Slashdot Mirror
DRM Technology To Be Added To MP3 Format
Bob Zer Fish writes "Cnet News.com has a leading story saying that the venerable MP3 music format is getting a makeover aimed at blocking unauthorized copying. Thomson and Fraunhofer, the companies that license and own the patents behind the MP3 digital music technology, are in the midst of creating a new digital rights management add-on. Of course, there are current standards, but most are incompatible."
An anonymous reader points to this brief mention as well.
...since Lame doesn't use the Fraunhofer codec, and is widely available for most major platforms.
Honestly, has anyone even consciously *used* Fraunhofer's codec in the last four years for personal MP3 encoding?
MP3 is so deeply entrenched in its current form, the public isn't going to switch. There are untold Terrabytes or even Petabytes of MP3s in the world that have no DRM. It's pure idiocy to think that people will just switch from the free and open (in their minds, if not truly in reality) format that MP3 currently is to another one.
It's a waste of money to develop an add on and try to force it on the market. That won't happen.
Then again, "Trusted Computing" might be enough to force people.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Kinda not a good idea as goinf from one lossy to another makes the end result a file that sounds "less" that the original but......
Here are some MP3 to Ogg Misory one could try
Julius Caesar - Act I, Scene i: "What mean'st thou by that? Mend me, thou saucy fellow!"
I think the word you wanted was "Vorbis". Ogg is a container format, so not really comparable to MP3 (it can also contain video, or audio in other formats such as FLAC). Vorbis is a compression scheme (usually contained in an Ogg file) that's comparable to MP3.
The Rio Karma, a 20GB HDD-based player, supports Ogg Vorbis AND FLAC, and gapless playback of these formats. It retails for around US$230, and is probably the most advanced DAP on the market.
Already happening.
no, he meant what he said. it's quite acceptable to refer to a Vorbis encoded stream encapsulated in the Ogg container format as just "Ogg"
many of the other developers do. Monty even suggests "Ogg" as the ideal way to refer it.
What about those that encode their own music... as in music they made.
If you record a song to which you do not own the copyright, you have recorded a cover song. If you distribute phonorecords (e.g. in MP3 format) of a cover song to the public, then you owe a royalty to the songwriter('s publisher). If you write your own song, record it, and distribute it, then you owe a royalty to the songwriter('s publisher) whose song you subconsciously copied. Subconscious copying is actionable infringement. Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, 420 F. Supp. 177 (SDNY 1976). Or do you know of a foolproof way to write music while preventing oneself from accidentally copying a copyrighted work?
Several government organizations (supreme court!) use mp3 as one of the means with which they provide transcriptions.
Granted. Works of the United States government enter the public domain upon publication.
I'll bet you anything! Because there are already a number of music players, such as the Rio Karma that play Ogg Vorbis just fine.
too late there out there http://wiki.xiph.org/VorbisHardware
De sig boss de sig
Well, Media Player does have the ability to automatically update your WMA/MP3 files with tag info from the internet. So I guess it does already modify your files, if you enable that option (I think it is enabled by default, but you can turn it off during the install).
And in the Copy Music options, the option to 'Copy protect music' is enabled by default for when ripping CDs.
So I guess by some extension you might think 'Copy protect MP3s' would get in there in a future version and be on by default.
But yeah. MS bashing again.
Nullsoft Winamp, since 2.9 or so, already comes with an Ogg Vorbis decoder plug-in right next to its MP3 decoder plug-in. Now all we have to do is get the Speex plug-in into wide use so that the audio book people can switch. (Speex is specialized to represent a human voice more concisely than a general audio codec such as Vorbis can.)
Yeah converting Mp3s to Oggs is going to make for some crap quality audio files but you gotta start somewhere.
Degraded, perhaps. Still rather listenable, yes. Option to go back to the original source from CDex, absolutely.
One already has. It was called Diamond Multimedia, the inventor of the Rio. If you'll recall, they stared down both barrels of an RIAA lawsuit, fought off a preliminary injunction (the RIAA tried to use the AHRA and the absence of a "serial copy management system" to interfere in the marketplace) and introduced the first commercially successful portable MP3 player.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Apple is getting wads of greenies for licensing AAC
Nope. That would be Dolby. They own the rights to AAC and therefore are the ones that license and make money from it.
It assists content providers in exercising their freedom to control the distribution of their (their?) copyrighted works. If they want to sell a product of significantly reduced value at full retail price, they're free to go ahead and try, and see if they can trick, err, convince anyone to purchase their now worthless offering. There's no law saying a business can't close its doors to potential customers. It hurts both the business and the consumer but they're well within their rights.
And you can't really put much blame on the developers of the DRM software either. They're just meeting demands for increased support for copyright protection. It's still up to authors and content providers to use it.
So lets blame the lawyers!
They want to double click an installer and have their OS Ogg enabled.
They have one:
Winamp 2.91 plays Ogg Vorbis, among others
If they're using Windows Media Player to play their music, they deserve to have the DRM chain yanked, hard.
People switching to WMA or AAC with iTunes instead of sticking with an older MP3 encoder as has been suggested here would be dumb as hell. WMA and AAC both have DRM installed, and enabled by default (iirc from my unhappy times trying to convert my WMA crap to Ogg goodness, but I don't know about AAC's default)
DivX is commercial software, and can thus afford to hire a webmaster who can be allowed to wake up stupid one day. Xiph's webmaster is probably one of their core coders.
DivX is also supported by winamp 2.91, without any plug-ins other than what comes with it. In addition, I'd definitely say that the AVI format was originated by someone other than DivX, given that according to Wikipedia, the AVI format is defined (thus was originated) by Microsoft. So DivX becomes an extension on a Microslut format that can be played by extensions to Microslut World Domination Take-over Software (aka WMP), thus making DivX itself only playable by third-party software. (Am I correct here in saying that having another party other than the DivX team and the end user-- in this case, WMP-- makes DivX third-party software?)
I'll give you that installing DirectShow filters is rather beyond certain users-- my mom included-- and that getting a standardized installer for the poor souls who have to use WMP would be a tremendous idea. But having users switch to WMA or AAC just makes for another inevitable format war; Ogg works on nearly every platform ever, with the possible exceptions of the Atari and the Amiga 500.* AAC works only on iTunes or very very compatible players; WMA works on Windows and WMP for Mac.
On another note, has Fraunhofer shown any interest (positive or negative) towards Linux and the OSS community? If they have, could this be an attempt to squeeze Linux out of the market for multimedia and thereby desktop systems? And is it possible (conspiracy theory) that Microslut could have funded them and/or be providing coders for this heinous act? (/conspiracy theory)
(*) For those who didn't catch it, this is a flat-out JOKE.
This is not the sig you're looking for.
" They will work just fine until the mp3 format license requires the DRM add-on"
Sure. And all those millions and millions of MP3 players out there already will stop working.
They tried this before with the SuperMP3 or whatever they called it. Sank without a trace. Made the titanic look like a "good idea".
Sorry, Fraunhaufer, the genie is out of the bottle on MP3. There are "free" implementations, and 10's of millions of licensed players out there already.
If I'm going to go licensed, might as well use a codec like AAC.
mp3 in not unrestricted. You have to license it and pay royalties. See here.
"Is this supposed to mean that no one can create anything new anymore, because it has "all been done before" ?"
... but, when you write a song, you don't know whether it's been done before. [And if I'm not mistaken, there are no provisions for this in Copyright Law. "Oops" doesn't work.] The chances are slim, but it's entirely possible. I've written songs and later realized that they're ripoffs of a friend's song that I had heard previously.
No no
Who doesn't like free music?
There's no point during which they're copyrighted between fixation and publication which are distinct events though sometimes simultaneous.
It's true that unpublished works of the US government aren't subject to Title 17, but they're still potentially subject to 18 USC 798 until they're officially published, and some of the Defense FOIA regulations seem to translate "public domain" as "unclassified" rather than "uncopyrighted." I can easily imagine use of digital restrictions management systems to restrict access to works to promote national security rather than "the progress of science and useful arts."
Both the Neuros from Digital Inncovations and the iriver and rio, from some company I cannot remember, support Ogg
That's all well and good, and I agree with your spirit and tenacity, but "Don't buy RIAA music. Download your shit online, use filesharing applications with bandwidth-limiting enabled so you are harder to detect. Change the default port numbers. Use obscure file sharing apps. Set up a node on freenet. Complain to your ISP and threaten to leave if they poo-poo P2P use. Bandwidth limiting kinda defeats (or at least slows down) the purpose, obscure apps mean smaller selection and limited hosts (especially if only a couple of people have that "must have song") Setting up a freenet node is beyond the scope of your everyday user; And while telling your ISP that "you pay them, so you are actually the one in control" is liberating and truthful (how many service based industries can you think of that actually tell you how they can serve you instead of actually asking you how they can please you)... It's a monopoly. People with cable in areas not served by DSL can't really go off threatening their cable companies if there is no other option than POTS. Like I said I agree with your spirit, but no. We are not killing them softly. They are killing themselves. As far as them being evil, that remains to be seen. Nice try though.
Sure they have. They used to change DLLs regulary to make sure Win programs didn't run anywhere else which broke some programs and they seem to need new upgraded device drivers every couple of versions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
In couple years, when DRM will be ubiquitous, there will be a booming black market with "coprocessor" devices of this kind. Fueled by the abundance of out-of-work engineers and developers, whose job went to the East.
Nature seeks balance, in medium-to-long-term ignoring the wishes of the money-hungry CEOs. [insert yin-yang sign here]
Well, Media Player does have the ability to automatically update your WMA/MP3 files with tag info from the internet. So I guess it does already modify your files, if you enable that option (I think it is enabled by default, but you can turn it off during the install).
.jpeg of the album cover. Ok, more than I asked for, and I don't need Microsoft cataloging my music, but not terrible.
It is apparently enabled by default. I take great care to set up my mp3 tags "just so", using the excellent OSS MP3BookHelper.
I took my portable to work one day, and in order to charge the battery, I plugged it in as a USB drive and played my mp3s with Windows XP's Media Player.
Naturally, Media Player went out and started downloading supplementary information about the tracks being played, including a
But then, once Media Player discovered that there were MP3s on the drive, it insisted on iterating over the entire 60GB drive, in order to make a "convenient" database of my mp3s. Now, recall, the whole point of using Media Payer had been to recharge the portable's battery via USB. Iterating over the entire drive, of course, ran down the battery faster than the USB current could recharge it.
Then, to provide further "convenience", Media Player -- without so much as asking -- also rewrote the Mp3 tags I'd worked so hard to get the way I wanted them, adding proprietary Microsoft tags that didn't conform to the ID3 tag specification (the tag names were longer than four bytes, being prefixed with something like "MediaPlayer/"), and, worse (iirc) using its own judgment to rewrite some existing tags.
It's this sort of attitude on Microsoft's part -- that they are going to "help" me, whether I like it or not -- that more than anything else drives me away from using Microsoft products.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
The problem with all the schemes is that, at some point, you have to unencrypt the data. This means that you have two big points of succeptability:
1) The location of decryption. All someone needs to do is modify the device to get at the data. I mean lets say you invent a scheme where the data is encrypted the whole time until it hits the audio card. Not decrypted and re-encrypted, but simlpy kept encrypted until the soundcard. That then decrypts it. Well what happens when the data is decrupted? It gets fed to a little chip made by Texas Instruments or Sigmatel or someone like that. That is the digital-analogue converter. So you just go and tap the signal right there, which will no longer be encrypted and you're good to go.
2) The far easier method: The key. Encryption is inherantly a technology if trusted parties. You give the key to the people you wish to be able to decipher your message. Doing that, you lock everyone else out from being able to read it. The problem with DRM is that you are trying to lock EVERYONE out, including the person you give the message to. That doesn't work, you HAVE to give them the key in some form or another at some time or another. If you do that, they can find it, and make use of it to decrypt the data themselves. This is the problem with things like game copy protection. They release some new version of SafeDisc with 2048-bit, uber-secure, penis-enhancing encryption to keep the evil haxors out.... Which the key to resides on the disc. So, you debug the program, find where it gets the key, grab it yourself, decode the data, write it to disc and call it a day.
However for things like audio, it is generally just easier to say fuck it to digital and capture it analogue and re-encode it. It's real easy to get soundcards that exceed the CD spec for a reasonable price, never mind the quality of compressed audio. Just re-record it and go. Sure you loose a tiny bit of quality, but if done right no one but people with good ears and high end gear will be able to tell (who won't put up with compressed music in the first place).
Of course, once something is available unencrypted it can be quickly distributed.
Companies pretty much just need to knock it the fuck off. People WILL violate copyright, it's just life. Been happening forever. Now I don't object to some non invasive controls to make it more than just pressing copy to keep honest people honest, but it just gets stupid. No matter what you do, you won't lock out the hard core people, and you'll just piss off the legitimate users.
Game copyprotection has gotten really bad. Time was you were better off having a warez version of Neverwinter Nights. The new Securerom copyprotection was so screwed it wouldn't work on a ton of CD-ROMs with perfectly legit discs. It actually was punishing legit users, whiile doing nothing to stop the game from being copied by those that wanted to.
They could just withdraw their code, and while anyone with a copy could then sue them for monetary damages, they still wouldn't be able to legally use the code.
What are you smoking? They can take down their own FTP server, but they can't stop other people redistributing it.
Just be aware that the script have hard times dealing with special characters. If you've got MP3s originating from a Windows user the characters ` and ' are probably mixed up, so you'll have to fix that before converting.
You are ogg | s/gg/dd/I don't believe Fraunhoffer has patents that would block decoder implementation -- just encoder implementation. This has come up on Slashdot before.
Of course, I'd hardly shed tears if this damages MP3's viability. I'd much rather see people using Ogg Vorbis...
May we never see th
A little nitpick: VCDs use MPEG-1, for video and audio. The audio is encoded in MPEG-1 Layer 2 (whereas MP3s are MPEG-1 Layer 3) at a fairly high bitrate, 224kbps if my memory serves me correctly.
Now, the AAC codec used in DVDs is a much higher bitrate than what you'd purchase at iTMS. 448kbps at 48000 KHz vs. 128kbps at 44100 KHz. Naturally, the DVD will have surround sound channels, but since most of the bandwidth will still be devoted to stereo, it's not really fair to compare the AAC that everyone will actually hear when it comes to music to that used by DVDs. In practice, at "normal" bitrates (between 128 and 256 kpbs), MP3 and Ogg Vorbis almost always sound better.
Thomson's (flawed) business argument is its
relationship with content owners; specifically
not audio but video content owners. Thomson owns
Technicolor, and Technicolor has special
relationships with movie studios, notably Disney.
Thomson's consumer electronics businesses are
handcuffed by this greater corporate need.
There are other forces at work in this particular
case. The OMA DRM is the only viable alternative
to Microsoft DRM, which locks people in to wma and
wmv. Thomson has a strong patent portfolio in
non-proprietary audio and video codecs including
mp3 but also mpeg2 and parts of mpeg4. Microsoft
offers a "one stop shopping" including Windows
Media codecs and MS DRM, and Thomson needs a
little industry leverage to avoid getting raped
by MS in licensing fees (a game they know a lot
about.) and also getting locked in to the loser
MS Windows CE operating system.
This is all even further complicated by the
fact that M$ owns a few percent of Thomson.
> THAT'S the problem. Copyright is a good, and
> necessary, idea for a capatalistic country.
Yes. But far more of a problem is that copyright law has NOT been updated in ways which are necessary to promote effective capitalism, and HAS been updated in ways which harm it.
For example, no update to copyright law has been made which protects authors from being forced to surrender their copyright in exchange for access to a distribution cartel. This immediately harpoons the "it's to give a profit motive for creating works" angle because typically you have to surrender the copyright to have any change of making any profit. "But the distributors are providing a service!" come the cries. No they're not. They're providing a service that wouldn't be necessary if it wasn't for their own existance, which is a bit like saying the mafia provide a service by not burning down your shopfront.
However, they were QUICK to update copyright law to put legal protection behind copy protection systems, which can clearly be abused: make all playback devices require DRM formats then make the DRM granting systems inaccessible to artists, either by exclusive arrangements or by pricing them too high, thus even FURTHER locking in the distribution system.
Both of these are anticapitalist. Effective capitalism requires a dynamic market where competition is active and reasonable. Neither of these help that.
See for yourself.
Windows
You can rip to Ogg using CDex and play using Winamp.
Linux
You can rip to Ogg using Grip and playing using XMMS
January 26, 2015