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DivX and MP3 Developers Work Together on Watermarks
An Anonymous Coward writes: "The DivX and MP3 developers are working on digital watermarking techniques together... Ogg anyone?"
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here's another fascinating article about this sort of "digital watermarking". Ogg is looking more impressive too, but mp3's are just so entrenched it'll be tough to get the average user to convert.
According to the article, the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics is in on this too. But really, we knew that this was coming. Someone was going to do it. Would you have preferred that that someone was hired by Hillary Rosen (RIAA) or Jack Valentini (MPAA) ? This might be the best we can hope for. At least vorbis will provide a way out for those in the know.
You're right, but video card manufacturers are already including DRM firmware - it's called DVI. DVI creates a secure link between the PC and the display to prevent digital copying of decoded streams (e.g. DVD).
BTW, I'm surprised no one has yet challenged the DVD regional licensing scheme under US antitrust law. The Sherman Act makes such geographic price discrimination illegal.
It does not circumvent anything. It does not break/bypass any method of (in)effectively restricting access.
It is simply an unprotected format.
Now, should the SSSCA pass (CPFDFJKFJSKD or whatever), it will be illegal because it won't have any protections built in.
No, AOL has a vested interest in people using the internet. They have nothing to gain from helping the RIAA make music sharing difficult or irritating.
Except for the fact that AOL owns the fourth largest record label in the world, this would be a really insightful point.
Not to mention that that sentence could be read to suggest that AOL has a policy of making the Internet less annoying.
No, AOL is a perfect example. Back in 1991 they were a very small bulletin board service that was dwarfed by online giants such as Compuseve, Prodigy, GEnie and the like. The people who joined at this point were almost entirely joining to play Neverwinter Nights. In all other categories of online services, AOL stunk across the board (I think PC World gave them the lowest score of all online services when it was first reviewed).
However, for broke teenagers, there was one reason to use AOL...it was free. Thanks to the easy availablity of sign-up disks, anyone could get online. All you had to do was sign up, fill in bogus payment information, and enjoy a month or more of free service. This went on for years. There were even tools written to automate the account generation process. From 1991 to about 1996 there was absolutely no authentication of payment information before activating an account. AOL would simply let the account run and then after a couple of months of sending "your payment information is invalid" messages it would finally close the account.
Each of these AOL accounts had five screennames. Each of these five screennames could have 550 e-mails stored on AOL servers. Each of these 550 e-mails could have up to 10MB in attachments. So here's how it worked. Someone would get online to their local warez BBS and download the latest warez release. That person would then repack the release into 10MB pieces and send them to himself via AOL (uploading the files to AOL). From there he would forward the e-mails to everyone else, essentially e-mailing gigabytes of warez to you with a single click. This also went on for years. AOL warez groups were flourishing right up until around 1996.
Surely this couldn't have escaped AOL's knowledge. In these days, you were lucky if an ISP let you keep 10MB on a server and here AOL was giving you basically 2.5GB of online storage. As long as you kept forwarding to fresh accounts before your old ones expired, you had access to all the programs you could ever want. But they had to be kept somewhere...and AOL had to pay for that storage not...to mention all those countless modems and dial-in access minutes.
So why would an ISP allow such rampant abuse of their account and mail system? Well from 1991 to 1996 something else was happening...AOL was growing. On the books, they went from about 100,000 members to 1,000,000 members in about two years. They surpassed Compuserve a couple years later. I seriously doubt that at any time during this era that more than a 1/3 of the accounts on AOL were actually valid paying customers (besides all the fraudulently generated accounts, there were boatloads of AOL4Free Macintosh customers). But on paper, I'm sure it looked good to investors to see how the membership was growing. And I'm sure it looked really good when they had more members than any other ISP.
Most telling to me is the fact that right around 1996 when they were working on getting, IIRC, their sixth millionth customer...AOL suddenly implemented a raft of policies that killed the AOL warez community. First, they started actually trying to verify payment on what was entered during sign-up. That did away with the fake generators...now you actually had to have stolen credit cards to get online (much harder to come by). Two, they started deleting files after they had been downloaded a certain number of times (people estimated it to be about between 250 and 500 times) or the account that uploaded it was cancelled. Last, they started blocking the private rooms where people met to trade mail forwarding with each other. These things happened boom, boom, boom within months of each other.
But by then, AOL was the number one ISP, and if I remember correctly, this was right around the time they moved to flat rate unlimited access so they could no longer afford to have a huge population of floating freeloaders when they didn't even have the capacity to support all of their legitamately paying customers.
So, call me a conspiracy theorist if you must, but to this day I belive that AOL turned a blind eye to piracy to enjoy the rapid growth that it encouraged, and then once they had grown as much as they good, they easily were able to disable the piracy. So do I think it took a major corporation six years to notice the problem (despite the BSA and others constantly launching tirades about AOL warez scene) and figure out a way to stop pirates (despite e-mails where techies suggest inplementing call-backs during the sign-up process to counter theft and their bosses responding it might scare off legit customers)? Or do I think they didn't really want to stop the problem until the potential risk for getting caught was suddenly higher than the potential gains from it?
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
The difference between LAME and other encoders is that the makers of most other encoders buy a MP3 license, so you don't have to worry about it. LAME, being a free program, can't afford to buy licenses and therefore is illegal if used the way it is usually used (by home users who've paid nothing).
Companies can use LAME for anything they want as long as they have a MP3 license.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.