Divx (the circuit city product) was, as far as I know, never cracked. Of course, they went out of business so fast that no one even had a chance to try.:-)
Is the RIAA's strategy to simply litigate every non-SDMIing player into oblivion?
They don't have to. They planned on using the same strategy as the MPAA. All legitimate downloaded music files from major labels would be in SDMI-encrypted format.
You could still manufacture an ordinary MP3 player, but it wouldn't work with SDMI files. It would be like manufacturing a DVD player without licensing CSS. Sure you can do it, and you could have digital outputs and no macrovision, but it won't play store-bought DVDs, so no one does it.
Exactly! I was disassembling 6502 assembly language when I was 16 years old to remove the copy protection on my Apple II games, and it was easy. Any 16 year old brain will outthink a 40 year old brain. Younger minds are simply more flexible than older minds. DeCSS didn't come from a team of seasoned software engineers with degrees and 10 years experience in software engineering each. It came from a 16 year old playing at home!
Copy protection doesn't work. Never has, never will. Copy protection is like publishing all of your trade secrets in Latin, because, after all, hardly anyone knows Latin, so your secrets are secure. Hello? Some of us know Latin, and we're laughing at you!
The point of the watermarking system, as claimed on their web site before they shut it down was:
(1) four different watermark technologies that are designed to detect compression and
(2) two additional technologies that are designed to ensure that under certain circumstances individual tracks of an album are not admitted into an SDMI domain without the presence of the original CD.
SDMI is designed as a "Napster Killer." Here's their strategy:
1) Apply a watermark to all CDs. This watermark takes the form of deliberate digital distortion, and is designed so that "most" people won't notice it.
2) Make all SDMI MP3 players scan MP3 files for the remnants of that watermark, and reject them. Hence, MP3s made from ripped CDs won't work anymore on new players. Napster is dead.
3) To allow people to download their own CDs into their SDMI MP3 players, provide special SDMI ripping software that allows the creation of an SDMI-encrypted MP3 from watermarked CDs, but associate these encrypted MP3s with the computer of the person who did the rip, so that they can download them onto their portable player, but if someone downloads this file from Napster, it won't work for them, because it wasn't made on their computer. The SDMI ripping software would look for the watermark, and make sure that the watermark is intact, signifying an original CD. This is so that you can't download an MP3, uncompress it into a CD, and run the SDMI ripping software on it. This is the purpose of the "two additional technologies."
The "detect compression" part is the fundamental mistake. The entire SDMI initiative is based on a basic misconception about the future of digital music and the reason why people use MP3s in the first place.
The only reason that people use lossy MP3 encoding is because it makes the files smaller by a factor of about 10:1. However, there are lossless encoding schemes that can compress by a factor of about 2:1.
Even if SDMI had worked, it would only have bought the industry a year or two, before DSL, or whatever faster technology replaces DSL makes downloading an uncompressed file as fast as downloading an MP3 is today, and before hard drive prices fall to the point where no one cares that their music files are 5 times as large.
Cracking SDMI now is a good thing.
Watermarking introduces deliberate distortion into the audio signal. By cracking the watermarking scheme before it was ever introduced to the market, we have avoided a scenario where all CDs would have included deliberate distortion, to no one's benefit.
C'net testing showed that most people can't tell the difference between 192kbit/sec MP3s and the original, and basically nobody can tell 256 kbit/sec.
If 256 KBits/Sec is your standard, then your standard is 5:1 compression. My standard is lossless, or 2:1 compression. You can argue one way or the other about whether the difference is noticable, but I'll point out that the difference between a 5:1 download and a 2:1 download is mostly that of convenience. Both are equally feasible, and as network speed rises and disk space prices fall every year, the difference between the two will become negligable.
Your point about sound quality is correct. For most people, there's simply no reason to download 2 1/2 times as much data, because they can't tell the difference. However...
SDMI creates a brand new reason to do so that never existed before and has nothing to do with sound quality. The new reason to download 2 1/2 times as much data is because that's what will be required in order to encode the music so you can play it on your portable SDMI player, and that's a powerful incentive.
The record companies stand, poised to replace "Perfect Music Forever" with "Music, purposely degraded -- made imperfect, and technologically restricted so it isn't necessarily Forever", at the exact moment that network distribution of their former, better product, "Perfect Music Forever" -- unwatermarked files with lossless compression -- is becoming possible. This is a disasterous strategy for the music industry.
5:1 verses 2:1 illustrates why the SDMI watermarking strategy will fail. It's too little too late. It's based on the assumption that downloading a lossless digital audio file is not feasible, which is not true. It's just unnecessary -- yet. The RIAA thinks that SDMI will destroy downloadable music technology, when all it will really do is force the abandonment of lossy compression.
The legacy of this failed attempt at market control will be deliberately introduced audio distortion on future CDs. This raises a new question. What will happen when someone figures out how to remove the watermarks completely, leaving the work undistorted? How will the recording industry compete against something that sounds, or is perceived to sound better than their store-bought product, and can be downloaded for free? They are not considering the results of their strategy. They do not understand the technology. Even worse for them, they no longer understand that the quality of their product is their product. In this sense, they have completely lost their way.
Ok point taken that watermarks can be used in this way, but SDMI is designed to be applied to completed works immediately prior to public release, not to audit the production of works.
Back in the early 1990s I used to joke to my coworkers that I'd buy a big hard drive "when disk prices reached a dollar a megabyte."
Then I had to revise my criteria. It became "10 cents per megabyte"
Then "a penny per megabyte"
Now I'm going to wait until disk space hits a dollar per gigabyte before I buy a big hard drive. Right now it's running about $3.50 per gigabyte. How long will I have to wait before I revise my criteria, do you think?
I met this great girl on a newsgroup in 1992, and we've been happily married since 1997! I know a lot of couples who met on the net. Some net relationships work, some don't.
How does such a watermark "break" MP3 files?
Simple. You look for a damaged watermark.
Groan. I got this wrong.
What I meant to say is that the SDMI compliant player looks for MP3s with remnants of a watermark.
You can still rip your own CDs, but you would have to use special SDMI software that creates a SDMI encrypted file that is tied to your computer (possibly through some hash of your hardware configuration, serial number, etc.)
Now when you use the special SDMI software to download your SDMI encrypted song to your player, the software verifies that the song was ripped on your computer. This means that you can't put a SDMI encrypted song on Napster, because if someone tries to download the file and load it into their player, the downloading software will recognize that the file was ripped on a different computer, and won't work.
The basic idea is for the hardware to reject MP3s that have traces of watermarks, meaning that they were ripped outside of the "control" of SDMI software. Old MP3s made from CD rips will continue to work because they won't have the watermarks on them.
Simple. You look for a damaged watermark. A perfect watermark means that there has been no compression, a damaged watermark means that the data stream has been tampered with; probably compressed.
As near as I can figure, the only way SDMI will 'break' MP3 is if every MP3 player both software and hardware is able to decode the watermark.
That's exactly their goal. They want to require all "phase 2" SDMI compliant devices to look for and refuse to play any MP3s with damaged watermarks.
Of course, this won't have any effect on open source MP3 players. The effect will be felt in the marketplace, with Rio-type devices. The idea is that all new portable MP3 players will include this detection technology. They are doing the same thing as the MPAA with CSS. Creating an encrypted "standard", and licensing the decryption algorithm as a way to force the hardware manufacturers to include watermark detection software. Without the decryption algorithm, your MP3 player won't be able to handle SDMI content.
You may be right about Macrovision. However, let me point out that Macrovision works well for two reasons. First off, it is unintrusive when used typically -- if you connect your VCR to your TV, and just play tapes, you'll never notice it. In other words, most people use their VCR to tape off the air and play rented movies. Macrovision does not interfere with either of these activities, which comprise 99% of videotaping activity.
SDMI is a different story. If you have a portable MP3 player, you need to generate MP3s to play on it. You can generate them either by ripping your own CDs, downloading them from the web, or paying for SDMI encrypted music files. SDMI, if successful, will make the first two impossible. You won't be able to rip your own music files, and you won't be able to use downloaded files. SDMI will be extremely intrusive. You'll be forced to pay for music you already own. This will not be popular.
Which is why I think that consumer response to SDMI will be different from consumer response to Macrovision.
Back in the early 1990s, when I was looking to purchase a pair of DAT recorders so that I could trade Grateful Dead tapes, the absolutely most important thing that you needed to make sure of was that whatever combination of equipment you bought did not enforce SCMS. If you had SCMS, you couldn't use the equipment. A lot of people spent extra hundreds of dollars on "Professional" equipment because SCMS rendered the hardware useless.
My experience with SCMS leads me to believe that SDMI will be similarly rejected by the marketplace. Not only does it offer no consumer advantages, but it's intrusive as well.
I never agreed to any EULA. As a matter of fact, I took explicit measures to NOT be bound to any EULA. I threw the software away. Your cuecat may be on loan, but mine was given to me free. I asked the Radio Shack rep, and he assured me that it was free. U.S. law says that anyone who received an unsolicited cuecat in the mail is the owner of that device. This is crystal clear.
Let's compare this situation to the GPL. Quoting the GPL:
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works.
If you do not accept the GPL, then you are bound by ordinary copyright law, which doesn't allow you to distribute copies of the GPLed software without permission from the copyright owner. I could decline to accept the GPL, and as a consequence, I would not be allowed to distribute the software.
In this case, I simply decline to accept the DC EULA. Had I accepted the EULA, then I would be bound by its terms, and I would be agreeing that the cuecat is only on loan. That would be part of the "bargain" between me and DC that would allow me to use their software in conjunction with their hardware.
I choose not to accept that EULA because I don't need or want their software or their restrictive license. I would rather retain full rights to use my cuecat in any way I choose.
1) These watermarks are going to be put on ordinary CDs that will be played on ordinary CD players. That means that everyone who rips a SDMI degraded CD is going to get the same watermark on their MP3, give or take a few bit errors. Or do you think they're going to individually watermark every CD? That isn't how CDs are made; they are made by stamping thousands of copies from a glass master.
2) SDMI devices and CDs with SDMI watermarks are intended to be sold over-the-counter, meaning you can pay cash for them, how do you propose that they can "track the mp3 back to its source"?
3) Their own website says that their watermarks are designed to detect compression. Read it yourself!
What's going on here is very simple. The RIAA is focused on one goal.
Kill Napster by killing MP3s.
SDMI was constructed with one goal in mind.
Kill Napster by killing MP3s.
They simply have tunnel vision. They don't see the bigger picture, and the inevitable consequences of their course of action. Napster can't destroy the recording labels. Only the RIAA can do that. They are!
What is being tested? There are two different types of technologies that are available for testing:
(1) four different watermark technologies that are designed to detect compression and
(2) two additional technologies that are designed to ensure that under certain circumstances
individual tracks of an album are not admitted into an SDMI domain without the presence of the original CD.
The fact that non-compressed music will be degraded with the watermark hardly renders my message moot. That's the entire point!
Even if Digital Convergence had built in some form of relatively strong encryption that was much more difficult to crack, and nobody had written third-party drivers that bypass their servers, I'd be willing to wager that they would have been out of business or close to in 12 months or less anyway.
If no one had been able to figure out the cuecat interface protocol, most of us would have thrown them in the trash by now.
If it had "leaked" out that the cuecat transmitted a serial number, I personally would have stomped mine into pieces before I threw it away.
The RIAA has no idea how good they have it, right now.
The main purpose of SDMI watermarks is to detect if a watermarked song has been compressed. The idea is that this will "break Napster." Breaking MP3s is completely the wrong approach! What the industry is forgetting is that lossy compression is just one way to transmit music. There are lossless compression schemes that achieve approximately 2:1 instead of 10:1 compression on music files. They're five times bigger, but disk space is dirt cheap now and network speeds are increasing. Quite frankly, lossless internet music distribution isn't something in the far distance, it's coming and it's coming fast.
What the industry doesn't realize is that they have one last chance to save themselves -- they need to market MP3s as a preview format, and CDs as a high quality format that you buy in a store that sounds better than MP3. Right now, they still have an opportunity to survive. If someone downloads an MP3, then decides that they like the song, they have a very good incentive to go out and purchase the CD, for a very practical reason that has nothing to do with morals or ethics or artists getting paid -- they still have an actual trump card. A CD sounds better!
Here's why SDMI is a two-pronged suicide weapon for the RIAA:
1) Even if the watermark is inaudible, people will think that they hear it. They will be dissatisfied, and will want unwatermarked music. Where will they get unwatermarked versions of their favorite albums? Not from the record store. They will have to either find a used, pre-SDMI CD, or copy it from their friend, or Napster, and they will feel zero guilt about doing so, because after all, they can't buy the uncorrupted version of the CD in the store anymore.
2) If SDMI succeeds, and it becomes impossible to play a song once it has been compressed to MP3, then people will be forced to stop using MP3. What will replace MP3? There are already lossless codecs -- the "shorten" format among them -- that achieve 2:1 compression (as opposed to 10:1 for MP3.) Napster and the like could quickly be retrofitted to use lossless compression instead of lossy compression.
If this happens, then the record industry will have destroyed the only consumer benefit in their pre-recorded CDs. So long as an MP3 sounds worse than a CD, consumers feel justified in "upgrading" their MP3s by buying the CDs. If people feel that the store-purchased CD is going to sound the same or worse than a download, then why should they buy it?
Or how about if the store-bought CD of "Dark Side Of The Moon" has audible distortion due to the watermarking, but you can easily download a lossless copy from Napster that was made from a pre-SDMI CD.
What will you do if you want the "best" sounding version of an album? There are collectors who pay top dollar for 1950s vinyl because they think it sounds better than CDs. Pre-SDMI CDs will join those ranks, but Pre-SDMI CDs will be infinitely reproducable.
In short, SDMI is suicide for the record labels. It's going to force changes in Napster and consumer behavior that actually destroy their own business model. Permanently.
I remember a story from a few years ago, possibly apocryphal. There was a bungee tower operator, and he went to the top of his tower to make a test jump. Apparently he first checked to make sure that the cord was securely fastened to the top of the tower, and did a back-dive off the tower.
Unfortunately, he had neglected to attach the other end of the bungee cord to his legs.
He apparently started screaming about halfway down... presumably the point that he realized his error.
Evolution in action.
Here we have the corporate equivalent. In order for DC's business model to work, they needed to ensure that no one else could write software to use their hardware. Their entire business model is based on funnelling all cuecat scans through their web site. If you can use a cuecat without going through their web site, then their business model is destroyed.
Unfortunately, they failed to do that. They used a primitive algorithm, and they made the slightly scrambled string print out in a DOS window, making it extra simple to figure out. They have NO patents that cover use of the hardware, and all of their copyrights only apply to their software, which you don't need to install to use the cuecat. Their "trade secret" was easily reverse-engineered, which is completely legal.
The reason that their vague lawyer-letters don't actually specify any specific intellectual property violation, and the reason why people are receiving vague letters instead of cease and desist letters is quite simple.
They forgot to attach the bungee cord to their legs.
I don't understand all these people crying about "amateur" athletes, who cares if they are amateur or not? Their is hardly a point in having a world class competition but barring the top performers of the sport.
A great deal of the mystique surrounding the Olympics was the fact that it was a world-class amateur competition. The professionalization of the Olympics has utterly destroyed the one thing that made it unique. Every sport has it's world championships for the professionals; they come every year, and if you want to see professional athletes, you have plenty of opportunities to do so. You'll get a good show. That's what they are paid to give you.
The Olympics were different. In order to be an Olympic athlete, you had to not only become a world class athlete, but you had to make the tremendous sacrifice of not performing for money, and you were entering a competition that only took place every four years, which meant that most athletes would only expect to compete in one, or maybe two games. You find it hard to believe that anyone would do it, but before the IOC destroyed the games, that was the price! Often, the Olympics were the "last stop" before an athlete turned pro -- and part of the tension was that the stakes were so high -- these were people who, given the choice between a professional career and a chance at an Olympic medal, chose the latter, and everyone recognized the sacrifice as well as the accomplishment. It was really something much more special than it is now.
Granted, the eastern bloc nations often cheated on the amateur requirement, and the IOC had the choice of whether to enforce the amateur requirement, or accomodate the cheaters. They took the low road, again and again, and now they wonder why the world is disillusioned with their corrupt, ruined games.
Now the Olympics are nothing more than the world professional sports championships, except that it comes every two years, so it isn't even a novelty anymore. I don't want to watch a "dream team" of overpaid, asshole NBA players beat the hell out of a third-world team and go on TV to tell us all what a snooze the game was and how bored they are and how they can't wait to pick up their gold medals so they can get back in time to rest up for the NBA season. I want to see the best American college athletes get together to try for a medal, knowing that it's a one-shot; they will never have a second chance -- the NCAA championships have a million times the heart and emotion that the Olympics will ever have. Maybe they should let NBA players play in the NCAA championships too. Why limit their potential?
The problem with barring professional athletes is that the best will not even care to compete if they are going to have to starve to do it, why should we limit a persons potential?
The aspect of personal sacrifice is now gone from the games, replaced by corporate greed, mandatory non-disclosure agreements for the athletes to "shut them up" so they don't interfere with what's important -- selling the rights to cover the games, and drug tests for the athletes to draw attention away from the real source of corruption - the IOC.
Unless you count a millionaire basketball player making the "sacrifice" of having to make do with a gold medal that should belong to an amateur athlete, instead of taking a paycheck this week.
Sorry, but the Olympics are now just another manifestation of of bloated, corporate crap.
Well, if the athletes feel strongly about this, they should get together and agree not to participate in any interviews at all. I'll bet that if a few gold medal winners, when presented with a camera and microphone, were to tell the reporter that as a protest against being prohibited from publishing their diary, they were declining to give any interviews at all, I bet that the IOC would get the message pretty quickly.
We've got to figure out the TV/PC code! Do you know how useful that would be. You could program your computer to mute commercials when it received the cuecat code, or press pause on your VCR.
Slashdot Mirror
Divx (the circuit city product) was, as far as I know, never cracked. Of course, they went out of business so fast that no one even had a chance to try. :-)
Is the RIAA's strategy to simply litigate every non-SDMIing player into oblivion?
They don't have to. They planned on using the same strategy as the MPAA. All legitimate downloaded music files from major labels would be in SDMI-encrypted format.
You could still manufacture an ordinary MP3 player, but it wouldn't work with SDMI files. It would be like manufacturing a DVD player without licensing CSS. Sure you can do it, and you could have digital outputs and no macrovision, but it won't play store-bought DVDs, so no one does it.
Exactly! I was disassembling 6502 assembly language when I was 16 years old to remove the copy protection on my Apple II games, and it was easy. Any 16 year old brain will outthink a 40 year old brain. Younger minds are simply more flexible than older minds. DeCSS didn't come from a team of seasoned software engineers with degrees and 10 years experience in software engineering each. It came from a 16 year old playing at home!
Copy protection doesn't work. Never has, never will. Copy protection is like publishing all of your trade secrets in Latin, because, after all, hardly anyone knows Latin, so your secrets are secure. Hello? Some of us know Latin, and we're laughing at you!
The point of the watermarking system, as claimed on their web site before they shut it down was:
(1) four different watermark technologies that are designed to detect compression and
(2) two additional technologies that are designed to ensure that under certain circumstances individual tracks of an album are not admitted into an SDMI domain without the presence of the original CD.
SDMI is designed as a "Napster Killer." Here's their strategy:
1) Apply a watermark to all CDs. This watermark takes the form of deliberate digital distortion, and is designed so that "most" people won't notice it.
2) Make all SDMI MP3 players scan MP3 files for the remnants of that watermark, and reject them. Hence, MP3s made from ripped CDs won't work anymore on new players. Napster is dead.
3) To allow people to download their own CDs into their SDMI MP3 players, provide special SDMI ripping software that allows the creation of an SDMI-encrypted MP3 from watermarked CDs, but associate these encrypted MP3s with the computer of the person who did the rip, so that they can download them onto their portable player, but if someone downloads this file from Napster, it won't work for them, because it wasn't made on their computer. The SDMI ripping software would look for the watermark, and make sure that the watermark is intact, signifying an original CD. This is so that you can't download an MP3, uncompress it into a CD, and run the SDMI ripping software on it. This is the purpose of the "two additional technologies."
The "detect compression" part is the fundamental mistake. The entire SDMI initiative is based on a basic misconception about the future of digital music and the reason why people use MP3s in the first place.
The only reason that people use lossy MP3 encoding is because it makes the files smaller by a factor of about 10:1. However, there are lossless encoding schemes that can compress by a factor of about 2:1.
Even if SDMI had worked, it would only have bought the industry a year or two, before DSL, or whatever faster technology replaces DSL makes downloading an uncompressed file as fast as downloading an MP3 is today, and before hard drive prices fall to the point where no one cares that their music files are 5 times as large.
Cracking SDMI now is a good thing.
Watermarking introduces deliberate distortion into the audio signal. By cracking the watermarking scheme before it was ever introduced to the market, we have avoided a scenario where all CDs would have included deliberate distortion, to no one's benefit.
C'net testing showed that most people can't tell the difference between 192kbit/sec MP3s and the original, and basically nobody can tell 256 kbit/sec.
...
If 256 KBits/Sec is your standard, then your standard is 5:1 compression. My standard is lossless, or 2:1 compression. You can argue one way or the other about whether the difference is noticable, but I'll point out that the difference between a 5:1 download and a 2:1 download is mostly that of convenience. Both are equally feasible, and as network speed rises and disk space prices fall every year, the difference between the two will become negligable.
Your point about sound quality is correct. For most people, there's simply no reason to download 2 1/2 times as much data, because they can't tell the difference. However
SDMI creates a brand new reason to do so that never existed before and has nothing to do with sound quality. The new reason to download 2 1/2 times as much data is because that's what will be required in order to encode the music so you can play it on your portable SDMI player, and that's a powerful incentive.
The record companies stand, poised to replace "Perfect Music Forever" with "Music, purposely degraded -- made imperfect, and technologically restricted so it isn't necessarily Forever", at the exact moment that network distribution of their former, better product, "Perfect Music Forever" -- unwatermarked files with lossless compression -- is becoming possible. This is a disasterous strategy for the music industry.
5:1 verses 2:1 illustrates why the SDMI watermarking strategy will fail. It's too little too late. It's based on the assumption that downloading a lossless digital audio file is not feasible, which is not true. It's just unnecessary -- yet. The RIAA thinks that SDMI will destroy downloadable music technology, when all it will really do is force the abandonment of lossy compression.
The legacy of this failed attempt at market control will be deliberately introduced audio distortion on future CDs. This raises a new question. What will happen when someone figures out how to remove the watermarks completely, leaving the work undistorted? How will the recording industry compete against something that sounds, or is perceived to sound better than their store-bought product, and can be downloaded for free? They are not considering the results of their strategy. They do not understand the technology. Even worse for them, they no longer understand that the quality of their product is their product. In this sense, they have completely lost their way.
- John
Ok point taken that watermarks can be used in this way, but SDMI is designed to be applied to completed works immediately prior to public release, not to audit the production of works.
Back in the early 1990s I used to joke to my coworkers that I'd buy a big hard drive "when disk prices reached a dollar a megabyte."
Then I had to revise my criteria. It became "10 cents per megabyte"
Then "a penny per megabyte"
Now I'm going to wait until disk space hits a dollar per gigabyte before I buy a big hard drive. Right now it's running about $3.50 per gigabyte. How long will I have to wait before I revise my criteria, do you think?
- John
I met this great girl on a newsgroup in 1992, and we've been happily married since 1997! I know a lot of couples who met on the net. Some net relationships work, some don't.
How does such a watermark "break" MP3 files?
Simple. You look for a damaged watermark.
Groan. I got this wrong.
What I meant to say is that the SDMI compliant player looks for MP3s with remnants of a watermark.
You can still rip your own CDs, but you would have to use special SDMI software that creates a SDMI encrypted file that is tied to your computer (possibly through some hash of your hardware configuration, serial number, etc.)
Now when you use the special SDMI software to download your SDMI encrypted song to your player, the software verifies that the song was ripped on your computer. This means that you can't put a SDMI encrypted song on Napster, because if someone tries to download the file and load it into their player, the downloading software will recognize that the file was ripped on a different computer, and won't work.
The basic idea is for the hardware to reject MP3s that have traces of watermarks, meaning that they were ripped outside of the "control" of SDMI software. Old MP3s made from CD rips will continue to work because they won't have the watermarks on them.
How does such a watermark "break" MP3 files?
Simple. You look for a damaged watermark. A perfect watermark means that there has been no compression, a damaged watermark means that the data stream has been tampered with; probably compressed.
As near as I can figure, the only way SDMI will 'break' MP3 is if every MP3 player both software and hardware is able to decode the watermark.
That's exactly their goal. They want to require all "phase 2" SDMI compliant devices to look for and refuse to play any MP3s with damaged watermarks.
Of course, this won't have any effect on open source MP3 players. The effect will be felt in the marketplace, with Rio-type devices. The idea is that all new portable MP3 players will include this detection technology. They are doing the same thing as the MPAA with CSS. Creating an encrypted "standard", and licensing the decryption algorithm as a way to force the hardware manufacturers to include watermark detection software. Without the decryption algorithm, your MP3 player won't be able to handle SDMI content.
You may be right about Macrovision. However, let me point out that Macrovision works well for two reasons. First off, it is unintrusive when used typically -- if you connect your VCR to your TV, and just play tapes, you'll never notice it. In other words, most people use their VCR to tape off the air and play rented movies. Macrovision does not interfere with either of these activities, which comprise 99% of videotaping activity.
SDMI is a different story. If you have a portable MP3 player, you need to generate MP3s to play on it. You can generate them either by ripping your own CDs, downloading them from the web, or paying for SDMI encrypted music files. SDMI, if successful, will make the first two impossible. You won't be able to rip your own music files, and you won't be able to use downloaded files. SDMI will be extremely intrusive. You'll be forced to pay for music you already own. This will not be popular.
Which is why I think that consumer response to SDMI will be different from consumer response to Macrovision.
Back in the early 1990s, when I was looking to purchase a pair of DAT recorders so that I could trade Grateful Dead tapes, the absolutely most important thing that you needed to make sure of was that whatever combination of equipment you bought did not enforce SCMS. If you had SCMS, you couldn't use the equipment. A lot of people spent extra hundreds of dollars on "Professional" equipment because SCMS rendered the hardware useless.
My experience with SCMS leads me to believe that SDMI will be similarly rejected by the marketplace. Not only does it offer no consumer advantages, but it's intrusive as well.
I never agreed to any EULA. As a matter of fact, I took explicit measures to NOT be bound to any EULA. I threw the software away. Your cuecat may be on loan, but mine was given to me free. I asked the Radio Shack rep, and he assured me that it was free. U.S. law says that anyone who received an unsolicited cuecat in the mail is the owner of that device. This is crystal clear.
Let's compare this situation to the GPL. Quoting the GPL:
5. You are not required to accept this License, since you have not signed it. However, nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works.
If you do not accept the GPL, then you are bound by ordinary copyright law, which doesn't allow you to distribute copies of the GPLed software without permission from the copyright owner. I could decline to accept the GPL, and as a consequence, I would not be allowed to distribute the software.
In this case, I simply decline to accept the DC EULA. Had I accepted the EULA, then I would be bound by its terms, and I would be agreeing that the cuecat is only on loan. That would be part of the "bargain" between me and DC that would allow me to use their software in conjunction with their hardware.
I choose not to accept that EULA because I don't need or want their software or their restrictive license. I would rather retain full rights to use my cuecat in any way I choose.
My right.
1) These watermarks are going to be put on ordinary CDs that will be played on ordinary CD players. That means that everyone who rips a SDMI degraded CD is going to get the same watermark on their MP3, give or take a few bit errors. Or do you think they're going to individually watermark every CD? That isn't how CDs are made; they are made by stamping thousands of copies from a glass master.
2) SDMI devices and CDs with SDMI watermarks are intended to be sold over-the-counter, meaning you can pay cash for them, how do you propose that they can "track the mp3 back to its source"?
3) Their own website says that their watermarks are designed to detect compression. Read it yourself!
What's going on here is very simple. The RIAA is focused on one goal.
Kill Napster by killing MP3s.
SDMI was constructed with one goal in mind.
Kill Napster by killing MP3s.
They simply have tunnel vision. They don't see the bigger picture, and the inevitable consequences of their course of action. Napster can't destroy the recording labels. Only the RIAA can do that. They are!
The following is quoted verbatim from their click-through agreement (emphasis added):
What is being tested? There are two different types of technologies that are available for testing:
(1) four different watermark technologies that are designed to detect compression and
(2) two additional technologies that are designed to ensure that under certain circumstances
individual tracks of an album are not admitted into an SDMI domain without the presence of the original CD.
The fact that non-compressed music will be degraded with the watermark hardly renders my message moot. That's the entire point!
- John
Even if Digital Convergence had built in some form of relatively strong encryption that was much more difficult to crack, and nobody had written third-party drivers that bypass their servers, I'd be willing to wager that they would have been out of business or close to in 12 months or less anyway.
If no one had been able to figure out the cuecat interface protocol, most of us would have thrown them in the trash by now.
If it had "leaked" out that the cuecat transmitted a serial number, I personally would have stomped mine into pieces before I threw it away.
Maybe if slashdot hackers worked with these people instead of against them they wouldn't be so reactionary.
I have a general rule where I don't "work with" people who introduce themselves with a threat.
The license is for the software. You don't install the software, you don't accept the license, you aren't bound by the license. Next!
You can ignore the DC license because it only covers the software that you don't have to install.
Simply throw the CD away, and you are not bound by any license.
Very simple.
The RIAA has no idea how good they have it, right now.
The main purpose of SDMI watermarks is to detect if a watermarked song has been compressed. The idea is that this will "break Napster." Breaking MP3s is completely the wrong approach! What the industry is forgetting is that lossy compression is just one way to transmit music. There are lossless compression schemes that achieve approximately 2:1 instead of 10:1 compression on music files. They're five times bigger, but disk space is dirt cheap now and network speeds are increasing. Quite frankly, lossless internet music distribution isn't something in the far distance, it's coming and it's coming fast.
What the industry doesn't realize is that they have one last chance to save themselves -- they need to market MP3s as a preview format, and CDs as a high quality format that you buy in a store that sounds better than MP3. Right now, they still have an opportunity to survive. If someone downloads an MP3, then decides that they like the song, they have a very good incentive to go out and purchase the CD, for a very practical reason that has nothing to do with morals or ethics or artists getting paid -- they still have an actual trump card. A CD sounds better!
Here's why SDMI is a two-pronged suicide weapon for the RIAA:
1) Even if the watermark is inaudible, people will think that they hear it. They will be dissatisfied, and will want unwatermarked music. Where will they get unwatermarked versions of their favorite albums? Not from the record store. They will have to either find a used, pre-SDMI CD, or copy it from their friend, or Napster, and they will feel zero guilt about doing so, because after all, they can't buy the uncorrupted version of the CD in the store anymore.
2) If SDMI succeeds, and it becomes impossible to play a song once it has been compressed to MP3, then people will be forced to stop using MP3. What will replace MP3? There are already lossless codecs -- the "shorten" format among them -- that achieve 2:1 compression (as opposed to 10:1 for MP3.) Napster and the like could quickly be retrofitted to use lossless compression instead of lossy compression.
If this happens, then the record industry will have destroyed the only consumer benefit in their pre-recorded CDs. So long as an MP3 sounds worse than a CD, consumers feel justified in "upgrading" their MP3s by buying the CDs. If people feel that the store-purchased CD is going to sound the same or worse than a download, then why should they buy it?
Or how about if the store-bought CD of "Dark Side Of The Moon" has audible distortion due to the watermarking, but you can easily download a lossless copy from Napster that was made from a pre-SDMI CD.
What will you do if you want the "best" sounding version of an album? There are collectors who pay top dollar for 1950s vinyl because they think it sounds better than CDs. Pre-SDMI CDs will join those ranks, but Pre-SDMI CDs will be infinitely reproducable.
In short, SDMI is suicide for the record labels. It's going to force changes in Napster and consumer behavior that actually destroy their own business model. Permanently.
I remember a story from a few years ago, possibly apocryphal. There was a bungee tower operator, and he went to the top of his tower to make a test jump. Apparently he first checked to make sure that the cord was securely fastened to the top of the tower, and did a back-dive off the tower.
... presumably the point that he realized his error.
Unfortunately, he had neglected to attach the other end of the bungee cord to his legs.
He apparently started screaming about halfway down
Evolution in action.
Here we have the corporate equivalent. In order for DC's business model to work, they needed to ensure that no one else could write software to use their hardware. Their entire business model is based on funnelling all cuecat scans through their web site. If you can use a cuecat without going through their web site, then their business model is destroyed.
Unfortunately, they failed to do that. They used a primitive algorithm, and they made the slightly scrambled string print out in a DOS window, making it extra simple to figure out. They have NO patents that cover use of the hardware, and all of their copyrights only apply to their software, which you don't need to install to use the cuecat. Their "trade secret" was easily reverse-engineered, which is completely legal.
The reason that their vague lawyer-letters don't actually specify any specific intellectual property violation, and the reason why people are receiving vague letters instead of cease and desist letters is quite simple.
They forgot to attach the bungee cord to their legs.
Those letters are the screaming.
Evolution in action.
it's slated to start in December.
... which will give them plenty of time to remove the parts they don't want "reviewed"
After all, how do we know that the version sent in for "review" is going to be the same software that they put on the machines? We don't.
I don't understand all these people crying about "amateur" athletes, who cares if they are amateur or not? Their is hardly a point in having a world class competition but barring the top performers of the sport.
A great deal of the mystique surrounding the Olympics was the fact that it was a world-class amateur competition. The professionalization of the Olympics has utterly destroyed the one thing that made it unique. Every sport has it's world championships for the professionals; they come every year, and if you want to see professional athletes, you have plenty of opportunities to do so. You'll get a good show. That's what they are paid to give you.
The Olympics were different. In order to be an Olympic athlete, you had to not only become a world class athlete, but you had to make the tremendous sacrifice of not performing for money, and you were entering a competition that only took place every four years, which meant that most athletes would only expect to compete in one, or maybe two games. You find it hard to believe that anyone would do it, but before the IOC destroyed the games, that was the price! Often, the Olympics were the "last stop" before an athlete turned pro -- and part of the tension was that the stakes were so high -- these were people who, given the choice between a professional career and a chance at an Olympic medal, chose the latter, and everyone recognized the sacrifice as well as the accomplishment. It was really something much more special than it is now.
Granted, the eastern bloc nations often cheated on the amateur requirement, and the IOC had the choice of whether to enforce the amateur requirement, or accomodate the cheaters. They took the low road, again and again, and now they wonder why the world is disillusioned with their corrupt, ruined games.
Now the Olympics are nothing more than the world professional sports championships, except that it comes every two years, so it isn't even a novelty anymore. I don't want to watch a "dream team" of overpaid, asshole NBA players beat the hell out of a third-world team and go on TV to tell us all what a snooze the game was and how bored they are and how they can't wait to pick up their gold medals so they can get back in time to rest up for the NBA season. I want to see the best American college athletes get together to try for a medal, knowing that it's a one-shot; they will never have a second chance -- the NCAA championships have a million times the heart and emotion that the Olympics will ever have. Maybe they should let NBA players play in the NCAA championships too. Why limit their potential?
The problem with barring professional athletes is that the best will not even care to compete if they are going to have to starve to do it, why should we limit a persons potential?
The aspect of personal sacrifice is now gone from the games, replaced by corporate greed, mandatory non-disclosure agreements for the athletes to "shut them up" so they don't interfere with what's important -- selling the rights to cover the games, and drug tests for the athletes to draw attention away from the real source of corruption - the IOC.
Unless you count a millionaire basketball player making the "sacrifice" of having to make do with a gold medal that should belong to an amateur athlete, instead of taking a paycheck this week.
Sorry, but the Olympics are now just another manifestation of of bloated, corporate crap.
I haven't watched a single minute of the Olympics since they replaced the U.S. basketball team with a team of NBA pros.
um, perhaps an amateur athlete; one without a corporate sponsor, if there are any left anymore.
Well, if the athletes feel strongly about this, they should get together and agree not to participate in any interviews at all. I'll bet that if a few gold medal winners, when presented with a camera and microphone, were to tell the reporter that as a protest against being prohibited from publishing their diary, they were declining to give any interviews at all, I bet that the IOC would get the message pretty quickly.
We've got to figure out the TV/PC code! Do you know how useful that would be. You could program your computer to mute commercials when it received the cuecat code, or press pause on your VCR.
Just think of the possibilities!