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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?
Somebody please write conversion software so I can batch-convert all my MP3s to this new and exciting format which will offer me as a consumer many exciting new capabilities!
Man, I'd better start saving up for a new Super MP3 player...
This one will not be widely used by consumers if it has a light-weight tracking mechanism embedded in it. We'll simply use one of the others. Not to mention, there will always be players (and converters) that disable the tracking and convert to a more well-accepted format.
But maybe it's a step in the right direction. We'll see what becomes of it. My guess...absolutely nothing.
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).
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What's to stop the community from making some sort of DRMless multi-channel MP3/Ogg format? Let the RIAA push their own formatfor their own files, it doesn't force us to use it for our own data. If users demand support for the non-restricted format, media player authors will be forced to either support it or lose customers.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
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?
IIRC OGG Vorbis can support upto 255 channels. Shame its not more mainstream.
As for the p2p tracking, people may not use it because of this or it may just get cracked.
Don't bitch and moan. This is wonderful for independant artists and those listeners that want to make sure where an mp3 came from. Personally i will encourage those recording friends of mine to use this...it's not to keep you from copying/sharing, rather to guarantee quality and authenticity.
I cannot see a single legitimate reason why people would dump MP3 for this when they can simply switch to the much better LC-AAC in the mp4 container such as Apple and Nero are using now. 4 channels, optional DRM, standardized tagging (id3 is NOT a part of the mp3 spec people!) and lower bitrates, plus better handling of problematic samples.
Jeremy
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.
That said, I would LOVE multi-track audio files. I would love to be able to press a button to disable the vocal track, or turn down the volume on the guitar track, or turn up the base track, or whatever. Basically like the tracks you see in Frequency or Amplitude on the PS2. There are many times I would love to be able to turn off the vocals, or turn UP the vocals to hear them over the rest of the music.
I would love this for TV too. I would love to be able to turn up the dialog track, or turn down the sound effects. Or my idea: turn OFF THE DAMN LAUGH TRACK.
THIS is the feature I want. Give music like this and files to store it in, and I'll be happier. Don't give me something I can't use. If you want me to swallow DRM (even LIGHT DRM) give me something that I want in exchange, not something useless.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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.
Or, they'll set all DRM info to indicate that the original ripper and "pirate" of each track was Jack Valenti!!! :)
You are not the customer.
Let's see, what to do with 255 tracks... 27 channel surround, the corners, edge midpoints and face midpoints of a cube around the listener, including one inside the listener for those subliminal message effects. Plus a ".1" sub channel at each of those points. And heck, a tweeter channel at each of those points as well. And... umm, every single instrument in the mix gets a separate channel so you can Mix-It-Yourself (tm).
That's strange, I didn't know it also had a channel that sounded like it was coming from the upstairs neighbors...
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
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.
No way, all those people with four-ear headphones will love this stuff.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
#1 Learn how the Super MP3 file format works.
#2 Collect information on your enemies.
#3 Insert that information into various Super MP3 files and strip out your information.
#4 Share files on web sites or P2P file sharing networks using an alias on a system that is not yours. Like upload files from a library, college, rental system (Kinko's, CyberCafe, etc using an fake ID to get access to the system, wear a disguise too).
#5 Sit back and watch the RIAA punish your enemies for you.
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Here's the problem:
You might want to share your MP3 with your friend. This is fully legal under the Audio Home Recording Act. Then, your friend gives a copy to his friend. Then, that person uploads it on a P2P network, and suddenly people all over the world have it. The RIAA gets a copy, tracks it to you, and gets you arrested. Now you're liable for untold dollars in damages. But all you did was give a single copy to your friend, which as I said is fully legal, but you can't prove that you're not the one who uploaded it to the P2P network. So this tag has basically changed our justice system, making you guilty until proven innocent. This is wrong.
The gun analogy is silly. If you lend your gun to someone, there's still only one gun. If they commit a crime with it, the bullet can be traced to your gun, but there might be evidence to corroborate your story that you lent it to a friend. It's not possible for that friend to make millions of identical copies of the gun and pass them around the world for free. And you'd be stupid to lend your gun out like that anyway. MP3s aren't capable of killing people, even though the media cartels would like us to believe it's worse to copy music than to kill people, since copying affects their profit margin.
10 DRM coders working 9-5 vs 10 million "pirates" working nights and weekends.
They want to be encoding standard on HD-DVDs. Well, the DVD consortium will not consider any format that isn't open and controlled by the appropriate standards body. So MS submitted WM-9 to SMPTE, and it has now been accepted and standardised. It is available to everyone under standard licensing terms.
Now notice I said open, not free. It is like MPEG-4, MPEG-2, AAC, MP3 and so on. Anyone many implement the standard for a fixed licensing fee ($0.10 per decoder, $0.20 per encoder) but it isn't free of charge. As a pracitcal matter they'd probably ignore not-for-profit, source-only implementations like the MPEG consoritum ignores Xvid.
But yes, it's open and controlled by SMPTE now. Your money goes to MS if you license it, but the fees are fixed, and any changes to the standard must be approved by SMPTE and will be given to all licensees as part of the license. It now is a viable alternative to MPEG-4, and it is one of the three finalists for the HD-DVD format.
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?