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Super MP3 Will Feature User Tracking
An anonymous reader writes "Next generation super MP3 files will support four-channel audio tracks and contain what's dubbed Light Weight Digital Rights Management (LWDRM) code to track it's owner via p2p programs." We've mentioned these multi-channel, DRM-ified MP3s before.
...nobody will use it.
...but this seems like a perverted 1984-vision. Whats next, death penalty for P2P sharing ?
Are there more of our privacies the corp execs want to relieve us of ?!
Really, who's going to use these things if they have DRM? The average person doesn't care a whole lot about quality (see how fast wma, vorbis, and AAC have caught on?). Throw DRM of any kind into the mix, and it just won't catch. .MP3 is here to stay for awhile.
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
What use is 5.1 if CDs (most anyway) only have 2 channels?
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Allthough i won't go into a discussion on quality of certain files, remember mp3-pro, suppose to be better quality at 64kbits audio compression. It failed complety, based on the fact that most hardware devices now support mp3's (car stereo's, portable devices) and at 192~+kbits it sounds like cd quality, i don't think people are willing to change.
Let's see Super-MP3's will incorporate a lightweight DRM?
How long is it going to take to have a converter that transforms Super-MP3s into normal MP3s, with the DRM stripped?
How long until someone incorporates this into, say, xmms or lame, so that the conversion is actually totally transparent to the user?
Gentlemen... start your compilers!
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
So another good reason to use OGGs. I never trust any non-open-licenced formats (it's all an illuminati plot).
www.gaian-mind.org - eco-punk/crust coop and collective | www.anarchistfederation.org - so cal anarchist federation
They release it, two days later someone cracks it, writes a nice program to strip the DRM. Seems we've traveled down this road before. If it didn't work the first couple of times, why try again?
And just how are they planning on getting these to replace the old MP3s?
As long as there is a way to encode them in the old way, people will do it. Duh!
This seems more like an attempy by Fraunhofer to pacify the corporates and "make up" for their follies.
If the owner who originally purchased the rights to that MP3 file publishes it online in a shared environment, the file will display the original owners digital signature, thus allowing the individuals to be immediately identified.
And what if the user purchased the rights to an Audio CD containing that track and converted it into a good old MP3?
This new trackable, un-sharable "Super MP3" may be an attempt by the Fraunhofer Institute to make amends with the disgruntled music industry.
Are they going to sue all the existing MP3 players if they don't change into the new format? Now *that* would be funny.
Bite me.
The can of worms is open, you are not going to be able to contain piracy this way. Change the way music (and media in general) is being sold - think up a new business model, the old one has been proven time and again not to work.
And guess what? Tracking users or preventive DRM is not the solution.
What are they going to do if I changed the ID of my MP3 to reflect that of someone else? How long is it going to take to crack this thing? A week? A month?
Sheesh. Won't these people ever learn? What beats me is that smart research institutes like FI are coming up with crap like this.
All things being equal, I would agree. This format has no actually value in the community. However, this format has one huge advantage; name recognition. Look at the new Napster: absolutely no advantage over any other existing service, but it did a great deal of business because people recognized the name. There's a very good posibility that soon, people will want to be able to say they have a "super mp3 player" because they think it makes them sound cool, and people just know the 'mp3' name.
I hope you're right, but I'm not sure you are.
That's all fine with me. It's simple. I just wont use them. :)
"The best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley..." - ROBERT BURNS
the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
Anything you play over speakers can be recorded. If you really need to share those files go ahead and rerecord them. Time consuming? Yes. But infinitely better than a lawsuit.
Of course, just about everyone reading this comment already knows that.
Sure looks like it... so tell me:
1) Won't they be trivial to remove?
2) What will happen when the next Internet worm shares your watermarked files?
This is about as realistic as going after people whose registration keys show up at serialz sites. "Why your company was issued the 'Devil's Own' key, please pay us X kazillion billion dollars for pirated copies of Windows using your serial".
Do you see it happen? No. But you can bet that this racketering will happen. It's like some lawsuits I've been hearing about, US companies sue companies overseas for hacking their network, even though they both know "they" didn't do it, only their trojaned machines.
It'll be the same thing with RIAA vs individuals. Even if you didn't to anything, the cost to settle is cheaper than hiring a lawyer. I would never get any of these simply for the legal liability they could get me in.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I didn't read the article (surprise!) but this sounds fairly reasonable. Attach a unique ID to an MP3 file that says "John Doe" purchased it. As long as John Doe uses it responsibly, he can take advantage of all kinds of fair use, record it to other media, etc. that he could with an unprotected MP3 file.
This is like arguing against certain types of guns because the FBI can do ballistics analysis on the spent casing and wear patterns of the round in order to match the bullet lodged in the dead victim with the one that came from your gun. Shouldn't people be arguing for guns which don't leave any traceable patterns? Or do people realize that as long as they use their guns responsibly, who cares if the bullet and casing have certain patterns which can identify the particular gun?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Mp3Pro?
Too true. If everyone was so concerned about DRM, why did iTunes Music store get so big. Truth is the only people who really get their panties in a twist over DRM are Slashdotters, pirates, and tin-foil hat fuckos.
Please note, I am not saying that DRM is a good thing, I am just pointing out that the average consumer/computer user doesn't care. When and if the RIAA gets their wish and ends all file trading the average joe will shrug it off and go back to buying Good Charlotte cds like a reall American.
Note to self: No more arguing with the faithful.
every content provider is looking to incorporate more and more DRM as the quality, cost, and ease of creation of copies improves.
the music industry doesn't care about people copying songs off the radio. it didn't even really get its panties in a bunch when CD-Rs first hit the market. or when mp3s hit the ftp servers. It went ballistic when anyone could download a single application and instantly find a never ending stream of perceptibility loss-less perfect digital copies.
likewise with the MPAA and DVD encryption, likewise with the new Cable Set-top standard.
They want to cut out MythTV, Tivo, splitters, H-cards, and cable descramblers. It's becoming too easy to get at the current data, so they want a change.
with the analog system working (fairly) well as is, why else would they create a new 'standard' for the digital system? It certainly isn't in the interest of the consumer.
Why doesn't Sony support the Blu-Ray with its stock rewritable feature?
Why did Disney/Circuit City/et al try to push (the bad) Divx onto the market in the first place?
It isn't because consumers are clamoring for less control or cheaper movies.
The time is coming when content producers are going to have to realize that their profits will no longer come from format-updates (repurchasing 8-tracks as CDs, VHS classics as DVDs, etc), and will -not- come from service-style access to data. Classic TV advertising may even have to give way to pure product-placement campaigns.
Cable will realize that a move to pay-per-channel is the way to support content without advertising in our new time-shifted digital reality. Some people -will- pay $1/mo for TLC. Home Depot will still pay for product placements in Trading Spaces. Maybe the Super-station will go away - but the cable companies, and popular channels, need not.
the film industry has already shown that the theatre experience is not losing out to cheap cam copies. they've learned that feature-rich dvds or dirt-cheap dvds are preferred to the customer over hacked-together recompressed copies on filesharing networks.
The record companies will need to realize that to win with digital music requires providing the best quality, with the least hassle. They will need to realize that they must beat file-sharing on features. People will give up hunting around for a good (not mislabeled)256kbps rip of Britney's newest song - if they know they can just hit iTunes or its ilk and cough up $1.
Fair Use needs to win out. These purported 'losses' from file-sharing need to be revealed to be grossly overestimated fabrications. (A PSA from a supposed union set painter claiming that file sharing is killing the movie industry, and threatening his job - airing during it's highest grossing year of all time is particularly tactless)
DRM is the tool of the content dinosaur. If they concentrated on actual content piracy rings - where big money is being made off black-market copies, and abandoned their fruitless DRM research - their profits could be higher than ever.
But such is not the reaction of anti-competitive cabals. Being forced to -compete- is not what they do. Suing, threatening, bullying, bribing - these are the blunt instruments they wield instead of the precise tools of innovation, imagination and competition.
So in the meantime - expect every advance to carry DRM in the fine print.
What are you suggesting then? Agreed, 255 is probably more than we'll need in the near future, but who is to say what technology will be able to do in the future?
"640kB? Hell, that's more than anyone will ever need".
Limits suck. Crazy high limits suck less, but still do. Silly low limits suck majorly.
a 4-track format falls in the "silly low" category in my book. a 255-track one doesn't.
10 DRM coders working 9-5 vs 10 million "pirates" working nights and weekends.
I think the point is that someone needs to write some "conversion" code that will take 4 track audio from XYZ format (or better yet, a 4 channel analog source) and turn it into 4 OGG tracks. I think OGG is pretty ubiquitous in that it can scale nicely while other technologies catch up to it (less the DRM "enhancements", of course).
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
I'm not exactly up to date on the latest music that's being released, but last I checked CD's were still being released in stereo, and seeing as how standard players are only capable of decoding 2-channel, 16 bit, 44.1kHz PCM streams that's the way it's going to be for a long time, if not forever.
DVD's are another story. I'm sure the \AUDIO_TS directory could hold some 5.1 music, but I've yet to see it being used. There'd be a small market if so. Would people really buy the super whizbang 5.1 version of their favorite music that will only run on their DVD player, given that they listen to CD's in their cars, discmans, etc?
And now to the crux of the problem. Since there is no 5.1 music out unless you are ripping it straight from a movie, why does SuperMP3 matter to p2p, or anything for that matter? IMHO, it doesn't - for straight music files.
Possibly, however, it might make a difference with DVR's. In the distant future, when all TV is HD and all audio is 5.1, DVR's will perhaps encode to SuperMP3 to save space and keep the 5.1 channels. Will this matter to p2p? Only if you rip the movie out of the box and place it on the 'Net.
Regardless, SuperMP3 will probably end up being yet another case study on why DRM doesn't work.
-R
The parent poster has got the thinking right. I run a record/CD store so I have lots of opportunity to talk with customers about their digital music needs. The basic trends are:
1. People want vinyl records. They see it as a format from simpler times. They hate CDs for any number of reasons and vinyl lets them just listen to music.
2. People buy CDs, copy them and sell them back. For those that rip they use MP3 and they don't care about quality. They hate any compressed format other than MP3 because it's one extra choice they don't want to think about.
3. The only people that are happy with digital music are the ones that have an iPod because they see it has being their whole collection in a little box. People who listen to music on their computer jukebox, or any of the competing portable players complain about the experience for any number of reasons.
4. The people who do know about DRM or any new formats have sworn to never use them.
Overall from what I see, the trend is to actively resist any kind of format that requires too much decision making, too much restriction, or which makes too much extra work. This negative wave has extended back against CDs and no one wants the majority of them because they have no physical character. I think from here on out, all new consumer audio and video formats are going to have a huge problem with adoption. The effort to adopt them is well past the acceptable limit of consumers. Need we mention DVD-A or SACD?
There's no reason to lose cross-platform support if your code is a bytecode that all licensees' platforms can interpret.
Well, I own more than 25,000 of 'em and I love the sleeve artwork, too. One of these days I'll frame a few of my favorites.
It pains me to admit that you're right on with your comment about LPs not being for just listening to the music. Yes, they still tend to sound better than CDs, but if the highest of fidelity was the only thing guiding my choice of music formats, I'd use reel-to-reel. I still have several hundred of those. No, I find that as I get older I have little tolerance for the rituals necessary to clean microscopic cat dander out of the grooves. It wasn't so long ago that I saw a calculation that given the cost of an extremely high-end phono cartridge and the frighteningly fast rate at which they wear out, you could literally hire classical musicians, in small groups and as soloists, to come to your house and play more hours of music than you could get from the damn cartridge. The only good reason to use LPs is for the superior sound but the maintenance and expense to maintain that superiority is just too much of a pain in the ass for me to continue to use them.
I've been a lot happier with my music since I gave up on trying to outrace the audiophile treadmill. CDs are pretty good. MP3s and streaming formats are good enough when I'm not listening carefully. And tickets to the symphony are cheap; as an added benefit, they get me out of the house.
I love my listening room. I've got wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling custom shelving on all four walls stuffed solid with more LPs than most people have ever seen in one place at one time. But it's time to take it apart and turn it back into the master bedroom the architect of the house envisioned. Yes, I sleep in a secondary bedroom because I converted the master suite into a dedicated listening room many years ago.
So it's time to let go. I know I should. But I just can't bring myself to start pulling those beautiful discs off the shelves. Is there a support group for people like me?
Being that the US is a Constintutional Republic and not a Constintutional Democracy, the rights of big business far outweigh the rights of the individual.
;)
Now if you really wanted to "mix" things up... Imagine if everyone in North America where to register themselves as a corporation, you'd pay less tax AND have more rights (the ones that the big corporations have, that you the citizen dont have). You would be able to deduct all living expenses and only pay tax on any profit at the end of the year. Of course this requires lots of paperwork, but the government loves paperwork & red tape. So why not indulge them
Another simple idea is to just stop living by their terms. Get OFF the grid, stop using their services, listening to their propaganda and most of all stop believing the president. He is only there to serve big business and make sure you pay their salaries.
Another thing to note is that while the current system of government has worked in the past, it has become quite antiquiated. The levels of corruption, influence and ass kissing run so deep that unless something is done SOON, there is no other route for it to go but to a future similar to that of 1984.
Cut away the cancer, a bloody revolution IS the answer.