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Ask Slashdot: How Do I Scrub Pirated Music From My Collection?
An anonymous reader writes "I tried out Google Music, and I liked it. Google made me swear that I won't upload any 'illegal' tracks, and apparently people fear Apple's iCloud turning into a honeypot for the RIAA. My music collection comprises about 90% 'legal' tracks now — legal meaning tracks that I paid for — but I still have some old MP3s kicking around from the original Napster. Moreover, I have a lot of MP3s that I downloaded because I was too lazy to rip the CD version that I own. I wanted to find a tool to scan my music to identify files that may be flagged as having been pirated by these cloud services; I thought such a tool would be free and easy to find. After all, my intent is to search my own computer for pirated music and to delete it — something that the RIAA wants the government to force you to do. But endless re-phrasing on Google leads to nothing but instructions for how to obtain pirated music. Does such a tool exist or does the RIAA seriously expect me to sift through 60 GB of music, remember which are pirated, and delete them by hand?"
Rerip all your CDs, this time to FLAC, since disk is now cheap as hell.
Get rid of all the old mp3s.
Scrap what you have and buy it all brand new. I'm sure that'll make everyone at the RIAA happy ;-)
From napster? A search for 128 kbit MP3 might be enough. Your legal ones are probably of higher quality.
A software could identify files which were downloaded. But it can never detect legally whether you have the right to listen to that file. Unless of course oly drmd files are considered to be legally ok.
yea that will happen, if someone wants to impose new law onto the people then they also need to take the necessary measures to enforce it and not just hope it happens on good will
Moreover, I have a lot of MP3s that I downloaded because I was too lazy to rip the CD version that I own
How can they tell the difference between an MP3 that you ripped from a CD that you own, and an MP3 that somebody else ripped from another copy of a CD that you own?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
And are all laws just?
If you don't think so, then you shouldn't be concerned with whether or not it's illegal or not and should be more concerned with how users can protect themselves from corporate political aggression.
Which side are you on?
Re-encode breaks the MD5 idea. What you really need is a way to find whatever audio watermarks the RIAA will be looking for. Odds are there are not any though, and your MD5 idea is fine.
Through an Md5 database hosted on the RIAA website or funded by the RIAA. Every legal file could be known. And then every illegal file would be among those not in the official database.
are you trying to become a Soviet model citizen??
But if he owns the CD, what difference is it who ripped it? I recall a ripping service for people who wanted to put their collection of 1000+ CDs on to an ipod for £x amount. If it is a licence and not a copy as they want us to think. Then he's bought the licence.
I say fuck'em. Send it all back and ask for a refund as you don't agree with the terms. Stuff like that.
The illegality of downloading track of a CD you own has yet to be proven.
Why do you think they spend millions on DRM but can't spend that kind of money to secure gamers personal informarion?
I think that if you pay for the iTunes Match that Apple will offer later this fall, then it will legalize any track you have that it can match. So even if you got it via Napster back in the day, as long as it is currently available in the iTunes store, then you will be able to "upgrade" your track to a legal version.
What happens with tracks they don't match? You can still upload them - but then who knows? Will they really scan them all and then hand you over to the RIAA? Maybe, but I doubt it.
I assume the only purpose of this article is to make RIAA look dumb by trying to suggest that there is such a thing as an illegal sequence of 0s and 1s, especially when it may be exactly the same in meaning as a legal sequence.
Couldn't agree more.
Smartest question I've seen on /.
If you yourself can't determine the legality of the (music) files you possess, how can the RIAA? a court?
It would be much easier if the RIAA just created a goddamn bounty rather than pose as an Anonymous Reader and try to coax us into developing it for free.
One file may be legal for one person, and illegal for another. For example, if you rip your CD yourself, the resulting MP3 is legal. Copy the same MP3 onto a friend's computer, and it's illegal. I don't think such a software is even possible to write. Every pirated / illegal MP3 file would have to be already watermarked as such in order for the software to function. What if the "common" version of the file floating around on Napster was just a basic 128Kbps rip with a common MP3 encoder, and you used the same encoder to rip the same song from the original CD yourself? In theory, it is very possible that the resulting MP3 is bit-for-bit the same as the one millions of other people pirated from Napster, even though you own the original CD and ripped the file yourself.
Morphing Software
I'm sure you blame the poor for having to steal food as well.
Face it - to a significant number of people, piracy isn't an ethical problem or a "real" crime. It's like speeding - sure, it's technically illegal, but last I checked pretty much everyone drove 5-10 mph above the posted limit.
" I have a lot of MP3s that I downloaded because I was too lazy to rip the CD version that I own"
Afraid of being found? Hey, let's all call the lulz hackerz and lullify your ip!
Bah...
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
He didn't "blame" anybody else - he accepts that there are some illegal files and he wants to clean them out without the hassle of creating his library all over again. Even if you aren't worried about the hours spent ripping your old CD's, maybe some of those CD's are scratched or have been lost, and there are legal downloaded files mixed in too - and playlists and ratings or whatever.... The question is very valid.
What's a 'legal' MP3?
If you rip it from your own CD, how does that get flagged as 'legal'? I was always under the assumption that songs offered in Napster or IRC were just songs that someone else ripped from their CD (originally.) Would that song look any different if I ripped it myself versus someone else ripping it?
I would think the only MP3's that are flagged as 'legal' are those purchased from an online store such as iTunes or Amazon. Then they'd have a way to 'mark' that the song is legal for that person. Perhaps if you rip a CD with iTunes or another 'purchase enabled media player' they could mark the tracks at that point as well. I'm pretty sure WinAmp has no way of flagging something as 'legal' or not.
A previous commenter said, 'check these MD5's against and official database of 'legal' MD5's' I don't even know what they were expecting to exist. If your rip is in a database somewhere of 'legal', then it would be legal for anybody I happened to share it with as well.
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
For the naptster stuff, just check for anything that has a godawful bitrate. For the downloaded stuff, the file names will probably be very different to whatever he uses when ripping himself.. so he just needs to find a media player that can sort by bitrate, and list filenames (it will be fairly easy to just scan quickly down the list and check for any block of files that stands out, assuming he downloads albums at a time and not just lots of individual tracks..).
which is totally what she said
...if you're looking to make things appear legit, I imagine that proper tagging and song length will go a long way. If anything, that'd be what they're checking for (recording quality as well, but I imagine you've mostly MP3's so that's somewhat moot). Is there an easy way to do that? Use iTunes or WMP and sort through them manually. Beyond that? nothing I know of. There are plenty of music directories, and you can probably check the songs against their legit counterparts in various music vendors.
However, if you sort by artist, album, singers, title, etc it'll show the songs which are lacking that information, and should make the 'illegal' ones somewhat easier to identify. While not all professional recordings have this information tagged, the majority do and it'll help you sort them out.
"Our goal each year should be to increase the number of goals we set for ourselves!"
It's only a matter of time before Facebook offers a music service which requires you to allow them to scan your harddrive and share it with your Facebook "friends".
If you successfully purge all pirated MP3s, even the accusation that a remaining file isn't legit will cost a lot of money. Would you rather pay your attorney $20k to defend the lawsuit or settle out of court for $10k? Or just continue carrying music around on a thumb drive? This service does not seem worth the hassle.
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
what you don't have in cd format, buy in cd format (amazon often has used cd's at ok prices. shipping is never reasonable but its their profit margin 'tax').
advantage of used cds: 'the man' does not get paid. no riaa income on used cd's. its just the buyer and seller (and some middleman, perhaps). disadvantage: no money goes to the band (but they made their money the first time on that 'first sale').
if you are worried (I would not be, I think you are paranoid) then make sure you have cds for every file. and like I said, used cd's deprive the riaa of any income, so that's probably your best route.
personally, I think your first and only problem is even considering these 'cloud' services. copy enough songs to your portable to last a day (or run a random mix uploader) and what's so hard? today's portables are even big enough to hold what used to be our whole collection. many people could fit their entire collection on portables. the cloud is about 5 years too late, to be serious.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
So he has the CDs for some of his downloaded music. Does that mean it's legal to listen to ripped versions? Wasn't it the dream of the RIAA at one point for there to be one device, one music license? Is that not the case any more? Can I buy a piece of music on CD, then play it on any of my devices? And if I have the cassette tapes, can I download for free the music and still be legal?
And if I'm asking these questions, should I really care? The RIAA should become the MAA (no, not Missing in Action Association...but Marketing Association of America) -- recording after the first time is trivial with digital technology. Put your money into marketing the musicians in various venues. Marketing the MUSICIANS not the music. I like to hear covers of popular songs and it's refreshing to also hear the original sung in concert by the original singer. Sure everyone will make less money (unless you spread your marketing talent out beyond the usually junk pop you focus on), but not everyone needs to be a millionaire musician either.
Think about it, the RIAA sues for millions and millions, but won't spend 40k to get a slashdotter to write the app to find and remove illegal music.
They don't want you to delete it. They want to sue the shit out of you.
and eventually, they will.
Don't blame the people trying to get out of the way of the legal onslaught.
Does such a tool exist or does the RIAA seriously expect me to sift through 60 GB of music, remember which are pirated, and delete them by hand?
That's funny, but neither. They expect you to pay $2000 per illegal track in your possession.
Moreover, I have a lot of MP3s that I downloaded because I was too lazy to rip the CD version that I own.
Is that really a problem?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Absurd. How would any algorithm be able to tell from an md5 if it is a legal rip or an illegal one? Two rips of the same CD should give the same bits, regardless of whether I own it or someone gives it to me.
The only way to tell is to compare to a db of your legal music:
- you ripped a CD and still have it (not legal once you sell or give away the CD, gray area if you lose it and don't have a receipt)
- you bought the bits and they are licensed to run on the device that you have them on
- the music is free or public domain (heh!)
Don't forget that under US law, the performance and the author are separate copyrights, so even if they guy who plays it gives it to you, it may still be illegal.
Does such a tool exist or does the RIAA seriously expect me to sift through 60 GB of music, remember which are pirated, and delete them by hand?"
No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die.
I'm sure the RIAA would prefer you to simply delete everything and buy it again. Just to be sure. Remember... these are the folks who swore it was illegal to rip your own CDs and firmly believed you should have an individually purchased copy of media for each individual player you used.
I posted a similar comment in thread from yesterday, but I'll ask here again, hoping someone will see it.
Basically, is the statute of limitations applicable to downloaded music? In my limited legal knowledge, it's not a felony to download music, afik, so misdemeanors typically fall under a 7-year statute of limitation, and so if you downloaded stuff from Napster's heyday, more than 10 years ago, could those mp3s even be used to legally prosecute you?
Of course I know we're talking about the RIAA here, and they act as if the law doesn't apply to them in their dealing. But I'm curious.
One file may be legal for one person, and illegal for another. For example, if you rip your CD yourself, the resulting MP3 is legal. Copy the same MP3 onto a friend's computer, and it's illegal. I don't think such a software is even possible to write. Every pirated / illegal MP3 file would have to be already watermarked as such in order for the software to function. What if the "common" version of the file floating around on Napster was just a basic 128Kbps rip with a common MP3 encoder, and you used the same encoder to rip the same song from the original CD yourself? In theory, it is very possible that the resulting MP3 is bit-for-bit the same as the one millions of other people pirated from Napster, even though you own the original CD and ripped the file yourself.
So just digitally sign everything you personally rip. I don't see how that could be so difficult. The computer you use to rip it could do it automagically.
Now of course if most stuff ripped isnt signed on purpose thats a different story. Maybe those Mp3s aren't legal?
True the md5 idea alone wouldn't solve everything but the guy asked if it could be possible to sort his files, and thats easy. Judging legality isn't easy even with lawyers and courtrooms.
It would be easier to scan your MP3 collection for what you know is legitimate. That giant stash of CDs sat in your attic gathering dust and your memory is the best way for you to determine what you own, rather than have a program scan for what might be ripped using what, bitrates and dodgy tags as a guide?
...just kidding. Sorry, but there is *no way* to automagically determine what the license status of a file is. The only way is for you to make a list of every song you actually own and compare it against the library. But track names, file sizes, etc could all be different so an automated diff won't cut it. And don't forget that even if you own the CD it's illegal to download a copy of the songs on it, so even if it's on your list you still could be "illegal". The only way to be sure is to start from scratch and rip all your CDs again, saving maybe the few songs that you can find Amazon or iTunes download invoices for.
Of course, the fact that such a task is IMPOSSIBLE to automate is precisely why the RIAA is advocating it and why it will never go anywhere (or will be a massive flop when it does). Copyright CANNOT be enforced in an automated fashion--any system will inevitably revert to "all copies are bad", which is a VIOLATION of fair-use copyright law, among other things. This is why all attempts to automate copyright violation enforcement must be killed without mercy.
(I am not disputing that "detection" can be automated. It is perfectly reasonable to make a system to look for likely cases of infringement. It is completely wrong, however, to take the output of such a system at face value and sanction the material en masse without human review, which is what a lot of companies seem to be doing these days.)
The legality of the file is not a property of the file itself, and cannot be determined from the file's content. If I buy an MP3 on Amazon, I can legally use it. If I put it on bittorrent and you download it, you have the same file as I do, but the RIAA says you're not allowed to use it.
This idea is explored in more details in the following blog post What Colour are your bits?
"Delete the ENTIRE library and re purchase all of them to be sure. It's cheaper than our lawyers raping you..."
IF you call a RIAA office the above will be their answer. if you call any lawyer the above will be their answer. if you cant PROVE you bought it, it's pirated by default.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Seriously, it doesn't matter. The crazy lawsuits are for distributing music and only that, which you're not doing. The whole idea of these being "honeypots" is ridiculous. There's nothing you can actually be charged for even if the RIAA could influence Apple or Google or Amazon. Which is doubtful because they each make far more money than the RIAA and would have to destroy their reputations to go along with such a "trap".
If you have some ethical issue then just buy a legal copy of the music for anything you're unsure of. Having multiple copies for personal use IS still fair use.
There is no way for anyone else to identify which of your music files are legal. All that is possible is to identify that certain music files are illegal (because they contain certain "watermarks" that indicate they come from a source that you could not have legal access to). And even there there is room for argument. For example, it is not clear how the courts would rule on a case where you downloaded a copy of a file that you owned on CD rather than ripping it from the CD. There is some question as to whether possessing music files that were illegally copied is actually illegal.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I don't think that idea has actually been tested. It's not entirely clear what constitutes an "unauthorized copy." We can throw away the ridiculous old RIAA argument that ripping from your own CD is unauthorized and not fair use. But is it an authorized copy to copy somebody else's fair-use rip because it's easier than making your own rip? And can you prove that you owned the CD before you made that copy? I think at that point you get into the highly-paid lawyer version of "he said, she said."
The audio data and subcode (track timing) data are split into two separate streams in the CD drive. The CD standard allows sync between audio and subcode to drift by (as I understand it) up to one sector, or 588 samples. This phenomenon is called "rip jitter". CD-ripping tools will overlap reads within a single rip by a sector or two to correct for changes in this drift, but there are still hundreds of offsets where the whole rip can start. Thus there are hundreds of distinct "basic 128Kbps rip[s] with a common MP3 encoder", each with a different starting rip jitter because the CD drive signaled a "start of track" in a different place within the sector.
One of my pals has regularly shopped the thrift stores (Goodwill, Salvation Army, etc.) looking for albums of the music he has downloaded. His theory is that as long as he has the album with the music - regardless of the format - he's covered.
I think he's probably right, actually. Although it might cost hims some legal fees to get RIAA off his ass if they choose to land on him.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
The illegality of downloading track of a CD you own has yet to be proven.
In which jurisdiction? In the United States, see UMG Recordings v. MP3.com.
Because kiddie porn is the gold standard. If you have even a file in you recycle bin on your computer, that you deleted, it can be forensically undeleted and you could be slammed for possession of child pornography. They use md5s to search for child pornography.
Most people cannot determine whether 100% of their porn and jpgs,gifs, are legal, how can anyone actually know whether 100% of their bits are legal? It's not humanly possible and the question is stupid because the burden shouldn't be on the user in the first place.
I'll agree that this is just a dumb, time wasting effort on your part. If you are so worried about the collection, don't bother with "clouds", but set up your own streaming server. You only want to listen to your own stuff...right? I use subsonic to access and listen to mine and I love it.
Regarding old mp3's and napster...I was around when napster came on the scene. Even before then I would "share" songs I liked with friends in the same manner I did with cassettes, burn a playlist and let them enjoy new sounds. They did the same with me and what it did was encourage me to buy albums of artists I would have not normally listened too. I do not condone piracy, but the pricing issue by the music industry made "sharing" more viable then buying a CD for one song or buying an artist only to find out the CD was mostly crap. Even today there are some albums from the late 70's early 80s that still cost upwards of 10 dollars....really? with not even a CD to justify cost? The pirates are RIAA and they pillage very well.
I have old napster files and don't worry a damn about them. I still buy mp3s, but do so from places where I feel I am getting the correct value for my purchase. Some from Amazon, some from other mp3 sites, but NEVER from itunes. Trusting them is like trusting Darth Vader to release the Princess and the Wookie to stay in the cloud city (Pray I don't alter the plans further). Use these services or don't, but please don't waste time cleaning a collection of files that can be altered to wav and back.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
And as such, there's a moderately decent chance that an innocent person will be found innocent. But it still costs a hell of a lot to be innocent in a court of law.
Well it worked for the inquisitors in the dark ages, and this is a witch hunt right...
this is hilariously idiotic, if a file has DRM you won't be able to upload it in the first place - the services will not accept it. Why is this even a question on slashdot?
I'm guessing RIAA would want you to dump _everything_ and start again. Buying it all anew from iTunes or the like.
Back in the real world however...
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
Depending on the (original) source of your pirated tunes, and how particular you are about your file naming scheme, you could probably just do a find on files named with common scene release groups. If your files didn't come straight from scene releases, or if you renamed them to fit your regular naming scheme, I think most groups also put their name in the ID3 tags.
When you move from one home to the next, as you are packing, if you come across a carton that came from the previous residence but has never been opened, save yourself time, and throw away the carton without even opening it. Use a modified version of that rule. Dont upload any song you have not listened to in the last 3 years. Use the find command with -atime modifier to find the songs that have been accessed in the last 3 years.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
IANAL, but: To convict you, the RIAA must prove that the files you have violate copyright, you don't have to prove that they are legal - that would be Napoleonic law, which is unconstitutional, although the current supreme court might disagree. The RIAA would face the same difficulties being discussed here. If a way cannot be found to prove your music is legal, I doubt that they'd be able to find a way to prove that it's illegal.
In the UK copyright law does not even allow recording TV shows to watch later, it is merely tolerated
This is incorrect.
s70, Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, entitled "Recording for the purposes of time-shifting", provides that:
The making in domestic premises for private and domestic use of a recording of a broadcast ... solely for the purpose of enabling it to be viewed or listened to at a more convenient time does not infringe any copyright in the broadcast ... or in any work included in it.
Pretty much.
If later on they come back and say "hey! Here's a list of files you have that look like they were downloaded from illegal public torrents. Delete them and purchase them from us." Then you just delete them, and... don't purchase them.
Music is only popular because people listen to it. If you stop listening to certain music due to political reasons (i.e. DRM / enforcement), then that just becomes part of the cultural landscape of music. If you let the recording industry push their musical tastes onto you and charge you for it, then, well, there are other words for that kind of relationship.
Don't worry about it. You're being paranoid. Even if they could detect that you have some illegal music, they really don't care unless you're actively trading it. Look at how companies handle pirated software, for example. Microsoft can tell if your WIndows isn't "genuine" and yet the worst thing they do is cripple your copy and give you a rather polite message about making it genuine. That's the worst I would ever expect from a "honeypot." At worst they're going to say "Hey, we think this song is not genuine, would you like to buy a fresh copy to ensure you're legit?" They're not going to call the FBI on your ass for having an illegal copy of Twisted Sister on your hard drive. It just isn't going to happen.
Through an Md5 database hosted on the RIAA website or funded by the RIAA. Every legal file could be known. And then every illegal file would be among those not in the official database.
If I encode my audio tracks at 128kbps MP3 for my player and you encode it at 192kbps AAC the MD5 hash is going to be different. The options are endless I knew someone who encoded at at 127kbps or 193kbps because they like prime numbers. I cannot imagine that unless the source of the rip encoded a digital marker that anyone, including the RIAA, could prove the music was illegal. I'm guessing the best defense against a case brought against you for music piracy would be a receipt...
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
Yes they do but it's easier than that. They only want you to listen to music on consumable mediums so all you have to do is delete everything from your computer
and mp3 player and go listen to your music with Beaver on the 8-track.
*BARF*
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
To do such a thing you would have to define
1: a whitelist of files that are identical to copies sold by legitimate services or "perfect" CD rips.
2: a blacklist of files that were found on P2P networks and have sufficiant defects or other idenitifying features that it is unlikely they would match any non-pirate's copy.
You could then go through a file collection sorting files into white, black and grey. The technical aspects of implementing such a tool are trivial.
However the problems are
1: it's pretty hard to find every file that is out there on legit services and basically impossible to find every file that is out there on P2P.
2: Afaict it is also bloody hard to get a perfect rip of a track from CD (and that is before you start considering the encoding options)
3: your CD rips will probablly not be on either the whitelist or the blacklist (see point 1), unfortunately it is likely that many pirate files won't be either (see point 1). Unfortunately not being on the tool's blacklist doesn't nessacerally mean the file isn't on the music industries blacklist.
4: most people outside of the music industry would probablly not want to give them a helping hand by building a list of "probablly pirate" tracks and those trying to track down pirates and extort money from them are unlikely to want to release their lists either.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
The database of who has paid whom for what is currently being built--it's called "Bitcoin".
-rozzin.
If you yourself can't determine the legality of the (music) files you possess, how can the RIAA? a court?
They don't have to prove anything. They can simply assume they are illegal. You have to prove they're legal.
Perhaps that can work for current music, but how do you track music I have ripped 15+ years ago that have lived though 4, 5, 6 hard drives and computer updates?
Since when does being a Socialist mean 'someone who has a different opinion than me'?
Lamest answer ever on Slashdot.
You should have just said, You can't. No tool exists. But many people are going to be wondering this as they transfer their music to the cloud and see it as a chance to become legit again. The biggest reason for music piracy was convience. But you can't beat cloud-stored music for convenience.
"...does the RIAA seriously expect me to sift through 60 GB of music, remember which are pirated, and delete them by hand?"
No, Mr. Bond, the RIAA expects you to die.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
They can't 'get' you, it's all a fear tactic. Especially for titles you have on CD.
Don't distribute them. There, you are fine.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Exactly. The illegal part is in sharing the music files, and even then it's just a tort. If you really feel guilty, turn yourself in to the police. Watch them laugh at you. That will show you how unimportant this is.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You have way too much time on your hands. :sagenod:
How much does it cost for you to build a time machine to go back to 1995 and make every audio encoder digitally sign every file it compresses? I don't see how that could be so difficult.
Get an ID3 editor that can do batch listing of tags. Look at the encoder used to generate the file. If it isn't the one you used, and you don't remember where you got the file from, then you probably downloaded it.
To me, it seems that this iCloud class of stuff has triggered an interesting paradigm shift.
From a downloader's perspective, who's to say you are not recording from radio, ripping from vinyl, ripping from a full-price, flea-market, or borrowed CD, cassette tape, or (infingingly) singing the tune into your audio recorder. All of these things should be transferable to iCloud with the infringing or non-infringing status of the actual recording unchanged. As others have pointed out, the music cloud thing does not launder the legal status in any way. It just format shifts.
In most of the world simply copying music for your own use is not being attacked by the recording industry. In Canada own-use copying from any source is expressly permitted by section 80 of the Copyright Act 2005. The RIAA has never gone after downloaders, only sharers. The whole "making available" theory of facilitating infringement is designed around nabbing folks that give away music, according to the RIAA, improperly. They do not sue those that merely download and do not "make available."
This iCloud thing does not translate into anyone other than the cloud operator potentially treading the dangerous "making available" ground. So what is going on that makes people think that the music cloud is going to change the playing field and expose users of music, as opposed to sharers of music to some new kind of legal nightmare that didn't exist before? If there are rumours of new kinds of liability, who's starting them?
Congratulations - you are a shining example of how well the paranoia-generating fear-mongering of the RIAA is working. Contrary to what the RIAA wants you to believe, you are innocent until proven guilty. If you can't figure out what is legit and what is not then how the hell do you expect them to?
All your music is pirated.
This.
It doesn't matter whether you paid for a piece of music or not. You have violated at least one copyright law, license, ToS or whatnot in some form or another. There are just too many of them and they try to out-crazy each other as hard as they can.
There's really no point in trying to acquire "legal" media, since you WILL run afoul of laws no matter what you do.
Why don't you post all of your music online, and ask people on the internet to do it for you. They could compare your files to the ones they downloaded.
There's a difference between enforcing the law and providing free programs to help existing offenders become compliant. The government is not required to provide software for you to do your taxes, why should they be required to provide free software to help you delete your illegal files? RIAA is more than happy to take the necessary measures to enforce the law through litigation. If you can't prove you own the CDs, what do you expect to happen? What do you think a judge is going to say? "Oh, he stole so much he couldn't remember what he bought? That's fine, just don't do it again."
Does an app exist that will slightly adjust your files so as to change hashes, etc? Bulk processing? Seems like it would be a pretty easy way to launder your collection.
People with one of the thousands of devices that don't support FLAC or that don't have 500GB of disk space? If I just wanted to listen to music in my living room I'd just pull out the CD.
Actually it has been tested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMG_v._MP3.com
Most illegal mp3s have comments in the ID3 tags. Write a program that goes through and strips all the ID3 tags and replace then with your own. This will also do the trick of modify any MD5 checksums. After that it would be hard to prove anything, unless they isolated the audio data and used that specifically to try to detect exact matches. But then it would be hard to prove anything from that.
I wonder if the RIAA would allow you to estimate just how much pirated music you own, and send them a cheque (check, for you US guys) for a nomimal amount per track, thus legitimising all of your music.
Kinda like the tax system, I suppose - you send them what you owe on a yearly basis. Could the RIAA operation like that - download as much as you like, and then send them a cheque at the end of the year for the amount you owe?
There isn't any way to look at a file and know whether you encoded it or someone else encoded it, unless you had the foresight when you encoded it, to somehow indicate so.
And more importantly, there isn't any way to look at a file and determine whether or not it was transmitted to you with the authorization of the copyright holder, or without that authorization. That's impossible. If that were even remotely possible, then someone would have invented a non-user-hostile DRM system by now.
The thing you want can't be done. Anyone who offers you a technical solution will be attempting to defraud you.
If you go by what the MAFIAA advocates through their DRM values, the best approach is "assume the worst." Just as DRM always assumes that anything that might be used or could be used for infringement, must be prohibited by default, any file of yours which might or could be the product of infringement should be deleted by default. If you don't remember where you got it, delete it.
If that's not an acceptable approach to you (i.e. too much collateral damage), then it sounds like you are not at peace with MAFIAA thinking. In which case, I advise you to stop worrying. Just accept that you might have some pirated files, and do your best going forward in accordance with your own ethics. Nobody really gives a fuck that you pirated some song 10 years ago.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
He doesn't need to prove anything. They have to prove he stole/downloaded/copied it.
Ok, at the time when they kick down your door & kill your dog and bag up everything they find. If your ripped collection matches your CD collection, 100% !!! What is the problem with those rips being done by a 3rd party? I hope it doesn't go this far :(
does the RIAA seriously expect me to sift through 60 GB of music, remember which are pirated, and delete them by hand
Of course they don't expect you to sift and delete. They expect you to PAY UP!
Let's see....60 GB of music rounds to a fee of about $1.5 million, give or take. Of course, this is according to the RIAA, so your millage may vary. Just think of the poor starving record executives!
Go on, citizen, stamp the vote card. R or D, your choice.
The RIAA would argue that you have no rights to transfer a track from one media to another in the first place.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
http://edna.sourceforge.net/
Open up a port on your router, say 9040 or something
Set edna to use port 9040
Use ssh (or putty if you must ) on your laptop (or mobile device) to forward port 9040 to wherever you are.
Enjoy your music.
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
It's not that such a thing is difficult, it's that there is never any point where a user has reason to do that.
The point of knowing the origin of each file is to avoid infringement, but if you want to avoid infringement, then you simply won't infringe, so your whole collection is whitelisted by default.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Not in this country. They can't prove that I didn't receive the CD with that song on it as a gift. Even a pre-law student could get that case thrown out of court.
Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that they're not out to get you.
In civil suits (which for a copyright lawsuit is what it would be), the standard is a "plurality of evidence", meaning that whichever side can present a more convincing argument to the judge will win, proof be damned. (IANAL, do not consider this legal advice, all situations are different, etc. etc.)
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
If they are oggs then they are from my CDs. If they are mp3s then I'm still partway through the evaluation phase of 'try before I buy'.
Interesting. I'd used mp3.com a lot back then, but always to listen to independent music. (Also, it's a nice reminder that "cloud" music services/music lockers have existed for a long time).
But the way that summary reads, the court decision was that mp3.com was outside of fair use and was infringing for making available. ("However, it was MP3.com doing the copying from the CDs onto their servers, and the court found this copying not a fair use.") It doesn't really say anything about whether a user listening to or downloading a track that they own would be an unauthorized copy.
The government is not required to provide software for you to do your taxes,
Taxes are actually a good analogy... If the gov decides there is a tax problem, they will make you come up with all the receipts to backup your claims on your tax return. Technically, if they suspected there were illegal copies of a song on your computer, they could ask to see the physical disc or a receipt where you ordered the track. However, the problem is that you are allowed one legal backup of anything you've purchased. So if I bought the latest Gaga CD (lol), ripped it to my comp, but my physical disc was destroyed when my car caught fire, I've still got a copy of it on my computer though I have no physical copy (which is exactly the kind of circumstances a backup copy is intended for). But at the same time, I can't produce proof that I own it.
I was looking at my 2TB drive wondering where to start with that mess, let alone my 1TB with just Live Dead and Phish shows.. and decided that I can stream my OWN music via Shout Cast and not have to deal with lame Clouds. I'm going to make an Anti-Cloud based server.. it'll be called GroundedTube. You upload your files you want to be deleted and we will delete them for you. ;-0 oh wait they already did that. next idea, Carrier Pigeon well tie your flash drive to a Pigeon and fly him to your work so you can have your music there.. oh wouldn't just be cheaper and easier for me to just carry my own flash drive, oh yeah duh. come on people now.. it is 2011 already.. I have had a car stereo that plays MP3s since 1999.
If you don't have a receipt saying you own it, I think you're screwed as far as the RIAA is concerned. If they come after clouds you better have a way to prove it rightfully belongs there. I wouldn't touch cloud music storage, period.
It really doesn't matter. The only damages the RIAA can reasonably claim for you having pirated music is around $1/song. It's UPLOADING that music that they care about, because then they can pretend that your upload is providing that song illegally to 20,000 people and therefore claim that that single song is worth $20,000 in damages.
They RIAA has NEVER sued ANYONE for merely possessing pirated music. I don't think they've ever sued anyone for downloading music either. It's all about what you upload. If you aren't uploading anything, you should be fine.
using MP3TAG: http://www.mp3tag.de/en/
Remove all comments and other "red flags" from your ID3 tags. Clean up the artist, album and track info.
Make them all fairly uniform in ID3 info.
"I wanted to find a tool to scan my music to identify files that may be flagged as having been pirated by these cloud services"
Interesting thought -- I rip all my music from original CDs for exactly this reason; to ensure that I am totally compliant in case my tinfoil hat is not just a rakish bit of haberdashery. However, I use the same library as lots of other people, and the same settings. Seems almost certain my rips will be identical to other people's -- assuming Lame is deterministic. I wonder if that means my tracks would get flagged? (not that I'll upload them -- I run a personal cloud)
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
any of these services where you upload your own music is a red flag. Get slingbox and do it yourself if you want access to your music through the internet.
With crappier rippers maybe. With a direct digital rip, it should be the same every time, in theory, from any CD drive.
Exact Audio Copy uses the AccurateRip system which somehow manages to tell me that my rips are exactly the same as hundreds of other random people via some central DB. The only time it doesn't match up, is when I have a massive scratch in a very old CD, and EAC took hours ripping and re-ripping the same sector to get the best results possible with what I gave it to work with.
Morphing Software
Smartest question I've seen on /.
If you yourself can't determine the legality of the (music) files you possess, how can the RIAA? a court?
I agree completely. I also think it's a joke (or well, kinda sarcastic). I never heard of RIAA knocking on someone's door who is not a file sharer. Mr Anonymous Reader is "obviously" not sharing any files on the net, that would piracy, and our good citizen would never do such thing. In fact, he is worried about possessing a few mp3 files that might be "pirated". Right. I believe the real question is: "can they detect if an mp3 file is pirated or not?". A GOOD QUESTION!
Try EAC, it will compensate for differences in drives to ensure a perfect digital rip every time.
Morphing Software
The Riaa has only gone after people distributing the data, not people that had the data on their possession. In a court case the burden on proof on something that you own would fall to the RIAA and they would need to prove you did not access it legally. AFIAK all the people they have gone after they have logs with IP addresses that people where SHARING the music, not Downloading it.
Example I used to rip alot of music from internet music services, something that is legal to do under fair use. The Lic fee was paid by the already approved service by the RIAA. All I was doing was recording something that was "broadcasted" to me, which I am 100% allowed to do.
I would love for the riaa to prove that any music I have is illegally downloaded.
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
Wouldn't you be better off with a little program that went through each of your mp3's and flipped a bit or two? If the RIAA is using MD5's/some type of hash to identify pirated tracks, just make sure none of your files will match the hash....
Just don't worry about it. Only a dumbass would worry about legality of his music. If you're listening to it, it's yours.
I think he isn't worried. He just didn't have the balls to ask directly: Is it possible to detect by software (implies remotely) whether my mp3 files are pirated or not.. That's a good question.
exactly, what the OP said -- it could start over a broad range, given scratches or other errors. Gee, maybe the RIAA should not have made such a cheap and susceptible product that they charge the same licensing fee for each time you buy it...... (BARF)
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
Your logic fails. Stealing money and copying 1s and 0s are not the same. Hence why they are covered under different bodies of law.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
BS. There is no way to tell an legal/illegal file reliably.
Simply put - lets say you go searching various sources for pirated music. You then take a checksum of the files you find.
(1) The database will be large, but probably manageable, More than most people would want on their personal computers though
(2) You can't be sure that you've gotten everything, or even a decent sampling - so it'll falsely report many as legal
(3) Although limited in scope, there would be false negatives, what if someone has a legitimate copy, which was legitimately copied by a 3rd party and distributed? What if it was encoded by a lossless mechanism (flac, some aac, etc), and therefore ended up with the same checksum as another person who also losslessly encoded it, then shared it?
There is no good way to CYA here except ditch all of your digital music and then re-rip and re-legitimately download. As you stated, this kind of tool would be only be useful for the tools at the *IAA, who would probably be fine with a 99% false negative rate (and false positives are nice!), as long as they can find a couple and extort their victims, while the legitimate user would need a 1% false negative and positive rate.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Nope.
Potential copyright infringement =/= potential thevery.
Somebody hang a sign on this AC advertising a lack of factual tact and logic in his arguments.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Pirates don't scrub music. They scrub poop decks. Yar.
MD5 Hashes of the files is a fine way of identifying pirated music. In fact I'm pretty sure it's how most cloud services WILL do it. The real question here is how do you identify which hashes will be blacklisted? I think the best approach to that would be to go through some famous torrent and Gnutella sites and scrape the hash values from those torrent files and databases. I know torrents have a way of doing this as part of the .torrent file itself and I believe that the Gnutella protocol probably has a similar system of uniquely identifying files. This way you would not have to download all the files but could still know which ones are being shared illegally by logging all those hashes and comparing them to your files. I think it is technically feasible to do this, but extremely difficult. I would recommend cleaning your files instead by adding trash to the tags section in an unused field. This would confuse most common hash algorithms. I imagine the companies could have a much more sophisticated way of hashing the files such that it does not take tags into account, but to preform this form of unique ID the companies would have to manually download each song illegally and ID it. I don't think that's likely. I feel that cleaning your pirated files is the best solution.
I would start by filtering out everything that you know for sure is legal. For me, that would mean all vorbis files, .wma (when I used to rip from Windows), FLAC, aac, and any other free codecs not commonly used for piracy. All these files get their likelihood variable decremented by 5 or maybe filter them out altogether based on a setting. It's worth noting that 99% of all your illegally downloaded songs will be in MP3 format.
Next, I would filter out by comments tags. Many distributors like Amazon include a non-drm comment in the ID3 tag. Filter all those out or subtract from their likelihood. If you ever include your own comments in your files, filter those as well.
Now you've gotten most of the obviously legal files out of the way. The next part will be to filter out the likely pirated music from the rest. The user would have the discretion of choosing his/her tests as they see fit. For this, I would probably increment the likelihood variable by one for each matched test.
Example Tests:
1. Low bitrate? (128kbs) to filter out most of the old crappy pirated downloads.
2. Lowercase ID3 tags? Pirated downloads often have typos.
3. Missing artwork?
4. Sketchy ID3 comments (t0rr3nted by r1ppErZ, demonoid, lots of things you could search for)
5. Missing ID3 tags (no album name, unknown artist, etc.)
6. Matching filename with ID3 tags. Often people fix their pirated tags, but the misspelled filename stays the same.
7. Subtract likelihood if bitrate is what you normally rip at
8. Song in incorrect folder. I normally put my tracks in a directory structure of artist/album. You could test the ID3 tags to the directory structure.
9. Interface with MusicBrainz and scan songs for correct tags, correct song length, and if MusicBrainz can even find it.
By no means is that all the tests you could do. Next you would list all the files high to low in a nice format for the user so that he/she could easily spot the pirated music. This solution is obviously quite preliminary and could definitely be refined, but you get the basic idea. The whole point is to make the user's task of finding and marking the pirated software much easier (and I'm sure in easily less than an hour you could find all your pirated music with such a program).
Ditch the RIAA for real by going to ccmixter, jamendo, or any number of other sites and build up a collection of music that you can listen to without glancing over your shoulder every few seconds.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Your imagination is scary enough to inspire people to write software tools to protect against that scenario.
Right. I believe the real question is: "can they detect if an mp3 file is pirated or not?". A GOOD QUESTION!
And the answer is SOMETIMES
If a version of a file meets the following criteria
1: it has been detected on a major pirate network
2: it has enough defect's or other identifying features that it is highly unlikely an independent rip would produce an identical file
3: it does not match any copy sold through a legal service
Then IMO they have pretty strong evidence that it is pirate,certainly enough to start sending out threats and probablly even enough to convince a court. Afaict as much as people wish it to be otherwise it is not legal to download a copy from a pirate network and use it as a substitute for a legal copy.
The problem is while it is possible to prove some files are pirate it is not generally possible to prove a file is clean or even to prove that it won't in the future become detectable as pirate.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Or, try the wonderful subsonic music streamer instead!
It's a great piece of software (server-side) with a sweet android client (all GPLv3). Also has many other clients (iOS, flex, windows7, etc).
If (and it's a big if) they try to search for infringing tracks, they will probably either look for exact matches or do some kind of hashing (MD5/SHA, etc.) to create a database of infringing tracks. If you just flip a couple of bits at the end of each track, it will foil the above two methods.
They may try to create a database of legit (Itunes, amazon, etc) tracks, but that would yield false positives for tracks you legally ripped at home.
There's also the huge problem with the situation where you ripped a CD at home with the same ripper (exact same settings) that someone used to upload tracks as they would be likely be identical.
This ignores sticky situations like when I had a CD with two tracks that skipped and downloaded the two offending tracks.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
mean, who uses MP3 anymore, this isn't 1999.
Amazon.
If you use iTunes, it will come in AAC.
So i should buy all my music from Apple? No thanks, I'll shop around. I generally end up buying from Amazon though, since they are generally a bit cheaper, and their store isn't as obnoxious or slow. Often they have a better selection (at least for my tastes) as well.
Furthermore, I haven't seen anything saying that MP3 is obsolete, or upstaged by any other lossy encoder. AAC is a bit better, but an MP3 with a slightly higher bitrate, sounds almost the same, and is roughly the same size, and is supported by more devices. I like FLAC, but most things I own don't support it, and the sound difference isn't really worth wasting over twice as much space for (I am not an audiophile, I can't tell much difference between the disk and anything over a mid-200's bitrate, though I generally rip at 320ish VBR).
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
You should be modded up for that.
But why does the criminal part say "commenced within 5 years after the cause of action arose." and the civil one says "commenced within three years after the claim accrued."? What is this distinction?
All your music is pirated. The copyright holders did not give you permission to rip it from CD, or store it online.
In the UK copyright law does not even allow recording TV shows to watch later, it is merely tolerated. You might be able to argue fair use in the US, except that now you don't buy music or CDs, you buy a license to listen which does not include uses such as this.
you are absolutely right. this is from a few years ago. but the RIAA website still claims the same information http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2007/10/sony-bmgs-chief-anti-piracy-lawyer-copying-music-you-own-is-stealing.ars ""When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song." Making "a copy" of a purchased song is just "a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy'," she said. "
Pretty much.
If later on they come back and say "hey! Here's a list of files you have that look like they were downloaded from illegal public torrents. Delete them and purchase them from us." Then you just delete them, and... don't purchase them.
Music is only popular because people listen to it. If you stop listening to certain music due to political reasons (i.e. DRM / enforcement), then that just becomes part of the cultural landscape of music. If you let the recording industry push their musical tastes onto you and charge you for it, then, well, there are other words for that kind of relationship.
I think the RIAA is more likely to say "Here is a list of 30 files that you downloaded illegally from us. At $750 per file, we will drop the charges for $22,500". That has been their M.O., lately.
But you can't beat cloud-stored music for convenience.
Having access to my music dictated by network connectivity and the desires of a third party is not all that convenient, in my eyes. I'd be keeping backups of everything I send to them anyhow, probably on network attached storage. Now, if only I could access that without a network, perhaps by syncing a subset of my collection onto a portable device that needs not 100% on connectivity expect to sync a different subset. For me, that's convenient.
Not arguing that could-based music storage is not convenient, but I'd argue that it can be beat at convenience. Especially when you factor in the cost of it.
so tag your mp3's with random guids. Now their md5's are unique and won't show up in any blacklist
bite my glorious golden ass.
There's no such thing as a pirate flag in those files.
Now you can search for anything that doesn't have the full metadata or tags, but that still doesn't say what it's source is, but at least they index better.
You can search for ones with non-conformist metadata like "rIppED bY BoZo" or other weird stuff.
But no matter what you choose to do, it's going to be on your decisions since the computer has no way of telling which of these you legally own.
Now some people have mentioned audio watermarks. Those are only going to exist if someone added them to the music. Those are almost never going to come from ones ripped by pirates, but rather might come from those downloaded from commercial sites like itunes. (I have no idea if itunes watermarks their audio, but it's just an example.)
Except they actually come back and say "Hey! Here's a list of files you have that look like they were downloaded from illegal public torrents. You now owe us $48 million dollars."
They don't want you to delete the files or actually comply with copyright laws, they want an obscene unreasonable payday subsidised by the American court system.
You are still innocent until proven guilty. What's changed is what they do to innocent people. - notnAP, #26891325
Yeah you are and I would be too if I sent you the source code of every program I've ever worked on.
So, don't be a dumbass!
Actually, they probably already did back then, for instance, in an ID3 metadata container. The problem is that metadata probably contains info about the program that created it (e.g. WinAmp) and song information, but nothing personal. I don't think MP3 encoders today even write anything personal that could identify owner.
Maybe this is true if you're ripping exclusively WAV files, yes each extract should be identical excluding large errors as you said. But the problem comes when compressing - each encoder program is going to do the MP3 crunch a little differently, so the same pristine CD compressed to MP3 will give different results when compressed using LAME vs. say the original Fraunhoffer codecs. I also suspect even the same encoder may cause different rips on the same source due to read jitter, system metadata and possibly floating point implementation and roundoff error differences, etc. So you have at least 4 popular bitrates (128, 224, 256, 320 at least, plus all the possible VBR variants) multiplied by how ever many encoder programs you have out there, multiplied by the number of compressing formats (AAC, MP3, FLAC, etc.) = the _minimum_ number of permutations of the same song you might see in the wild.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Now be a good citizen and turn yourself in.
We are eternal, all this pain is an illusion.
DON'T USE THE CLOUD
There I said it.
You are asking for it if you do.
The RIAA could make the argument that you are sharing your music with Google, which you are, and prosecute your ass. You don't own your data in the cloud. That makes it Google's once you upload it. Is it really worth the risk to use this service? Do not underestimate what the RIAA can/will do with this.
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Don't use the service in the first place. It's going to be yet another waste of people's time and money that will go obsolete in a year or two, or get compromised by some hacker group that will rip everything including your credit card and other personal information, or just break the thing and it won't work for weeks or months while they fix it. Just keep your music on your PMP like you always have, like everyone else does, and be happy.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
It occurs to me that they could keep a catalog of illegal music files and run hashes on them.. Then, they run hashes on your music files and compare... Admissible in court, probably not... Cunning, maybe...
I don't think there is any way you can definitively classify each MP3 file you have. If you bought any files on line like from Amazon unbox or wherever you can probably get a transaction history from those services, include those in text file.
Now go through all your physical CDs and look up the track listings online paste each of those into that same text file.
Finally with a little luck you were at least somewhat consistent in your naming or taging of the files you ripped, that make things easier. Use find to get all the MP3 files you have, write some regex patterns, that allow for different capitalization, spaces vs underscores, and any other issues you can quickly spot in the data for egrep and then some bash for loops and see what you can match. Manually inspect anything you can't match and removed as appropriate.
That is about the best you are going to be able to do it. It will take you many hours if you have lots of music. Whatever is left though you can probably make a pretty solid case you are entitled to a license for however, if you are ever forced to do so.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
There is no such thing as a "direct digital rip". The CD standard doesn't provide one, there are no boundaries on the CD for one to work against, and as stated rip jitter is inevitable. The only question is how the software and hardware involved handle it. The post you were objecting to talks about one of the pieces of the magic used to help with this fundamental problem that you're not aware of, and there are some others too.
Drives that support what's called AccurateStream will guarantee you that they always pick the same spot every time you ask it to seek somewhere, which is the first part of the problem. If you drive doesn't do that, you end up needing to do the overlapping read shuffle described above to figure that out. See EAC Drive Options for more about all that.
Even if you have AccurateStream, there's a second problem: the spot will be the same every time, but exactly where that is can't be guaranteed--it varies based on the drive model. The way AccurateRip copes with this problem to collect a database of CD Drive Offsets. If your drive isn't in their database, what you can do is use a known music CD that AccurateRip has good data on, then calibrate your drive using it to figure out how much you're off by. People submitting those test results is how they compiled the database.
If you have AccurateStream hardware, and you know your drive offset, you can get the same rip every time and match against the checksums that AccurateRip provides. But this is only happening because several pieces of the chain know how to compensate for the limitations of audio CDs encoding, there is no way to get digital data straight off of them usefully.
I agree completely.
I think the best solution would be a home server that you can remotely access. Why give Google or Apple access to your items?
If you downloaded any of them from the internet and you need to find out what, just look at the tags on it for comments. 90% of all the music my boss downloaded from the internet on his 2TB music drive had information in the comments field of the ID3 tags that said something like "ripped by such and such" or had a website in the comments. Other than that I'm sure it's next to impossible to tell if you got it from the internet or ripped it your self.
This is a Mac, what you have there is an embarrassment to your fellow computer users.
Meh, I've been served a takedown notice from my ISP before (some star wars video on my anonymous ftp site... that's how long ago it was), and it was more like my version. I promptly deleted all those videos and that was the last I heard of it.
I'm fairly certain Google would work a similar way, where maybe the studios would give them the list of md5sums of infringing content, and then they'd notify any customers with breaches without really telling the studios who they were.
Anyway, the RIAA/MPAA legal proceedings so far look more like a scare tactic, with the courts dropping most of the cases vs. John Does, except for a handful of high profile cases. And even those are mostly for file sharing, not just file having.
http://www.gcaudio.com/resources/howtos/demagnetization.html
The point of knowing the origin of each file is to avoid infringement, but if you want to avoid infringement, then you simply won't infringe, so your whole collection is whitelisted by default.
But the poster has explicitly said he has infringed with 10% of his music. He just doesn't know which 10%. I agree with earlier post that said what you want is to know how the RIAA does it -- they are the only ones who care.
Currently hooked on AMP
It really doesn't matter. The only damages the RIAA can reasonably claim for you having pirated music is around $1/song. It's UPLOADING that music that they care about, because then they can pretend that your upload is providing that song illegally to 20,000 people and therefore claim that that single song is worth $20,000 in damages.
They RIAA has NEVER sued ANYONE for merely possessing pirated music. I don't think they've ever sued anyone for downloading music either. It's all about what you upload. If you aren't uploading anything, you should be fine.
You're absolutely correct that the RIAA has never sued mere downloaders or possessors, because how can you prove that someone downloaded it? Unless you're tapping the network at the ISP and deep-scanning all packets, the only way prior to seizing their hard drive to know that a person downloaded a song (which you have to be able to do to file the complaint) is to be the person who uploaded the song to them... And if you're an RIAA distributor, uploading songs so that you can nab anyone who downloads, well, they just downloaded legally since you're the owner and you put it up for free public distribution.
But, it's not just $20k in (claimed) damages... Since they're going after uploaders, they're going after distributors... and the distribution rights can be much, much more. For example, when Michael Jackson bought the distribution rights for the Beatles' discography, he paid about $115k per song. Similarly, Apple paid more in royalties that $20k for Rebecca Black's Friday. That's why the statutory damages for infringement are as high as they are: it's all about the distribution right, not the individual sale price.
...don't throw out (or even worse, give away!) your physical CDs, or those tracks you ripped will be considered illegal when the MAFIAA audits you! Better yet, dig up the original store receipts that correlate with the items!
You know these guys are a bunch of gangsters when people get this scared of them and are taken seriously.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
And people are moderating this as "Insightful"? The law is the law. Good luck with an attitude like that in court.
I know it's a popular meme on /. to morally justify piracy because of the belligerence of copyright trade associations towards the public and onerous contracts they make artists accept; but, none of that changes the fact that what they're doing is legal. Immoral? Absolutely. But it is legal.
Now enforcement of the law is another thing all together. What's the likelihood of getting caught? Probably very low. It's like speeding. I drive a little fast. I know where the areas of traffic enforcement are along my commute to work. I know they let me get away with about five MPH over the posted speed.
This is a boring sig
Yes, that's certainly a productive use of someone's day. Taking all your CDs that have been ripped... and doing it again!
Will iTunes even bother ripping anymore? If *online* it may simply download the files from the store as it would do if synching.
Good point. If he is not caught uploading. They have a major issue proving that he did not rip the files himself. Or borrow a friends CD and rip that. If you really wanted to make sure you are in the clear, I would only keep the files for CDs I have and I have some soft of receipt for the digital download. For the remaining files, either delete them or look harder for how you got them. If you can prove you got them legally, keep them. If not, delete them. If they call you in to court, you show them your proof you are clear.
That is a hell of a lot of work to prove you have a right to have some music. They never bitched this much back when tapes were king. I guess they knew that tapes would wear out at some point. The biggest problem I see is borrowing a friend's CD and ripping it. Back in the old tape days coping a tape was what many people did. I usually copied tapes that I played a lot so I would wear out the copy. Many people ripped their friend's CDs to their collection. They did not buy the CD but they did not download it either. Ripping your friend's CD is against the law now even though people copies records and tape for years without any problem. This looks like a move to limit digital stored music. They want to increase CD sales.
What? Really? The RIAA isn't responsible for sorting out someone else's affairs. If you download music illegally it's on you to sort your shit out. Stop acting so entitled like everyone else on here. It's embarrassing and gross.
More than likely any "auditing" that may occur will be based solely on ID3 tags. Simply audit all of the ID3 tags (probably just the comments field) for anything that might be incriminating. (find . -name "*.mp3" -exec mp3info2 -p '%c: %F\n' {} \; | egrep "bad tags|more bad tags")
For that matter deleting everything in the comments fields would probably remove all possibility of incrimination. (find . -name "*.mp3" -exec mp3info2 -c "" {} \;)
I mean digitally sign in the cryptographic sense, which seems to be what the OP troll was saying.
It's the only way to be sure.
I can tell the difference between mp3 vs. Ogg Vorbis or FLAC, regardless of bitrate: mp3's inability to indicate what data is actually audio vs. junk used to pad-out a frame leaves glitches between tracks --because there's no way for players to identify the padding as such, they just play it to completion of the frame. Ogg and FLAC don't have that problem.
-rozzin.
Does such a tool exist or does the RIAA seriously expect me to sift through 60 GB of music, remember which are pirated, and delete them by hand?
No, they expect you to pay. Or delete your whole collection and start over, buying each song again at their very reasonable prices, of course. And I expect them to burn for all eternity, or perhaps be slowly eaten by particularly surly badgers.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Analog to digital conversions inherently are going to miss some data.
That is true.
What is also true is that when you are ripping a CD there is no analog phase.
Remember that CD's are digital, they get played as analog - but when you are ripping you simply read the digital files and compress them.
So as the OP said, if your files come out different every time you are Doing It Wrong.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You no longer own the data you load into Google's cloud.
Google does.
Ok Mad Hatter....
So you have provably shared with ONE person (since a corporation is considered a person). That means you are liable possibly for triple damages from sharing ONE copy. So, $3 per song?
Come on, do you think anyone is going to sue over that? And again they would have to KNOW you uploaded it to Google, and why would Google tell them or let them see into the cloud? That would raise HUGE privacy liabilities for Google.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They could prove that a file was common on P2P networks and had sufficiant defects or other identifying marks that it was highly unlikely a random user would end up with an identical file from their own rip.
a) no matter how unlikely they cannot prove you did not rip it, especially if it matched again the "bit perfect" hash lists.
b) How do they know YOU were not the original ripper? You could easily claim that and also claim someone had stolen a system which was why they had other copies.
All these and a thousand more reasons are why it is stupid to sue someone who simply owns a pirated file and why it has never been done before. It's why the RIAA sets up SHARING honeypots where you download a file using Bittorrent and they have reasonable proof you are sharing with others as a result (by checking to see if your system is forwarding on data).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Rerip all your CDs, this time to FLAC, since disk is now cheap as hell.
Probably not a problem for unemployed teenagers still living with their parents who have nothing but time on their hands. The rest of us will get on with having having a life and doing non-pointless things with it.
I say use two different computers. One with all your "good stuff" and the other for internet use. That's what I do, although got ZoneAlarm but I had a PC that got so botched up, I nearly lost everything. So now I use two (also got Macs, one online the other not). Not that I have pirated music, don't really know if some of my few Connie Francis mp3s are pirated (virtually all my music is on CDs and vinyl). But with the mob mentality of various you-know-who organizations it seems pointless to debate the legal issues (they will continue to be as aggressive as those in Hackastan).
mfwright@batnet.com
They do add your account info into the metadata for the downloaded file.
The audio data in the file is the same though.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
In a nutshell this is how it is. Some company has disk space which they are making available on the internet with security protections in place. They are telling you to put your music on there to listen to, but it can't be illegal. Since there's no digitally "legal" way to detect legality, you enter into an open-ended agreement. They can make their decisions later on what's legal & illegal.
This is 2011, there are things that hold 10's of gigabytes of information that fit in your pocket. I've yet to even think about using some "cloud" service since it's easy enough to synchronize everything I have onto a zillion different devices as needed. I have a central repository at home... on a Mac so let's not even bring in the "oh your just a geek, we're talking about the real world" mentality. My iPhone, iPad, Airplay devices (Apple TV, etc), along with NFS & SMB enabled devices have full access. My car? my iPhone taps into the stereo, and it's a MD device.
This whole cloud thing is just recycled internet services. What happens when all your trust is flushed down the toilet when it's been hit by lulzsec or just EOL'ed overnight. I've seen it happen.
Don't trust someone else to be as dilligent as yourself. It's a losing situation, at best.
I do.
And it sounds fine.
And it doesn't waste extra space even if space is cheap.
Dare I say 90% of people don't even have the equipment to tell the difference between a 320/VBR bitrate MP3 and FLAC anyway. I've heard both on rather high end equipment and to be honest, I didn't even really notice any negligible difference. This mad rush for everyone to use FLAC always humors me. To me it seems to be more "The bits are more pure!" than "It actually sounds better!". To that I say, "So what?"
Or can we burn down a record company to make all their holdings public domain?
I am intrigued by your suggestion and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
"...search my own computer for pirated music and to delete it--something that the RIAA wants the government to force you to do.".
You are mistaken; RIAA wants you to give them money for your pirated music, NOT to delete it. If you would delete it, nobody else could download it from you and be forced to give them more money... That's how filesharing works, right?
And AHRA would be strong defense.
they are required to provide you the proper information and forms however
Genius in iTunes has been uploading a complete list of your library. If Apple was working with the RIAA you would have heard about it by now. Metadata sent to iCloud will have more info, but Apple wants to identify the same base tracks, aliased to different rips. They want to discard minor differences between your rip and my rip of the same track.
Apple's deals with the big music companies are good for us all. They want to collect a bit more money for music you use, not collect penalties in lawsuits. They want the music industry to move in a positive direction in this new era of music redundancy.
The RIAA would have made congress to pass a law so it would be illegal to own any digital device w/o this running 24/7 and reporting to the RIAA
But copyright is about the right to make a copy. The uploader is the one who made the copy, the downloader merely received the copy.
The way things legally stand (which can always be changed in the courts) is that the file sharer is the infringer. The file downloader is guilty of, in anything, something much less severe, and at worst would have to either delete the file, or buy a proper license for it (~$0.99 apiece).
Afaict as much as people wish it to be otherwise it is not legal to download a copy from a pirate network and use it as a substitute for a legal copy.
[citation needed]
No, the RIAA expect you to confess to your crimes and pay damages. What did you think they were going to do?
If you want to get 100% legal, it's simple enough. Figure out what content you can prove you have a license for; delete everything else.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
How can anyone prove they own anything digital these days, especially with lots of computers? Free software and content will win in the end, if only for that reason.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
No. The RIAA expects you to delete all 60GB of music and purchase new copies that have received their official blessing. That's the only way they can be sure your music collection is legal. (And they're the only ones who matter, after all.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Exactly.
Two rips bck to back on the same machine and the same cd give different md5s for me. Any time you are downsampling you can expect this.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
You can't do it because ITunes leverages napster data.
I know this because I have some obscure tastes in music. I have a tape and a cd of an old band. I downloaded one of the songs that's only on the tape from napster. I was disappointed with the recording because of three glitches in the track. Years later, itunes pops up. I buy the song from itunes. Low and behold, same three glitches are in the itunes version.
This happened for not just one song, but two songs from two different artists in two different genres. One was a single glitch, which I would have dismissed as chance, but four glitches at the same timestamps from two different songs in two different genres?
Yet.
Nope ... I can see it already. You take the sleeve to the counter (or however it works - it's that long since I went into a music-shop), hand over your credit card, they're getting the pre-printed disc out of the racks behind the counter, drop it into the "disc-checking station" ("to ensure that your disc hasn't been scratched in storage", despite CDs being immune to damages short of thermonuclear Armageddon - I read the reviews and believe them!) where a hash of your credit card details, store, date, time are burned into the lead-in area of the disc.
Hmm, the disc's directory might need a link part way through to make reading devices detour back to re-read the lead-in in full.
I stand by my "yet".
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
It's even Online
I love the internet.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
It's even Online [jenkins.eu]
Even better than that - try legislation.gov.uk for legislation, and bailii.org for case law.
Piracy is ship to ship armed robbery, kidnapping and murder.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Bloody marvelous. Hadn't come across those (and I work in open data for the uk govt, albeit in an unrelated field!). Thanks.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.