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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
" 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.
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."
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.
The problem with converting mp3 to vorbis is that both are lossy formats and the have different encoding methods: when you convert an original piece to mp3 you lose one part of the sound, then when you convert from mp3 to ogg you lose another part. See the Ogg Vorbis FAQ for more on this.