Emacs is for experts. Pico is for beginners. VI is a disease.
Can you make an open source SDMI player without giving out the unencode secrets?
(The DVD question)
So what's to stop me from ripping next year's (or whenever) SDMI-crippled CDs and playing them on my first- or second-generation Rio? Nothing, so far as I can see. So I think the only way this model can work is for CDs to go away (leaving you nothing to rip), and others have addressed the non-viability of this idea better than I could.
Brandishing Dangerous Logic
Also, there are SDMI Phase 1-compliant devices out there, this one for example, coming to the US in November, for which I wrote some of the PC software.
And no, I don't know anything about how to hack the Verance watermark, we just got a module from them.
But.. the new rio still plays standard, non-secure mp3, no?
>And (this is important) a system that relies on a >secret algorithm is not secure. Once the
> algorithm is public, the game is over. Insert >billions for new game
What about RC5, IDEA etc. The algorithms are public, does that mean that anybody can decrypt an RC5ed file just like that?
You are suggesting 'Security through obscurity' is a good thing? encryption algorithms demonstrate the opposite.
(waiting for someone to tell me I'm wrong)
skiy.
skiy. www.Smokedot.org Drug Info, Rights, Laws, and Discussion
Only as long as the SDMI group thinks it is OK for the RIO to. SDMI devices have the ability to turn off the playing of 'evil' files.
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
sir, assuming you are not a troll.
I am, but I wasn't trolling when I wrote that.
'digital music.'
compact discs are digital music.
it's highly compressed, thus losing some degree of quality which may or may not be significant.
it's exactly as compressed as you want it to be. in comparison with analog soundwaves, even the 16bit, 44khz signal used for CDs is suboptimal. there are now many commercial 20 bit recorders which achieve a much more 'full' sound - not that you'll ever hear it on a CD.
...
i'd go point-by-point, but none of your arguments have any merit at all.
long flame short, music is art, a CD is a saleable item. lack of cds != lack of music, nor does it equal lack of access to music, it simple means lack of easily controllable conduit from musician -> record label -> listener.
i want cd's to go away because i like music.
i browse at -1 because they're funnier than you are.
Exacly one of the reasons why I utterly loathe the concept of 'secure digital music' embodied by SDMI and others. Does he understand what the consumers are thinking? Obviously not! PEOPLE DO NOT WANT CD'S TO GO AWAY! That's a ludicrous and absurd notion. Portable music media is a necessity, because I don't know how many people are willing to shell out money for intangible digital music that they wont be able to control.
People like this are exactly the problem with the whole digital music movement today. Pirates do not exist just because mp3's are out there, they exist because consumers are growing weary of buying overpriced cd's and have the option to get the music free. (Note: I am vehemently anti-piracy, but I understand some of the rationale aside from the whole 'its free' thing) People want to pay for music they can listen to. I think I can speak for many music fans when I say that they do NOT want to spend the same amount of money (on music that they spend on cd's) on watered down digital content with no actual medium. I understand the costs behind the making of the CD's, but if the RIAA actually had any sort of clue they would offer digital songs very cheaply (perhaps some subscription service) so customers could just use them as previews, and then maybe lower the price a dollar or two (let's be realistic, making and recording the full cd is fairly expensive) while increasing the artists cut.
Emerson Willowick: Thinker, Writer, Human Being.
It sounds to me like SDMI devices will reject anything that is not authenticated. So you're MP3 player will no longer play ordinary MP3 files - just stuff you've downloaded securely using the authenticating downloader program. Furthermore, he implied that the devices would at first be fine, but that a trigger would make them stop accepting non-validated files:
I certainly will be asking for my money back if I buy a player which suddenly decides it won't play ordinary MP3s
The big joke is, apparently SDMI is going to be an open standard. If this is true, what the hell prevents me from writing a client which doesn't obey their security protocol? It will certainly make identifying the watermarks pretty easy. And you can bet that Linux support is going to be a problem (specifically because it is easier to reverse-engineer programs).
All i can say is, watch your back guys! You're going to be up against just about every hacker in the world. And good luck getting the system adopted if it even looks like being slightly inconvenient to consumers or able to be hacked.
I'm convinced the only answer for music companies is cheaper, more convenient things like mp3.com and emusic. The sooner the old RIAA dinosaurs are dead the better.
But reread my words "Anyone with a clue." You've eliminated 50%-75% of the American population with those words. That means that 50-75% of the "sheeple" will buy the latest Sony SodomyMan® SM-1000 the moment it shows up on Best Buy's and Target's shelves. Just because it showed up on Best Buy's and Target's shelves. Not to mention an ad push that will become as ubiquitous as Nike's swoosh.
These are the people that will gladly go to www.sony.com to check out Britney Spears' latest album. They'll happily download oops.SDMI "now with 3 free plays!!" and a coupon for Pepsi. And they'll "trade" oops.SDMI with their 10 friends as per Mr. Shamoon's argument. It won't bother them that they have $12.59/month billed direct to their Visa for "music services", because they already charge their lives on credit. These are the same people who blame Visa because their bills are so high.
Mr. Shamoon is trying to say that enhancements will help sell his product. Sony will find a way to get their SodomyMan® to use bluetooth (or something similar) to transmit their songs to their car's AutoSodomy® player, or to their SDMI-enabled pager, the Sony Bugger®. The convienence of the interchange will be the prime seller. That, and the ignorance of the people who will be sold on the "latest technology."
As a matter of fact, you, Slashdot Reader, can expect to be labelled a "luddite" for not jumping on the SDMI bandwagon as soon as it comes out. Your mom, your boss, your cousins, everyone who knows you as "the computer geek" will be flabbergasted that they're all sharing the benefits of SodoMusic® while you listen to your ancient CD collection.
I think Mr. Shamoon's biggest problem is to get Sony, Philips, Mitsubishi and all the rest to agree to a common format before MP3 makes it all the way through the consumer's home, car and pocket. A VHS/Betamax battle too early in the game will destroy his cause.
Education and knowledge, of course, would be the best weapons against SDMI. However, education and knowledge have reduced the incidence of smoking in this country from about 21% to about 19%. Betting against the ability of Americans to understand logic is almost always a sure thing.
John
John
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
All of this sounds to me like another round of suggestion that only approved hardware should be able to play back digital contact. Yet another incarnation of encryption hardware in your monitor to keep you from viewing the (copyrighted) source of a webpage.
I keep having visions of my children sitting in their homes 20 or 30 years from now. They're paying $15 to rent a digitally encoded movie about the days when people could do whatever they could think up with their information. I see them downloading these movies into their WebTV box.
-- Ideology breeds Hypocrisy. How much is up to you.
Ideology breeds Hypocrisy. Just how much is up to you.
That will never work. It assumes that all existing playback and record devices will somehow cease to exist.
This is one of the amusing things. Does the RIAA think that they will ever be able to stop selling compact discs? Do you know how many players there are out there? I couldn't believe the public outcry if CDs got stopped - there's be riots in the streets. The RIAA, like the MPAA, in their greed, has made the default format a perfect unencrypted copy. Doh. What's to stop me from ripping the CD? (Like I do now?). You're going to watermark it, oooh, big deal. Going to ban cash purchases, too?
..don't panic
yuck.
it'll never fly.
If the person is using a local ISP, a quick whois will show their locality. In either case, it gives up your ISP as well, and it's no bother to call up the ISP and determine more about the user through creative social engineering.
Given the choice, you're mildly safer (although only by obscurity, rather than security) not having random people know your IP/hostname.
11*43+456^2
If they wish to limit themselves to watermarking, then they'd have to design a watermark that doesn't leave audible artifacts but is robust enough to survive transmission through analog air. I sure wouldn't want to bet my livelihood on them coming up with one.
well, that is what watermark means, though they wouldn't necessarily "stick" if converted via a different and lossy compression algorithm.
Yawn, let's make them run some super secret .exe's, yeah that's it, my phd didn't go to waste.
Search discussions on bugtraq for why you cannot ever, EVER trust the client, let's cite quake as an example. Hint, if the attacker controls the environment, you are provably fucked.
The problem with digital media is that people aren't thinking clearly. The industry wants some absolutely secure system for online distribution; why? Music distribution has never been secure. Somebody has always been able to duplicate things; from singing the song or writing down the score, to burning copies of the disc and sending MP3's across the net. There's not really a way to stop it without saying to the customer "We're greedy sons of bitches, and you're a low-down-dirty-theiving-not-worthy-of-being-truste d-with-that-two-dollar-crack-whore-I-had -last-night piece of trash". Such statements have not historically gone over well with consumers. (with the notable exception of the computer industry, where "you're stupid, we can help" is a good marketing line".
On the other hand, if the public wants commercial music, they should be willing to pay something for it. Making somebody like Britney Spears tolerable to listen to is not a cheap venture. Unfortunately, at the moment, a majority of the people giving the spiel about MP3 listening introducing them to new artists they'll pay for, and backing up things they own, manage to come across like the red-eyed hemp activist, sayting that they only think it should be used for paper, and not smoking.
Perhaps the record guys need to come up with an idea, that while not bulletproof, is Good Enough to make piracy difficult, and make it worth the publics time to use the system. I mean, if slashdot can make money, why couldn't something that actually interests people do the same?
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
I hate to say it, but no matter what they make to make something secure, there will always be someone smarter who will crack that and then exploit it so the "watermark" is ineffective.
Boy, that'll have consumer appeal.... "buy our CD and risk getting sued!"
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The DMCA's provision against bypassing copy protection mechanisms probably precludes the commercialization of hardware that plays back cracked SDMI streams.
Of course they can. Vinyl and cassette tape are pretty rare nowdays.
I think it would be pretty easy to kill off current CDs, especially if you replace it with something backwards-compatable. Ideas: DVD-Audio, or weirdo files on CD-ROM.
All they have to do is sell players that can play old CDs and the new stuff too. Then sell the new Britney Spears album for $15 in the new format and $20 in the old format. Pretty soon Joe Sixpack will decide to buy a new player so that he can save $5 per album. After a few hundred million of the new players get sold, they can drop old CDs just like cassette and vinyl.
You're just not thinking evilly enough.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Ever heard of Sony? They make hardware & own record labels.. And they're not the only one - Economies of scale (may) make the general population purchase a nifty little digital music player with SDMI (whatever that means to them)- Hopefully you will still be able to buy non-SDMI hardware, and truely have a CHOICE.
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Vices - what I lack in originality, I make up for in volume.
Shamoon was one of the original four scientists who developed watermarking -- a way to lace digital content with invisible copyright information that can then be used to limit access
And here I thought that watermarking came before any kind of digital media, guess I know better now.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
Maybe, but consider than most music CDs are only half full anyway, so it's not like most forms of distributed music are hurting for disc space... and would you really want to pay 10x the money for 10x the content, given that the media will probably contain content from only one artist? I'd much rather have 10 different bands' CDs than 1 really long CD from one band (most groups don't even have enough music to fill, say, a DVD).
-User
Emacs is for experts. Pico is for beginners. VI is a disease.
If music players all force you to only play music that is "signed" by this technology, guess who gets to decide what kind of music people listen to? Only music labels.
The promise of digital technology was that it could make things like producing and distributing things like books and music accessible to anyone with a computer and microphone. But I guess we can't have that if it threatens the music industry. If this kind of technology spreads from the music industry to other places like software and publishing, we're really going to be in trouble.
Music publishers want to have it both ways. The freedom of the internet, and the control of copyright enforcement. These two forces are opposed to each other. Something's gotta give, and I hope it isn't freedom.
Artists will make great music even if they aren't paid. I have the recordings to prove it.
-jlg
ps. use Debian! www.debian.org
If someone would just put up a site where you can buy MP3s (no SDMI crap) at $.20 - $1.00 each, with half of that going to the artist, this whole thing would cease to be an issue. You could download MP3s at whatever bitrate you wanted, they'd always be well-encoded, and you wouldn't have to waste time searching. Best of all, you'd get that warm, fuzzy feeling from knowing you're actually supporting the artists (and not just the RIAA). Everybody's happy, except maybe the RIAA.
Because the PC platform will never be a trusted client. Bruce Schneier has written about this here.
that I am sitting in front two computers, one is my old windows 2002 machine, the other is my peguinastic g10 x 4 ppc linux boxen. "The key", I half whisper, half laughing, "is this". I pulled a box out hidden behind a secret panel next to the stove. I had bought these before the federal government had outlawed them as a device to circumvent the DMCA. It didn't matter though that I couldn't get them, because I knew could make more from cat food tins and lamp cord, as I had done for some friends that believed in The Cause.
They were in remarkably good condition considering the number of times that they had been used. I looked at their shiny silver reflection in the moonlight, and marvelled at the technology that inspired the RCA engineers to invent a wonderous technology that could pipe audio signals down a conductor without encryption.
I carefully plugged one end from the "out" on my windows box, and plugged the other end into the "in" on my linux boxen. I was sweaty with excitement because I had a rare SDMI copy of the Britney Spears final grand reunion tour. This was a special moment for me, because I could now listen to her on my old MP20 earpiece that held 20 hours of continuos music.
I turned on the PC and - damm - not the blue screen!!! I never grew less annoyed of it, even though they changed the name from 'general protection fault' to 'fatal exception error' to 'courtesy reboot notice' to 'we're microsoft and we appreciate you' with little colored butterfly designs on the edge. I rebooted and put in Britney. I had always wished I could have gone backstage.
Ok, the machine was stable for a half hour, long enough for me to get the good tracks "Go with Me on my Space Plane" and "Rocket Man Dreams". I got the linux boxen recording - boy, those open source guys would have never have guessed that their technology would have been instrumental in saving the cultural heritage of the nation from eventual extinction, as copyrights had been extended to 200 years as the big companies wanted us to buy new expensive stuff only, not listen to the old music that wasn't profitable any more.
What was that sound? was it the IP scanners?? the had a way to pick up stray computer RF like the cable companies did in the 20th century to see who had illegal cable tv decoders. Sheesh, the RIAA never gave up. I personally felt that they're the ones who had set fire to the 2600 guys who gave me the schematics to the cords....Oh no, there's a loud banging on the door... I got to go....
0-w-0
There's an implicit assumption on Shamoon's part that people, given an option, will naturally tend towards the legal, ethical, "right" thing to do, which is to jump through the music management industry's hoops and use controlled distribution, management, and playback mechanisms. I call bullshit on that. People will do what is easiest, and find a way to rationalize their behavior in whatever manner they please. The only exception to this is to provide real value to the consumer, creating an incentive to play by the industry rules.
Face it -- SDMI provides no benefit to the consumer. It's sort of like the "PCS" technology marketing in the cellular telephone market. At introduction, the audio quality of the digital cellphones was worse and the signal weaker than good analog phones. The marketing of "digital" phones was dismal because it offered the customer no real benefit. However, the cellphone companies that could push 3-5 digital calls per cellsite radio instead of one analog call had a real incentive to make the service attractive, and started adding customer value (like messaging, call management, etc) and marketing the package as "PCS" as distinct from "digital." PCS has been successful, because there's value in it for the customer.
Same goes for SDMI. Until there's some value in it for the customer, such as offering music subscriptions or access to digital liner notes, artwork, etc, SDMI is dead as a doornail. And even then, it'll be relatively trivial to bypass it by conversion to open formats. If Shamoon's strategies are the best that SDMI has to offer, then SDMI is in real trouble.
I think not...(*poof*)
Remember, the goal of the free software movement is not to liberate other peoples' work. You don't see Linus or RMS pirating 0-day Windows 2000 betas or reverse-engineering competitors' formats. Instead, they built a brand new alternative from the ground up, and it's gaining new followers every day. Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing Napster or Gnutella or anything; as I said, most artists are in support of them -- we just have to consider the needs of those who aren't.
Choice is always a good thing; in fact, it's the principle that the open source community was built on. We've got different distros to choose from, different window managers, different desktops, etc. It's nice to see that there's now different alternatives for digital music distribution.
According to this article the watermark is audible. I am not buying any music with an audible watermark, I might buy music with an inaudible watermark, but only if it is significantly better than the plain old CD I can buy now.
Q.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
OK, the author here needs a HUGE whack on the head with a cluestick. With napster, you ask a central server for a song, and then you set up a direct connection. With gnutella, the only difference is that you have to do so before you log on. He's right so far. But then he goes on to say that this increases the risk of virii. Grade A prime bull. You can't possibly get a virus unless you actually transfer a song. No client is brain-damaged enough that it will accept code (vbs or otherwise) from its nearest node without asking for it. And the stuff about child molesters is pure garbage. Chat is chat, whether or not you're using a decentralized server. Knowing someone's ip address doesn't help you hunt down their house.
--
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
Regardless of what 'they' come up with...
a) We can cheaply and easily build portable devices to play music in whatever format we want, regardless of 'standards'.
b) What prevents us from doing what we want anyway?
He doesn't need it to work; think it through.
SDMI is being built on DRM software made by his company. This will make his stock optiosn very valuable.
SDMI will be moderately secure - enough to be some effort to crack.
While music is availabel in both forms, it is less effort to buy the CD and rip it.
Only when music you want is SDMI-only is it worth your time to crack it; even then there will be a lag (like there was with DVD).
I'm sure the techs at InterTrust know this; they are just hoping to cash out their stock before the market catches on.
I got tired of having a karma of 60+.. So now i'm trying to nuke my karma as fast as possible. Its down to 29 now.
I dont see what the big problem is. The SDMI was defeated long ago -- Apparently several clueless Slashdot authors failed to realize this before posting the article. Meanwhile, hundreds of other articles are rejected. Another fact of the matter is, is that Slashdot is not the way it used to be, despite promises that it wouldn't change.
Have a great day,
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
I had always thought SDMI was a paralell computing term meaning Single Data Multiple Instruction. Which was pretty much useless because any of the instructions could modify that data at any time, making the multiple instuctions operating on it useless...
;-)
At least you don't go to the South Henrietta Institute of Technology... err... I mean Rochester Institute of Technology. You figure out the initials
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
All the specification says is, "if you download a song to a PC it should be protected; if you transfer it to a portable device, the wire along which it travels should be protected and the portable device itself should keep it protected."
Oh, gee, what realistic requirements! Sadly, it will be hard to transfer data to your PC when it's secure (ie, turned off inside a safe at the bottom of the ocean). They're actually expecting end-to-end hardware protection! This would required rebuilding everything inside the machine (if it's possible at all, which I doubt). Not to mention the fact they you still have to trust whoever you got it from (ie, trust that nobody tampered with it over the wire). OK, let's rebuild the internet too! But we'll stop those pirates! (haha, yeah right).
A digital audio file of any format has to be converted into analog audio to be playable. I can get a Y-cord (or, even better, an S/PDIF output) out of my soundcard that can go to a DAT machine or another computer. While the watermark is still there, what's going to stop me from using this now highly ordinary WAV file? Furthermore, even if audio delivery systems of the future have watermark detection that doesn't allow you to play a file if the watermark is present, wouldn't take all of 15 minutes for someone to write an algorithm that would do an FFT on a sound file and remove the offending frequency?
Sounds like the SDMI people aren't the brightest minds out there.
"Even genius needs a competent technique."--Robert Fripp
The only hard bit is identifying the unnecessary data. But, it's only a form of steganography. If you know the message is there, then all you have to do is find it. It may be hard, but given the past history of the companies involved with SDMI, it won't be *very* hard.
This is another example of the 'Trusted Client' problem There ain't no such puppy as a trusted client. There can't be.
The millions being invested in SDMI is a waste. I hope the people involved have a *very* good set of excuses ready for when the shareholders start asking where the money went.
In the meantime, I will pay for the music I listen to. I'll pay for the DVDs I want to watch. But I'll play them on the platform *I* choose.
Share and Enjoy.
Suppose you search for adobe photoshop.zip with gnutella and someone has a trojaned piece of warez? You can't really imbed a virus in a data file and expect it to spread.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I can't help but wonder if these people are in a deep, deep, deep case of denial. They need pills, or something. Can't they see that they're fscked? I'd guess terabytes of mp3's swap hands every single day. There's no putting the genie back in the bottle. For some unknown reason, sales still are up. What, people are maybe at their core honest?
There is no digital protection scheme short of implanting an RIAA chip in your head that will would because you need to hear the music. This guy has a degree from Cornell. He's still an idiot, he's just an idiot with a degree. If there's a watermark, you can bet there's a pissed off hacker out there who's better than you who's going to take care of your watermark real fast.
The format is too widespread, there's no control over players and the numbers of people make it impossible and possibly not legal to sue everyone collectively. (Civil disobediance, who?)
Find a model that doesn't rape consumers and makes people happy for once, find a model that makes the artists happy - no, not Lars and his happy gang, but the 99% that get fscked when they sign on with the labels. Or face a horrible, horrible obsolecence. You won't be missed.
Doing my part to end RIAA monopolistic practices since 1996. :)
..don't panic
hello? isn't that a pyramid scheme?
It isn't enough that the RIAA wants to deny you the right to OWN what you BUY. Now they want to become pyramid-schemers.
They are lying when they say they want CD's to die. That's just condescension and red herring. Actually, they don't want us to pay $1 a song instead of $16 a CD because that means they will lose $15 bucks every time (how many CD's have more than one good song on them?). So to build up alternate revenus to offset that loss, they are willing to turn us into spammers, to build a pyramid of distribution using incentives, and basically suck us dry from every angle.
Just think about Their Vision of the Future: Consumer hears song on radio (free to consumer, but radio paid $ to Them for the broadcast rights). Consumer buys SDMI-compliant CD or individual files from the NapsterCorp (90% of sale goes to Them, maybe 10% goes to the artist). By buying the music the consumer has to surrender their privacy (or is tricked into losing it) and that demographic info is sold to marketing lists. The consumers are spammed, and further encouraged to spam their friends in a pyramid scheme using incentives. At *every* stage, They make $$ and We surrender our income, our privacy, and our rights. The poor artists will be brainwashed into thinking this is good and will beg for crumbs from their masters.
this guy is just a corporate egghead who is shilling for the Paycheck Masters. Zero credibility.
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______________________________________________
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
The interviewee seems to love the phrase "quality experience" yet never defines it. What exactly is a "quality experience" and why would his method provide it?
The general opinion here is that no one likes watermarked files. Thats like saying you don't like the key your car uses, so everyone should install a simple on/off switch. After all you should be able to drive anyones car you please.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Placing a watermark within an MP3 doesn't seem to matter much, if the software that plays the MP3 doesn't check for it. Right now, that software is is probably part of a grand total of zero "pure" MP3 players.
Even if fully adopted, there will always be the possibility of "renegade" MP3 players that disregard the watermark entirely. So, why would watermarks be useful in this "playback" regard?
For protecting integrity of the content, watermarks are great. For blocking reproduction, they fail. Anyone have any thoughts on this?
I read this article with great interest, as I am comfortable to know that something such as "Digital Rights Management" will never take away my personal freedoms. Its just not going to happen.
Remember when CDs came out and they said that they would be cheaper? Sounds like SDMI and DRM are just more ways to get the end consumer to pay out more money for music with watermarks and "big brother features" in it.
No thank you.
// www.21planet.com
// www.mp3411.com
I think thats right (easy to copy from audio channel) - However, watermarking is slightly different to copy-protection encryption. Basically they alter tiny bits of every piece of music in such a way that when it is held up to the light, so to speak, you can see the watermark.
This does not stop you from copying the song - but generally you cannot find out which bits were altered very easily (maybe Im wrong). Thus when you buy a song and copy it, your finger print will remain on the song, and if it appears on Napster, you will be fingered as the person who allowed the copyrighting...
Obviously you can also do copy-protection based on this as well, but as it is so easy to circumnavigate, it is more likely that the watermark fingerprint would be used.
Winton
Ok, I've flamed and flamed, but something needs to be done here. What the fuck compels you to spam slashdot nonstop like this? You want to join the ranks of Penis Bird Guy and magenta syringe? Jesus christ man, just because you're Bowie fucking Poag and you run a little graphics site doesnt make you some kind of badass who's entitled to troll like this. Fine your karma may be high enough that youll never run out of +1. But what the fuck are you doing this for? If you're trying to get attention, good job. I know your little propaganda site exists. But I sure as hell aint bothering with something ran by an egomaniac like you. No wonder everyone on slashdot fucking hates your guts. Please grow up and move off slashdot if you dont like it.
Theoretically, let's say that I were to purchase some music with this consumer-unfriendly technology.
I calmly play it from my computer - which happens to have a digital output from the sound card. Now, exactly how is this technology going to stop me from manipulating it in any form I wish?
Exactly.
Musicians and Record Companies do not own any of the equipment the materials they are selling will be played on. It's as simple as that. If I can hear it, I can record it. If I can see it, I can record it.
Any questions?
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.