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Liquid Audio to Open Source their MP3 watermarking
maskatron writes
"
Liquid Audio will release their watermarking technology
for MP3's as open source on Monday. A new MP3 coalition
will be using this technology to watermark MP3s."
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like all of the other proprietary formats
this will fail miserably
I saw this article on Wired, but I couldn't find any confirmation of it. The article is pretty vague and I think they're misusing the term "open source". The Liquid Audio site has no info.
And if it is true, what then? Are they going to let anyone use their protocol, or are they going to license it for money? This "open source" thing could just be a gimmick to get their software ported for free.
From what I understand the watermark proves the authenticity of the MP3 file, like a digital signature. How can that affect MP3 trading? After all, MP3s are really low security stuff - I don't care who created them as long as they have reasonable quality.
It remains to be seen if what they are releasing meets the Open Source definition. It seems that the author of the Wired article used the term open source, not LA. Additionally, the sentance in which 'open source' is used is ambiguous: 'is expected to release its proprietary watermarking technology as an open source for use in the MP3 format'. "For use as an open source"? huh?
Police don't care about end-user pirates.
When you hear about the raids and the piracy crackdowns, it's always the mass-warez-distributor who is targeted, never Joe User with his PlayStation "backups".
Piracy is like prostitution. No one ever goes after the Johns. They'll bust the hookers. They'll bust the pimps. The Johns just move on to a source.
Actually watermarking is *NOT* like a digital signature; it's a method to (secretly) identify
;-)
digital data; So they could track you back...
But it's nothing to worry about; you just don't have to use it at all when compressing your audio files...
-
I like this one:
>"This was something we intended to do all
>along," said an MP3 industry source. "
>"It's a good thing for consumers."
Yeah! Right!
Let's pirate everything we can and especially independant artists who try to sell their music on the web in mp3 format! That will show them! Try to charge us for music.. What will they think of next?
[Sorry, I just had to add my sarcastic comment for the day]
Watermarking is based on hiding data in the binary of the sound itself. From what I can see, this would make the watermarking pretty hackable. If the source is open, you can see how and where the data will he hidden and strip it out. Perhaps LA uses some sort of (pseudo) random key that is unique for each encryption, so that the way the data is hidden will not be fully transparent from the algorithm itself, but I still think you could hack it pretty well. That would also mean that you could not decode the watermark without the help of LA's key database, putting them in quite a position.
hahaha.. mp3 watermarking, "MP4 (tm)",
none of this is going anywhere. Fuck the
RIAA and fuck the Consumer; pirates will
only become better coders again to keep
information and all medias free (at least
in the digital realm).
I think we're reaching an interesting
point in history - you're going to see
the big fat corporations lobby & astroturf,
and the governments in turn try lamely to
legislate the digital realm to the favour
(and ultimately, elite control) of said
companies / "industries". Right now you
can see that the radiowaves are federally
regulated by beaureacracies making sure
that only Legitimate Commercial Interests
are able to broadcast through the air that
should be the usufruct of any given
_community_ at any individual's will.
Similarly television is heavily regulated,
and a medium that once seemed to have
limitless potential is closed to the
individual. You may observe. You may Buy
Our Product. But broadcast? hahahaha.
Now the Forces That Be will once
again try to wield the law to render
us all into good, quiet, obediant
consumers once again.
If you don't think they want the internet
snugly in their hands, if you don't think
their rights to Sell have already
eclipsed your rights to Freedom,
you're simply not paying attention.
If you like the music/movie/game/app/whatever,
it is always yours to take from the corporate
ogre and their precious profits. It's just a
question of whether you have had your brain
washed by them; is this music really
some kind of "intellectual property", or
is it mine and yours and anybodys? hmm..
Music / Art / any kind of culture cannot and
should not be turned into an industry.. how
sick is it when children define music as a
commodity? When instead of playing an
instrument and getting wise to cultural
democracy these same children become passive
observer/consumers like their idiot parents
before them? Starfuckers, all of them..
Power to all the kids growing up in such a
hostile environment intellectually... being
turned into slaves. Power to em that at least
a handful may come awake..
Seems a good use for a PGP library... They cannot prove unless they have the keys, and I can setup a script to autodestroy them if something goes wrong.
There appears to be a lot of confusion over how watermarking works.
From what I have read, I have got the impression that it behaves as follows:
The watermark says who the song has been licensed to, including their credit card number. So if you get a song and pass this on to someone else, and they get found with your track, you get done for dealing in stolen goods.
I think the watermark uses a two key system. If you are the writer of the watermark, then you know the private key, and can easily get at the watermark, but if you are anyone else, then you can't see it. You can only read the non-encrypted copyright info.
Watermarks are specially designed so that they survive most forms of copying, including mp3->wav->mp3.
Mass produced identical CDs will eventually be phased out, leaving all media watermarked with its owners.
This is obviously a positioning move by Liquid Audio to generate some industry noise. By opening their watermark technology they hope to gain acceptance among the OSS community, and eventually some market share as well.
I haven't found any information other than that provided by the Wired article, but as I understand it the watermark shouldn't interfere with the current MP3 format. You'll need a new player to view the watermarked information, but an older player simply won't know it's there. Likewise, the watermark probably can't be used for licensing schemes since the technique is open source and can easily be hacked.
True, watermarking will probably degrade quality, but not to a degree that the average user is likely to notice. MP3 is a rather lossy format to begin with, and quality is subjective anyway. If MP3 sounds good to you, a watermarked MP3 will too.
Watermarking will benefit consumers, but only indirectly. While the majority of /.ers could care less about who encoded a particular MP3, a site that wanted to remain "label-friendly" could decide to host only those files that have official watermarks. This won't prevent piracy, but will make it easier to spot and might even curtail some of the negative press MP3 has received lately.
What does Liquid Audio stand to gain? Shareholders more than likely. If they can associate their brand name with the already overly-buzzed MP3, amateur investors will undoubtedly take notice. Maybe there's more to it than that, but my conspiracy theories are exhausted at the moment.
I'd like to add that I don't much care for the RIAA's predatory attitude toward online distribution, but I care even less for the "fuck the man, high prices justify piracy" attitude circulating /. lately. I applaud Liquid Audio for attempting to contribute an OSS solution rather than antagonizing the music industry into further anti-consumer action.
Essentially, what you need to understand, and
where I can see this thing falling down, is that
the watermarker adds detail to the sound in a
way which is inperceptible to humans. The
problem is that this relies on the ability to
(at an inperceptible level) destructively filter
the datasream. The problem is that if you
know how MP3 filters out data, you can
(expertise permitting) write a general destructive
filter which will not noticeably alter the sound,
but everything which wouldn't be noticeable would
be erased form the sound.
That said, repeated use of such a filter will
degrade the quality, so there is still a limiting
mechanism.
Some technical information about digital watermarking...
A watermark is made from two pieces of information: An encryption/hiding wrapper, which determines exactly how the watermark is encoded; and the payload, which is usually tracking information, such as a purchaser's credit card number. An encrypted copy of the payload is usually repeated, over and over again, throughout the target data.
Digital watermarks are designed to be both subtle and pervasive. An attempt to mask all the possible spots in the file the payload might be placed in would reduce the sound quality of an MP3 file to the point where it is practically worthless listening to. An MP3 could be analyzed by using the encryption code to locate all the points in the file the payload is placed, and average them together. This makes the method extremely hardy, and the data may even survive translation from digital to analog and back, or even resampling at a different data rate.
A second watermark is often added, with a commonly known encryption key; this allows watermarks to be viewed by the public. These sorts of watermarks are fairly easy to obscure, so that an MP3's watermark may be removed or replaced. The secret watermark, however, remains.
...someone encoding mp3's would be stupid enough to watermark them like that?! no. the dude encoding them is going to be encoding real, non-watermarked mp3's, or else using something like the bytes of 31337 repeated over and over again as the key or whatever.
- RF (dfelker@cnu.edu)
Of course you can keep your old software, thats why schemes like this haven't worked before. IIRC, Audioactive tried something similar based on public key encryption. How many people use Audioactive's mp3 player now?
Something that no one's yet mentioned is what exactly they mean by "open source". I'd bet that Liquid Audio will have applied for and/or received patents on this technology, and they're using the "open source" gimmick to:
a) establish themselves as the industry standard for this type of thing, and then:
b) charge royalties to anyone using this technology commercially
I seriously doubt that this is going to be Free Software (which requires that it be patent-free or licensed gratis worldwide).
I also expect that gullible geeks throughout America will help make this happen by porting the software and improving it, since it's "open source", and anything "open source" has to be good.
If your friendly neighborhood judge instructs you to turn over your keys/passwords, you will sit in jail until you do. Also, during the encryption/decryption process, you are likely to have fragments of the mp3 floating around on the disk. Bottom line, like the other poster said, if you are completely legal, then you have nothing to worry about.
Schemes like this are all very well, but how exactly will they prevent pirating? There's just too darn much hardware and software floating around for the purpose of creating MP3 files. Sure, the direct conversion of a watermarked or encrypted MPx format might be made more difficult, but what is the problem with playing a file and capturing the audio output and converting that to wav/mp3 or whatever?
All the cleverness in the world won't deter people determined to get something 'for free', unless the music companies control every CD drive and every encoding program...which can't be done.
>
;)
But it's not the same situation. Prostitution is a mutual agreement with moral tones many don't agree with. Piracy's theft.
Even if you don't agree with the company's moral standing of charging outrageous amounts, there is nothing civilized or right about simply taking what you like if you don't accept the terms of the deal.
>
It's all relative and it's all illegal. Prostitution is illegal period, as is piracy. You don't seem to agree with prostitution being illegal, but maybe I don't agree with piracy being illegal. See the problem.
But facts are facts, both are illegal and if you choose to engage in either act you are breaking the law (except in Nevada, for prostitution
Watermarking is no more destructive then the Layer 3 coding algorithm itself. If you think Layer 3 at 128Kbit sounds good then you are tone deaf anyway and wont hear the results of an audio watermark either. FWIW, I can hear the artifacts in Layer 3 up to about 160Kbit - at 192Kbit and above it sounds pretty good to me, though some people might claim to hear artifacts even at that high of bitrate. I can also hear artifacts in MPEG AAC at 128Kbit even though MPEG claims that in controlled listening tests it was found to be indistinguishable from the original PCM source. I am so sure of this that if I were allowed to choose the source material, I guarantee that in a blind listening test I could pick out the Layer 3 or AAC version with 100% accuracy. Notice - this is if I get to choose the material - the problem with these lossy algorithms is that how "good" the results sound varies drastically with the source material - and its not just a minority of material that sounds bad when processed: complex vocal harmonies (like you would hear an an Enya track - or some Queen tunes), choirs, electric guitar when the "fuzz tone" is fairly flat across the audio spectrum, "dense" musical passages, etc. This is all fairly common stuff in typical recorded music.
Anyway, back to watermarking systems. All recordings contain some amount of broad spectrum noise. Even on a track with a high noise floor this tends not to be intrusive in the audio program because our brains (this is psychoacoustics we are talking about here) are busy analyzing the "important" parts of the music and we ignore the noise floor. The trick with a watermark is to modulate bands of audio to enough extent that the watermark can later be recovered by analyzing these audio bands while at the same time not modulating these bands so much that the watermark "stick out" above the noise floor. A well tuned watermarking algorithm - at least for audio programs - should be harder to detect then the artifacts introduced by MPEG coding. But just as a poorly designed MPEG encoder can sound worse then a well tuned encoder, a poorly tuned watermark engine is also not a good thing.
The nice thing here is that if the Liquid watermark technology "sounds good" and works only by modifying the audio spectrum (probably this is the case) and not by tinkering with the Layer 3 file format, then I think it will be a reasonable compromise between encrypted formats and no protection at all. As many point out, encrypted formats wont stop piracy - someone will hack a playback device or otherwise get at the unencrypted data and distribute it anyway. Even if they just sample the audio outputs and encode that back to MPEG - the MPEG pirates don't seem to concerned about audio quality anyway so a "generation loss" like this isn't going to stop anything. On the other hand, as has also been pointed out, if the files are watermarked - you could certainly build players (software or hardware) then can tell you if you are playing a "legal" MPEG file or whatever.
Just my $0.02
It most certainly does not filter frequencies above 20KHz; that would negate the usage of a higher sampling rate. MP3 compresses data by removing masked material not supersonic material.
Indeed, you are correct. I worked in the industry for six years, and I must say that recording companies do not care for thew resale of CDs. They do have means to compensate artists/labels for these sales. Guess where that money comes from. THE FRONT END BUYER. There is a percentage of every CD purchased today that goes to a pool where labels draw from. They are suppose to credit a portion of this money back to the artist, but it does not happen. As a whole, artists like MP3s. The money they recieve off of album sales in nominal at best. Record companies are the ones hurting from the trade of MP3s online. Aritists make their money off of tours and merchandizing. Anyone who tells you different, is full of it.
BSC (Blood Sucking Corporate)
Why not simply append a breif advertisment before the music in MP3s and use the ad revenues to pay the artists, their lawyers, agents, and other associated leeches. Any site that edits out the ads could be prosicuted but individuals could elect to edit their own copies as long as they didn't forward them (in their edited state) to others...
Over here in the UK (and the rest of Europe AFAIK) it is still legal to create a backup of music tapes/CD's for personal use. This right is soon to be taken away from us though, last I heard some Euro MP's were trying to make it against European law....
Nick
Nick
- A.P.
--
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Yeah...
Even if it was audible, the compression process would most likely fry it to the point of being unrecognizable to the watermark noticer.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The idea behind watermarking is simply to serial number the file. It doesn't stop copying, but it prevents large scale bootlegging. If they can show several people offering the same audio track with the same serial number, they have criminal evidence.
Presumably, removing the watermark (by re-recording or whatever) will degrade the quality of the audio, and reduce the value of the track. This is like the low quality bootleg tapes that are out there.
If the above is truly their aim, all is well IMHO. My problem with most of the schemes out there is that they lock the audio up or prevent perfectly legal personal use copies (backups, one for in the car one for at home, that sort of thing.
I'll take the culturo-centric (is that a word?) view and talk about America for right now. Flames from you Un-American people welcome. :)
Here in America, only about half of households own a computer. Just about everybody has a Discman. I'd hazard that 80% of young adults do. Discmen don't wear out that easily. The fact that so many standard CD players exist means a sustained demand for old-style CDs, a demand that won't go away for a long time.
Not everyone has a computer, and not everyone with a computer is anxious to jump on the latest digital-music bandwagon. While the CD standard dominates the mainstream market, unfettered, open mp3 will continue to cement itself as the standard in online music distribution.
Why? Because the mp3 model works. There's no Big Brother hidden tags in it, no nagging "you have to buy this song for another week to play it again" messages. Consumers like this; it makes life simple for them.
The competing models don't work. Each of them, regardless of the technique used, starts off with the assumption that the consumer is a criminal, poised to pirate every song he or she downloads. Consumers don't like this; they prefer their business relationships to be based on trust. Nobody will buy into a system that doesn't trust him.
The mp3 market, despite the format's ability to be copied over, will succeed. Artists who lose potential revenue from the songs they distribute online will gain it back manyfold from the exposure they get. Artists will want this, consumers will want this. Guess what happens when there's a supply and a demand?
When it's time to put away the old Discman because there are no more CDs available for it, mp3, or some open and trust-based standard, will be there.
... ist that they don't work. I haven't seen a single watermarking scheme yet which could not be broken by trivial manipulation, and I don't expect Liquid Audio's stuff to be different.
Mass produced identical CDs will eventually be phased out, leaving all media
watermarked with its owners.
I hope not. That would eliminate the trade in second-hand CDs, and fill the landfills with the remains of unwanted CDs.
The only way I can see a MP3 -> WAV -> MP3 conversion fail to remove a watermark, would be to do the following:
If they can do something like this, conversion would still carry the watermark. Thus making the conversion pointless.
Then the only way to remove it would be to search for it and destroy it. I would give a good programmer a week to figure out how to that... At the most.
how will this make mp3s "secure?"
will it prevent me from copying it?
or will it prevent me from playing it in any other player? Is it me, or is this just politics just to make the RIAA feel all warm and fuzzy inside?
The concept of encoding music and sharing it with others has become deeply ingrained into alot of internet users lives. If the somehow removed all known mp3 players from the internet and the ability to make more mp3 files. Someone will just creat another format. This has been going on before MP3s, and it will continue. Unless the current music industry change and find a more reasonable way to sell and distribute music, they will not be able to do anything to stop "music piracy." The same way that all attempts to stop software piracy has failed, so will all attempts to stop music piracy fail.
Its spelt "L-I-N-U-X", but pronunced as "Free Beer"
Unless I've seriously overlooked something this isn't a bad thing, just good.
It won't stop anyone from using MP3's the way they are used today, it will just give the people who wants to sell their copyrighted music over the net as MP3 files a little more protection and that way the record labels might become more friendly into this kind of distribution and MP3 in general.
Some kind of protection is needed and if we can get an extension of MP3 instead of some kind of new, more closed fileformat it's good for us and everyone else.
I don't think that we will have to worry about hardware mp3 players requiring a watermark and even if they would do it we would only end up with MP3s watermarked liked "RiPpEd aNd eNcOdEd bY Da MaStEr" or something like that.
You are so right, the purchase of most products over the WWW, etc. is a Yuppy-only scene (I'd wager a guess that most of the people who read and comment of this site are indeed yuppies; just look at the posts when a story about employment comes up, they can't seem to understand that their tech jobs are not and infinite thing, oh yes, they'll be unemployed as well... sometime) People still would rather have salesman to yell at or sue if something goes awry then try to contact the pretty much anonymous company (which they'll never get through to anyone in a company who holds any sway anyway).
- Chris
Yeah, pretty much. A pessimistic, but more truthful outlook on the corporate society (especially in the US) which will lead to more destruction. Many people feel Americans are too complacent when it comes to corporations and power grabbing, and with good cause, would you want to be in court fighting $$$$$ lawyers? No, who would? And don't think that people are too sophisticated for violent upheavals of corporations and the like because they're not. The thing is, it is no different that the aristocrats of the past and the serfs. I am in Canada, we are even worse. When a new, unpopular law comes in, people may get angry for a day or two and then say oh well. Throughout history, people have only been able to be pushed so far... Maybe the corporations are a little more lucky because we're in a new(er) age. Maybe not. Fact is, not too much digital (computers) have gotten into the hands of those in poverty, wait until it becomes the standard in society, when they find there is even more that is unattainable to them, the impatience will wear thinner. People are almost at their peak. In the US, the GOP is becoming ever more popular this is where the people go (for some reason, b/c the conservatives are just as much "in" with corporations as anyone else.) As it is going this next 100 years or so will be ummm... very "interesting" to watch, the winds of change are howling.
-Chris
As far as I've seen, the Johns are the ones they go after with the most vigor, including putting their names and faces in the paper.
But it's not the same situation. Prostitution is a mutual agreement with moral tones many don't agree with. Piracy's theft. Even if you don't agree with the company's moral standing of charging outrageous amounts, there is nothing civilized or right about simply taking what you like if you don't accept the terms of the deal.
Artists get a pittance from the record companies when you buy their albums. When you steal them, they get *nothing*
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
This "f-ck the world, f-ck the rich, I'm being persecuted by the coporations, we must rise up against the oppression" meme has gotten out of hand on on slashdot recently. The record companies' crime is stupidity, not malice. This is exactly the attitude that has led to the current attitude the big labels have toward MP3. This is what will destroy any trust-based system for MP3 ditribution, and lead to us all being treated like theives.
0 1 - just my two bits
For those of you (us, whatever) pirates out there,
wouldnt it be possible to prevent this watermark thing from going on by basically holding on to old copies of winamp and some kind of ripper that dosen't use the watermark? if you kept those in circulation, then i dont think it would float
-Nik
MP3's need something like this before they become more popular, but it needs to be something that everyone has access to. Artists who don't have official record companies need ways to distribute music, and a protected MP3 system could help in doing this, but if it's going to be called MP3, it needs to stay compatible with existing MP3's. By not doing this, it would be similar to calling DIVX disks DVD's.
Wasn't there a lawsuit against / by the RIAA several years back when second hand discs were popular? I forgot he intent of the suit, but it was either a 'major' second hand company was forced to stop selling these or risk loosing getting preferential status with the original manufactures of the discs. Something like that, very /./m$ian conspiracy :)
:)
Anyways however the suit turned out, soon after this I noticed a big decline in used discs. Theres only a few places now I can find any an the ones they have are crap. It is mostly in college towns where one can find these things anymore. Which brings up the point...most people who hord mp3s are college kiddies, most places that sell used discs are in college towns. If ya like the artist you are listening through mp3s, then people usually buy new discs as a used one holds as little worth as an mp3...before mp3 used discs were my way of auditioning new artists at a very cheep price. So who are we puting out of business? The mom and pop used industry that the RIAA hates so much anyways. The bestbuys are never going to see a decrease just bcause us geeks play music on our computers and by continually bitching when the RIAA tries something new, you are just encouraging them more so
back to sleepytime
clify t
Stamping a file with a digital signature retains information, such as artist or producer contact, copyright data, and a number to track ownership.
So if I want to play a watermarked MP3 on my watermarked MP3-enabled listening device, is it supposed to connect to their server and verify that I've paid for the download? Or is this thing just supposed to make it easier for them to shut down high-volume piraters? Something sounds fishy here.
"It's a good thing for consumers."
hahahaha!!!!!!!
Slashdot: Liberal News for Nerds. Liberal Stuff that Matters.
And there's no way there'd be enough detail to identify who owned the watermark - which let's face it, is what companies implementing want.
What are you talking about? What history?
Like the refusal by oil companies to accept unleaded gas!
Like the push for black-and-white tv sets by powerhouses like Sony!
Like the elimination of libraries by the book-publishing industry!
No, as you see, greed isn't always such a bad thing. These are instances where they migh have forced the public to accept an old standard, or an inferior one, but they were driven by competition to use a better one. Actually, greed usually helps. Take an econ course. If you already have, take another one and stay awake this time. North America may be in its infancy, but the US has one of the oldest governmental systems of the major industrial powers (200+ for US, compared to about 40 for Japan).
From what I understand of the average watermark technique... It's mostly a non-destructive way of encoding info inside the music data itself. It's not some new protocol you need a new version of winamp for. A watermark-enabled winamp would be a good thing... it would tell you if the .mp3 is watermarked. Otherwise you'd probably never know. Some people probably have some watermarked songs right now, they just don't know it.
Yeah, I guess a bit of editing destroyed what I meant to say... 'mostly non-destructive'...
I meant you shouldn't be able to tell a difference by ear.
:)