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Making and Detecting Illegal Music
Demona writes "Long-time music aficionado
Dave Marsh has an article in the latest edition of
Counterpunch entitled
Sampler's Delight. Giving rave reviews to "Nothing to Fear", the
latest in a
long line of so-called
illegal music, he also describes a "'major label waveform CD database,' which is capable of recognizing materials allegedly owned by the record label cartel." This database is allegedly why a UK pressing plant rejected the initial attempt at publishing "Nothing To Fear", which is comprised almost entirely of sampled material."
cd mp3; ls *
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Pac-Man Fever should have been illegal. They dropped the ball on that 15 years ago, however.
As a lot of readers probably know gracenote uses simple metrics about the length of the songs and their position on the cd to check a database to find likely matches. Gracenote maintains nothing of the sort of a waveform database.
While i believe there is/was at least one startup that was working to match music using a beats & tone analysis method that could match to songs that had been shifted or obscured in some way, i'm not sure this technology has ever been in real use.
The idea that there is some huge waveform database that cd pressing plants now use is pretty suspicious. I think working in the industry i would have heard about it, even if it was kept secret the storage capacity and processing needs would be astronomical. 11,000 albums heavily compressed to 160kbps still takes approximately 600gb, I understand that the amount of in print US albums is somewhere between 200,000 - 300,000 and more like 600,000 for world releases (in print only). Searching through a collection like that would easily take days or weeks depending on how small a segment you were trying to match
Most MP3 files downloaded via a P2P service are illegal no matter what. However, possession of a copy of one of these recordings is illegal even if you have purchased a CD because they're "derivative works" of 1. a musical work and 2. a sound recording. Copyright owners have won infringement lawsuits over four notes from a musical work and over one note from a sound recording. (The latter link will tell you that the four-note rule does not apply, but the four-note rule applies to musical works, which are independent of any recording of such works.)
When there are fewer than 50,000 possible melodies, how can anybody write new music? "Apparently, they just do" does not answer the question.
Will I retire or break 10K?
What more blatent example of satire can there be than an artist scrambling and re-arranging the works of other artists for the sake of mockery. I myself enjoy warping and "Mashing" otherwise lame recordings. If someone can take one creation, and turn it into another, it should be respected as a seperate work of art. Besides, I haven't seen an original concept in popular music for years. Most modern music is just recycled chords, lyrics, and beats.
Make a song detailing how to decrypt dvds.
If major labels are bothering you all so much, why do you keep supporting them by talking about their bands, trading their music, grudgingly BUYING THEIR CDs??
Sometimes I just don't get the Slashdot crowd... Many of us use Linux and have given up on using Microsoft stuff, but when it comes to the latest crappy mainstream music, we whine that we can't pirate it? Come on.... If you really feel that major labels are screwing you, give them up. Support inedepent musicians and labels.
There's a whole world of music out there that is cheaper, more interesting, more cutting-edge, etc..etc... You just have to look a little harder to find it, just like you had to try a bit harder to get Linux installed and your closed-source applications replaced by Free Software.
Sorry for the rant...you might mod me down, but really....If some big companies are doing something you don't like, forget about them and move on to something better.
Cheers,
Vic
Why don't these people put their time to some constructive use and learn how to write actual music on their own
Could it perhaps be because songwriters either are close to running out of unique melodies or already have run out of unique melodies? (There exist fewer than 50,000 possible melodies; read this article to see why.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
Such releases are quite similar to flamebait on slashdot, except that the flaming that follows is written in legalese, and, well, karma isn't what they should be afraid of losing... =)
My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right! =)
While i believe there is/was at least one startup that was working to match music using a beats & tone analysis method that could match to songs that had been shifted or obscured in some way
That was Relatable.
i'm not sure this technology has ever been in real use.
Napster 10.x used it. MusicBrainz uses it.
11,000 albums heavily compressed to 160kbps still takes approximately 600gb
Relatable claims that its tech can identify songs down to 16 kbps.
Will I retire or break 10K?
can't you see that sampling without permission, and then selling the copies, is illegal for a reason?
I absolutely can not see that. This is our culture we're sampling. I agree that it wouldn't be fair to copy your entire album and sell it, but if I just sample 5 or 10 or 30 seconds of it, how is that impacting the sales of your album?
No one is going to say "Oh, I'm not going to buy that old Beach Boys album because artist Xyzzy used a 12 second sample of it, and those were the only 12 seconds I wanted anyway!" No one chose to buy Plunderphonics because they couldn't afford the original version of the Beatles' "A Day In The Life", so they decided a chopped-up unrecognizable version of the ending would be close enough.
Copyright is there to give the artist incentive to create. Sampling laws don't do that. No one says "I'm going to create a great song so that it can be sampled a lot and I can collect royalties." That's just a happy side benefit to selling albums.
But sampling laws DO encourage people not to create by giving them a limited pallete to work with.
Hasn't Puff Daddy ... proven your
assertion already?
Except... (Skip the obvious troll to get to my point)
Puffy took *good* music and turned it into complete crap.
However, you raise a good point.
Why can *he* steal 90% of a song, unmodified, and sell it as "his" work, while these other "illegal" artists take small clips and heavily modify them, yet the result counts as a copyright violation?
The answer?
Puffy sells.
These other groups do not.
At the "Negativland" link, it mentions that the fee, $70k, exceeds their *total* sales in 14 years. That does not make the labels money.
I think that about sums up anything we can discuss on this topic. Copyright violations only matter if no one makes money off it (interestingly, the exact *opposite* of what the law says, where penalties come in direct proportion to how much someone profits from the use of stolen material). Make the RIAA money, regardless of how, or prepare to face legal battles the likes of which even Puffy couldn't weather. Fortunately for Puffy, and Wierd Al, and every other SUCCESSFUL artist that makes "derivative" works, the RIAA can make enough off the music to keep them at bay.
I was hoping to hear from these guys. In the early 90's Hip-hop was very much on its way to becoming the next big thing.(Yes I'm a white boy, but I liked it OK?)
There was a big arm-wresting match over sampling rights. In the end the record companies won by suing and threatening artists who used samples in thier music. The practice was further erased by requiring artists to "clear" thier samples ahead of time with the recording studios, many of which required the artist to pay royalties on each sample used.
This was a very real and demonstrable case where RIAA-like tactics destroyed a promising art form. I think it's another reason why digitally traded music should be allowed to flourish...simply because it re-creates an environment where this type of music can start again where it left off.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
Sampling fees are another issue. I do not know what record companies charge for sampling fees, but if they are anything like the prices that they rip us off with CD's with, then I don't blame them. Artists need to be paid, but the amount of this that goes to the record companies is just ridiculous.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
I'm sure a good slashdotting will really hit their pockets hard.
I hold a patent on sigs...
Have any of those other bands released an album with the name of the band they copied music from in big bold letters on the cover, and their own name in fine print at the bottom?
but is there not a certain degree of freedown allowable in reference parodies?
Under United States copyright law as interpreted by the courts, parody is only parody when the parody ridicules the original work itself. That's why The Wind Done Gone is legal but The Cat Not in the Hat isn't.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Your post is misleading.
There are less than 50,000 4-note melodies. 4 notes being all it took in one particular court case.
However that only means that there are 50,000 unique melodies in a legal sense.
In an artistic sense there are millions.
From what I remember, Gradenote (or CDDB.com) looks at the catalog track. It takes the number of tracks and the checksum of the catalog to determine an ID for the disk. It then takes this ID and looks it up in its database. I have had some CDs present me with a list of 8+ possible matches, asking me to resolve the conflict.
The dogcow says "Moof!"
When you the MP3 of the song in a few filters, it gives the DeCSS source code.
I have done this. Along the lines of what Aphex Twin used to hide his face, I wrote a program that converted a .bmp of the efdtt source code (efdtt is a small DeCSS program, available at the Gallery of CSS Descramblers) into a waveform (using an inverse fourier transform of sorts) and mixed it on top of some song.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Actual I was thinking more of Britney Spears singing:
q T="C*",_)[20]&48){D=89;8 ,unqb8,qT,_^$a[--D]}@INC; ( P=(E=255)&(Q>>12^Q>>4^Q/8^Q))>8^(E&(F=( S=O>>14&7^O)^S*8^S>=8)+=P+(~F&E))for@a[128..$#a]}p rint+qT,@a}';
eval"
"s''$/=\2048;
while(){G=29;
R=142;
if((@a=un
_=unqb24,qT,@b=map{ordqB
s/...$/1$&/;
Q=unqV,qb25,_;
H=73;
O=$b[4]>8^
s/[D-HO-U_]/\$$&/g;
s/q/pack+/g;
catchy beat eh?
If you read the article it says Marsh didn't believe the database possible ..."until I read a story in J@pan Inc Magazine (June 26) about a company called Gracenote, which specializes in "music recognition service," the software that lets your CD player tell you which artist and track are currently playing."
As many of you know, Gracenote offers the CDDB service. It does not do any fancy music waveform checking. It checks song lengths and a few other points of data off a CD. It is only useful for CDs. CDDB, though it is handy for getting CD info, contains user-entered data, and often has duplicate entries. Using it for such a system as the author described would be a bad idea. At this point, the chances of a certain CD "matching" another in CDDB's eyes is higher than you might think. Sometimes, I'll put in a disc and have three or four separate albums come up.
± 29 dB
Because that would require learning music, writing and composing songs, playing an instrument, and maybe even developing a talent. Not a very efficient process, time-wise...
Can I get an Amen out here? Come on now, you all know this is true, most modern musicians can't sing, can't write lyrics, and if you go to rappers, cannot even play an instrument. (at all, not that a rocker pounding on a guitar plugged into an insanely overpowered amp is anything resembling playing)
There is a reason that traditionally the entire composing VS playing this is separate.
Oh yah, and, to boot, I might add that real musicians STUDY for a longer period of TIME then many of the pop so called "artists" have even been ALIVE.
That right there should tell people something about the quality of the "music" that they are getting. . . .
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(Not to say that what I'm about to describe is what the referenced "illegal music" songs actually are. But this got me thinking.)
...
Jay-zus, people, can't you see that sampling without permission, and then selling the copies, is illegal for a reason?
Hmm... Resampling bits of another record and playing them at another speed. Using them as notes on a synthesizer keyboard, short riffs, or wildly off-speed as percussion elements.
How is that different from what rap music does? Sliding somebody else's record around on the turntable, playing sampled notes on a drum box,
Don't the major labels record rap music and sell it at a profit without giving a cent to the group that recorded the disk that's "weep-weep"ing in the foreground?
How many notes do you have to copy before it stops being fair use and starts being plagarism?
Is it more if the notes are warped beyond human recognition?
Is it more - or less - if your song is a parody of the form of which the original is a member?
Is it plagarism if the individual notes of your composition are sampled from some other song rather than played anew in a studio?
Is a song a "copy" if a stock riff common to many songs of the form happens to be sampled from a commercial recording rather than played anew in a studio - and this can be identified by computer processing but NOT by a human ear (even a well-trained one)?
These are not rhetorical questions. Some of them have already been litigated.
"Intellectual Property" - whether patents, copyrights, or trademarks - is a creation of The State. When combined with a right to free expression it creates a multitude of slippery slopes.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So,
I should write my code in assembler and never use anyone elses code or libraries.
Yeh we need some more people doing that, I only have libjpeg but i want a statically compiled propritory image format in each application.
"We can see as far as we can today, because we stand of the shoulders of giants."
You are comparing apples to peanut brittle.
No, wait, make that apples to a Philly Cheese Steak Sandwich.
While both kick ass, I would not try to use the same preparation instructions for both of them.
See, music DOES borrow from others, heck many techniques and methodologies have been passed down from one great Grand Master to the next. Does that mean they are stolen? Heck no, it just means that an ideology was employed/i> in both songs, originated in one, and used once again in the second.
Code is the same way.
A timer function may be used in Application A to count down how much time the player has left until their simulated city goes down the toilet from a nuclear meltdown, and then used again in Application B to set off an alarm at a scheduled time of day every day and shows the User how much time they have left until that particular alarm is triggered.
Though I am just using a Timer as an example, obviously a highly simplified example of a function, though a library to save JPEGs or such is the same way. Be it saving screen shots from a game with hard coded settings plugged in there automatically, or all the variables left open to the user to play around with when saving files from their image editing application.
Same library, two completely separate programs.
But now to jump back to the first example, if somebody just DIRECTLY ripped off the timer + font and used the same alarm sound as the game had and popped up a "Your city is now a slag heap" message, well;
I would not call that a very useful Alarm program, though I would call it one hell of a rip off.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
..if it was impossible to trade mp3's(or .ogg or such), i'd be listening to .mods, .xm's , sids, and maybe midi's. i listened mostly to those (+radio) before mp3's.. great amounts of music available and cost was only downloading from some bbs, and those included some really good songs too.
streaming nectarine now..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I know in the UK there is a service called Shazam which you call up with your mobile phone, point your phone at a 'music source' for around 15 seconds and then you get a text message/SMS back around 30 seconds later showing a) the artist name (handy for 'cover versions) and b) the track name. It also has the facility (if you register) to 'store' your requests on its website and give appropriate links to online music stores.
It seems to work quite alright as well, I tested it by playing 2 tracks at once out my speakers - it correctly identified one of them (I thought it'll fail complete), I've tried it via the radio on a bus - again success, admiteddly it failed in a very crowded and noisy nightclub - but it's still damn good (and resonable cheap) for identifying music.
The claim that they can recognise 1.5million different tracks from just a 15 second second sample - I don't know how they do it though, but I know *I'm* impressed by the technology!
Goddammit, I used the notes C, D, E, and F again! Those `Happy Birthday' ladies (as well as everyone else) will probably sue me.
:-( *
As a songwriter, I often wonder: How the F*** am I supposed to compare my songs to the other one-million songs out there to see if they are `substantially similar?' Hell, any three-chord song sounds `substantially similar' to any other three-chord song.
I hereby renounce my title as a creator. Everything I could ever make (as music, as art, as writing, as code) has already been done and been copyrighted and/or patented. I will now slave away in a factory. Thank you for your time.
No, this is not a troll. This is simply a scared U.S. citizen.
*=Registered trademark of despair.com
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
I'm sorry guys, but anyone who thinks that the solution to the scourge of intellectual property is to simply steal it, is either an idealist at best or simply a fool at worst.
The solution to the problem is to stop buying the product in the first place, if the album is good you will buy it, if it is bad you will not. Get rid of your illegal MP3s and OGGs and simply have music that you own. Wanna listen to some new music? Pay for it, or learn to play it.
Stealing it weakens the argument for cheaper music and enforces the perception that p2p networks simply share music for which people have no license. Rather than providing people with a useful way to share files on a heterogenus network.
I don't like MS products and licensing so I don't use them. I hate when people tell me that they think MS Office is much better than StarOffice, when the copy they have is stolen. If it's that good pay for it. The same is true for all intellectual property, we all think it is theft, we all would like to live in a state of pure anarchy, but none of you seem to be able to get to that enlightened level because of your greed. Free your mind and free your wallet, don't pay, don't listen.
If you think a lawsuit destroyed hiphop, you're more than white, you're missing the point.
Um, Kazaa sucks?
If nothing else though, the spyware should let lot's of spammers and con artists find you, if that's any consolation.
if it was impossible to trade mp3's(or .ogg or such), i'd be listening to .mods, .xm's , sids, and maybe midi's.
Turning a recording into a .ogg file and distributing it infringes both the songwriter's and the performer's copyright.
Turning a song into a module file (mod, s3m, xm, it, mid+sf2) won't draw any fire from RIAA labels but will still infringe the songwriter's copyright. You still need a license from BMI or Harry Fox, depending on the intended use.
Writing your own music is harder than it looks because it's nearly impossible to avoid "substantial similarity" to the millions of songs out there.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Been done.
If you ask nicely, I'll give you a good URL from where you can download it.
See also: illegal art, valenti cracks
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
But that does not make it unoriginal. Most Western music for the past 400 years has been created using the same essential building blocks. An infinite number of works can be made using this system. All the sounds, rythyms, etc may have existed before, and may have been used in another work before, but that does not mean entirely new combinations cannot be created. What you say is akin to dismissing a painting as unoriginal because the artist used the color red.
You shouldn't complain about bad rips if you don't contribute back to the MP3 scene. Napster/Morpheus/Audiogalaxy/Kazaa/WinMX/Blubster/ whatevers_new_this_week is not the MP3 scene.
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
that's really irrelevant. The point is that Indie music sucks for most people and most people are not going to enjoy it and thus are not going to buy it.
People don't always want to take the time to appreciate things. They want instant everything.
I'm sorry, how did you come to the conclusion that there are less than 50000 4-note melodies? When I think about this, I consider that this number depends on the tonal system and the rythmic figuration. The latter condition guarantees that there are actually an infinite number of 4-note melodies, even if the former does not. Legally, I suppose the question would be the number of melodies that people could distinguish as being different. This number depends on the person and is probably higher than you think. People with absolute pitch consider the same melody or even the same motive played at two different pitch level to be quite different, for instance.
Just curious, but doesn't MP3 signifigantly alter a waveform when it chucks the parts you normally can't hear? It'd be like fingerprinting with half the prints missing or otherwised changed around, I'd imagine. Oh, I'm sure they could make a close approximation, but the an approximation isn't nessisarily going to hold up in a court.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
That said, personally, I'm torn -- I don't like what the RIAA is doing, but still like some of their music. I mostly buy independent music these days. When I do want some RIAA stuff, I generally pirate it because it subverts their business model. They spend a lot of music up front to produce and promote music, and then I get it without giving them any money. I don't see any point in complaining about their attempts to stop this -- they're futile anyway.
-Esme
You mean like this?
http://decss.zoy.org/decss-sung.mp3
The capability to automatically identify the music from the waveform may be one of RIAA's priorities. However, is it a good thing? If a software can tell which music it is, it can also tell if someone is saying "I love the Al Qaeda", so it will be promptly adopted for counter insurgency purposes as well. Given this, can the ability to detect "No, I didn't vote for Dubya" be far behind?
But then, every copyrighted music out there may not be copyrightable, due to prior art. For each sequence of four notes, search all melodies whose copyright has expired. If you can find that sequence in an old melody, then that music is not copyrightable.
For Puff Daddy, the music thing is now a sideline. He's really an apparel designer, and a good one. See his new fall 2002 line, selling under the Sean John label. He's considered the most innovative designer in men's fashion right now. His stuff sells, too, unlike most other new ideas in menswear. It's not just runway fashion.
Have any of those other bands released an album with the name of the band they copied music
from in big bold letters on the cover, and their own name in fine print at the bottom?
Warrant released an album in 1992 entitled "Dog Eat Dog"
Subsequently Dog Eat Dog released an album in 1993 entitled "Warrant"
http://jesus.everdense.com/
The songs are public domain and you can purchase the songsheets and perform the work yourself all you want. However, something like the recording of the Boston Symphony Orchestra performing Bach and Beethoven is copyrighted as it is the interpretation of the music, not the music itself. Same goes for any classical music CD available today. The performances are copyrighted but you are free to grab the songsheets and perform it yourself all you want.
Are you sure you want to go down this line of reasoning? You are trying to use an objective measure to validate a subjective thing.
When one hears a song for the first time, most people don't suspend judgement until they can research how much studying the performer has done before they decide if they like the song or not.
[Do you not use a software package unless you know it was coded in machine code with object-oriented design, because that's the only thing that meets your subjective qualifications for a good software engineer? Should they also make sure not to re-use any code that others have developed?]
All means of expression are valid. Some means might not appeal to you for many reasons. You may be looking for a specific kind of talent (e.g. years of study). So be it; that's your right, but it doesn't make the expression less valid.
It's art. Art is personal. Art makes you think. it makes you happy, and it makes you mad.
To the RIAA it's also product. Product is commercial. Product makes you money.
Complain about the commercial quality of the product but don't complain about the "talent" of the performer. They are different things.
Lots of great (and ironically original) groups and DJs do lots of sampling, but rearrange the samples or cut them up into weird new unexpected beats.. and really redefine the sound.
Examples? DJ Shadow, Fat Boy Slim, Moby, Daft Punk.. there are a hundred examples.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Why? Because it's the exact same argument the very next guy uses and he's modded as an 'interesting'. Common, a little consistancy here? And he's absolutely right. Music is not open source as is the popular opinion. And late at night when Aunt Betty is asleep and i'm honest with myself, I have this tiny little fear: That the pirates- yes, you and I -Really are destroying the music industry. Oh, sure, the Labels are doing their part, but what is the long term effect this all has besides this RIAA crap? Well, I've thought of some...
Pirating really is like welfare. I can see people becoming so use to free music that it'll poison the industry. Joe has a few hit songs, but like most people, doesn't have the cash or the distibution infrastructure to get visibility. (and no, the internet is barely a viable option at this point) Unfortunately, neither do the labels anymore because all it takes is a dozen people to hit the net with any P2P program, and they're ass outta luck with near zero chance of defraying the cost. What happens? Joe is either really, really, really dedicated or he says I have a wife and kids to feed and drops the music gig. Now picture that on a large scale.
Now I'm not saying that this will happen 100% or the industry eventially won't eventially find other ways to make money off hits, but it doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to a see a music recession on the rise because neither side will back down. And before I get any high and mighty replies about the evil empires raping us at the counter, I ask you this: What do you do if a department store gives you shitty service? Overprices their product? Oh, naturally you steal it off the shelf, right? Contrary to popular belief, you can change the industries behavior without resorting to THEFT... It just takes a lot of hard work and we're all lazy bastards.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Doh. So, there are just 12^3 == 1728 melodies? I'm pretty sure there are more than 1728 classic melodies, I myself must have at least that many among my records. What do we need then, to kill copyright law forever? Create a table linking each one of those sequences to one old melody where it appears. Then, for any newer music, it'll be just a matter of consulting that table to demonstrate that that tune is not copyrightable.
However, shouldn't "prior art" then be able to be argued in this case?
You said "argued". It's true that copyright protects only the original portions of a work, but if you don't have much money on hand, you can't afford to hire somebody to argue anything. Those without sufficient income to afford legal representation must steer clear of performing any action that anybody else could conceivably think of as infringing or defamatory.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Seriously, why should they be able to stop people?
If I buy a copy of some mix CD that happens to sample Britney, surely records companies don't actually think they're missing out on a Britney sale? I'm not even a 'potential' customer, so they're not even losing a pretend "if it weren't for napster we would have sold 10 trillion copies of the latest Backstreet boys album, therefore napster has to pay us <pinkypoint to="mouth">one hundred trillion dollars</pinkypoint>"-type sale.
mp3s of Negativland's original "U2" single is available here. Top of the page. "The forbidden single"
Just because gracenote runs cddb, doesn't mean that they aren't allowed to run other business ventures using different technology.
http://www.negativland.com/audio.html
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
If people stop buying big-label music and buy unknown bands, the big labels will go out of business. But it takes effort to break our advertising-induced buying habits. Most people would rather rationalize their own laziness.
If more people would put their money and effort where their mouths are and take the time to look for non-label bands, they would find bands they like just as much as the ones that have been spoon-fed to them. There is a ton of excellent music freely available from the bands themselves, which the labels have absolutely no control over and can't touch you for downloading. Finding it on doesn't even take that much more effort than bitching on /.