Slashdot Mirror
RIAA Plans to Allow Portable MP3 Players
Bocephus writes "CNET news.com reports in this story that the RIAA, despite its Secure Digital Music Initiative project, will allow MP3 to continue to exist so that portables like the Rio or Nomad may play MP3s. However, MP3s ripped from new CDs will be unusable if downloaded from the Net. " Yeah, essentially the RIAA is saying that current players can still play ones, even the existing illegal ones, once specs from the recording industry has been made. I wonder how long it's going to take them to figure out that they lost.
In turn, we can choose not to buy their CDs, because we are not happy with the licence -- and instead listen to those artists who realise they no longer need major record labels in order to reach an audience, but who publish straight to the net.
I'm looking forward to the day when alternative music radio DJs (i.e. the ones who aren't already part of the Sony/Warner/whatever hype machine) start discovering legal MP3s on the net, playing them on the radio, and paying the artists royalties.
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I can defeat digimark entirely withing photoshop using digimark.
The Tao Of Hacking Digimark
1. filter/noise/median until the watermark is defeated. Actually, anything will do. Sometimes I do an add noise as well. Basically just defeat the water mark at this stage.
2. Add a new watermark at the highest setting/lowest image quality
3 superimpose over the top of the original, adjusting the opacity until you get a near perfect picture with no watermark
simple really, with nealy indistinguishable results. picture looks great, no watermark, takes about 5 minutes, and a little bit of judgement.
Problem is, you can't put a different watermark on every CD you produce. Since all CDs are perfect copy, they would all carry the same watermark. So what this watermark would be good for ? To know that a MP3 files has been ripped from a CD ? You already know that. Even if the watermark is different for every CD, there will be no link between the watermark and the CD buyer, so you can't use it to prevent piracy.
To me watermarking is only good when selling music online, because you can put the name of the buyer in the watermark. But for CD it is really useless.
The only ace I can see up the RIAA's sleeve is Sony. They seem to be the only member who has the know-how to make anything decent. But who would buy something that doesn't work with existing MP3s? Especially knowing the type of people who use MP3 -- Slashdot types and other college students with fat pipes (Ethernet, of course, not crack pipes...) -- who seem to hate the RIAA and what it stands for. Even the casual MP3 listener will be infuriated when, after spending $150 on that new Sony MP3 player, he finds all his MP3s are useless because of the RIAA.
The RIAA seems to thrive on making enemies. Personally, I don't think I'm ever going to give up CDs in favor of MP3s. I can still hear differences between the original CD and the MP3, even encoded at 192, sometimes even higher. I've downloaded plenty of songs, and the ones that I like I eventually buy. The ones I don't like get trashed, and the "ehh" ones linger around my HD for a while before eventually being tossed. I think MP3 is the ultimate try-before-you-buy for music.
If the RIAA was REALLY worried about MP3, why don't they just lower the prices of CDs? If they cut the average price of a CD from $18 (or whatever fscking ridiculous price it is nowadays) to something like $8, there would be a huge buying spike. If they'd stop being so greedy they might be able to save themselves. But, of course, there's little chance of that happening in an organization comprised of such behemoths as Sony and Columbia (same company?) and the other record companies.
And it'll be their downfall, I tell you.
-----BEGIN ANNOYING SIG BLOCK-----
Evan
rooooar
When you hear about "watermarking", bear in mind: like the tamper-proof smart card, it doesn't work. See Petitcolas, Anderson, Kuhn, "Attacks on Copyright Marking Systems":s /
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~fapp2/papers/ih98-attack
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Xenu loves you!
Hmm... I'm not totally sure that the RIAA has lost in this case. Watermarking CD's is a VERY effective way to superimpose information on top of a song without it being audible, and without compromising the information if the song is encoded into an MP3 or whatever.
I tried playing around with various methods to defeat JPEG watermarking, but even stuff like embossing a picture doesn't get rid of it. The only way to beat it would be to go back to the FFT of the image and attempt to restore it.
The audio watermarking is similar to this and won't be easy to defeat. Someone will have to write a program to actually go and remove the FFT components that they've stored the information in.
If you have a chance, use Corel Photopaint to load a JPG and use the watermarking feature and take a look at the FFT of the image before and after. You can see the spectral components of the information fairly easily.
æeee!
So let me see if I have this straight...
Sometime in the future, the RIAA is going to force labels to actually change the way that CDDA is written to a CD. Somehow they are going to tag the CDs that you buy at the corner store as "secure" CDs. This will have to be done so that the new CDs will play on old CD-players. Perhaps an extra track at the very end of the CD with a small amount of data on it (hell, if they are going to do that, then I would also like to see them include the track and CD info, ala CDDB, right on the CD!)
The new ripper software will detect this tag on the new CDs, and will only allow the audio to be ripped to a 'secure' format. More than likely, this secure format will be tagged such that it only plays on a single device, so you would need to re-rip the audio if you have multiple devices.
The devices which incorprate this SDMI technology would be able to play MP3s, as well as this new format, which the RIAA is calling MP3, but really isn't (unless I am mistaken, there is no provision for encyption or locking in the MP3 spec...)
So this requires that the CD makers, the CD-ripper makers, and the MP3-player makers all sign up for this plan.
Perhaps if you use an all-in-one solution that comes with your portable MP3 player, this would be feasible. But if you continue to use any of the freely available CD-rippers/MP3 encoder solutions that are around today, this just can't work.
Anyone else have an idea as to how they plan to make this work?
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
It may take 5-10 years, but storage capacity keeps growing. When you have multi-terabyte hard drives and portables with gigabytes of RAM compressing audio won't be an issue. The 44/16 660 MB CD is unlikely to change unless humans suddenly evolve better hearing. The 96/24 format on DVD is wasted on most people. Right now putting 600+ MB of wav file on your hard drive for every hour of music is unthinkable. Once you spend $300-400 on the new 1TB drive are you really going to worry that it only holds 1700+ hours of uncompressed, unencoded wav files? Are you going to mp3 them so that you can fit 17,000 hours on that drive?
A few thoughts on RIAA's inititiative.
This is actually their smartest move yet, when you think about it for a minute.
They are going to allow us to play MP3's on the machine. And they are going to push it really hard to manufacturers of recording equipment--the big ones, like Panasonic, Sony(who have proprietary tech, but might abandon it) and Phillips. And believe me, the RIAA has some pull with these guys. So all the big consumer electronics guys will release these devices.
And we will buy them, because they don't threaten our beloved MP3 collections.
More importantly, the general public will probably end up buying the RIAA approved devices in far greater quantities than old stuff like the RIO, etc, because the big boys (Sony, etc)have marketing budgets several orders of magnitude beyond. Their manufacturing and design abilities are also much better (admit it, the Rio is an ugly, badly built piece of crap compared to a Sony minidisc player), so the RIAA devices will be spiffier and work better too, meaning even those of us who generally hate all things RIAA will probably buy the Sharp or Sony model.
So, now they have all the market share, and everything is groovy for MP3 lovers too.
But my bet is that the new SDMI spec will end up sounding a hell of a lot better than MP3.
Which basically sucks, if you want my opinion, or if you don't just siddown and play a tune ripped at 128b versus the same song off a CD for yourself, back to back.
My guess is that the SDMI spec will be close to CD or ATRAC-6 MD quality. So people will play free MP3s, but buy SDMI versions of songs they really like.
There is really no reason for the watermarked CD option RIAA is pushing, except that somebody would probably figure out a way to open up the SDMI algorithm and rip their own without watermarked CDs.
I don't even think this is such a bad scenario overall. (except that like most of you I would like to see the music industry crushed beneath the heel of the music-buying public. I just don't think that will happen.)
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I have no contacts inside RIAA or member companies, but this sounds an awful lot like the following happened:
1. They saw their golden empires are being challenged by MP3, so they knee-jerked and took a hardline stand against it, including the failed legal efforts to block MP3 players. The people who made those decisions had no clue about the technology involved, so they naively thought they could stop it.
2. Some of the more technical people at these companies informed the decision makers of the realities of the situation, i.e. MP3 is here to stay, and RIAA has already lost, so to save face and avoid an even bigger debacle, they decided to "allow" MP3's to co-exist with their standard.
BTW, I think this was NEVER about stopping bootleg copies, and was entirely concerned with outside, independent artists who were satisfying the listener's demand for new music and keeping the customers from spending money on new CD's. I know that since I started downloading files from mp3.com, my CD purchases have flatlined. I listen to music all day while I work, and it's about half CD's I bought months (or longer) ago, and half MP3 files.
I don't believe that one second. Redbook CDs still have to follow the same format or old players won't play them, and that format has no copy protection.
Booby trapping encoders and decoders is a joke, because its not like they can make existing MP3 encoders and decoders "go away" if the new ones won't do what people want them do to. Sure they can watermark (at the cost of sound quality), but what are they going to do, burn the CD with my name in the watermark AFTER I purchase it?
The RIAAs only hope is that they develop a copy protection scheme for the SDMI format that is 10 x smarter than anything that has been done before, and that people actually let themselves be fucked over by the new format.
Did I say I doubt it?
"riaa will allow mp3s to exist"...
When are they going to get it? This is exactly the type of mentality that will ensure they loose.
As long as physical media exists, we will be there making mp3s. They cant force another format on us. Itd be one thing if we didnt know how to make the mp3s ourselves. Who do they think made all the mp3s that are already out there? We did.
You can shove that liquid audio right up yer @#$)@#($
In the Playstation case, the difficulty is to crack a system. The difficulty that the RIAA faces here is that once a song is cracked, that song can be distributed endlessly, through already established channels. Moreover, there is a huge established demand for this. I really don't see how they can prevent the MP3 community from making illegal copies of music using already capable hardware. Since you can't mandate the replacement of the millions of CD players out there, what can you do?
Finally, it is virtually certain that cracking these things will be a matter of running something through some program written by a cracker after ripping it with one of the millions of CD readers that can currently rip CDs.
The cat is out of the bag, and they could only have what they want if they can go back in time and modify all the hardware. It's too late to implement a new hardware standard (years too late), and all software can be cracked, probably relatively easily. In fact, I bet there would a race of sorts amoung the ripper-programmers to see who could be the first to get the crack in.
I had to vent a little there, sorry. The point being that these 'solutions' are not being technically driven, and they are trying to fix something that, from the broad perspective, only they think is broken. But it is everyone else who they have to change to scratch their itch. The mindset seems to parallel with the people who want to censor the Internet.