SDMI Technologist Talal Shamoon Interview 232
A reader writes "Salon has an interesting interview with one of the brains behind SDMI.
Watermarks in music? Talal Shamoon, a key technologist for the SDMI, says that he's found the key to protecting copyrighted tunes."
Re:This guy is clueless! (Score:1)
SDMI future: just like the Chinese Internet. (Score:2)
Re:The genie IS out of the bottle (Score:1)
Until the RIAA makes sure that this stuff comes out of an end-to-end hardware-secure solution (like someone already said), we're still going to get perfect digital rips, thanks to things like the SBLive!
(One also wonders how difficult it would be to code up a driver for a soundcard that existed solely in software, and whose sole purpose was to dump the output stream to disk?)
Re:Focusing on the algorithm is ridiculous (Score:1)
Indeed. Especially when you consider how MP3 is lossy enough to screw with any inaudible but present watermarks.
Removing SDMI (Score:3)
Any decent compression will remove the watermark automaticly...
I'm guessing the idea here is to imbed the watermark on CDs etc...
When someone rips a CD to an MP3 the compression will automaticly remove the watermark. It probably appears as unheard (or byond our hearing) noise.
Example Sound is "Really loud" watermark is "extreamly quite poping" you never hear it but it's there.
Here comes compression. Unheard sound? Yank.. Not in this MP3.
Even simple filtering would yank that example...
If it's not accually in the audio stream but in the data then it'll never survive being converted to an MP3.
Say your protecting an audio stream. I tap in and record whats comming off my chip (kmix RecSource master volume). I MP3 it...
All I need is your trusted client.. a program to control the audio on my sound card (kmix or the mixer built in Windows will do) and any audio recoding tool.
Convert to an MP3 using reasonable compression.
The watermark is history...
If the watermark is fluxuations in the sound that are to minnor to notice. Again removed.
Ideally lossy compression removes everything you don't hear. In the real world it ends up having an audioable effect and removes a few things you DO hear.
But compression is vital if you are gona trade MP3s over Napster. And thats what they are trying to prevent right?
Re:The *Correct* Use for Watermarks (Score:1)
The *Correct* Use for Watermarks (Score:4)
It's disappointing to see such an otherwise brilliant man so completely taken in by the media companies' need to protect their works -- a need which has never been convincingly demonstrated; to protect works which, strictly speaking, aren't theirs to begin with, but the originating artist's.
However, digital watermarking does have an important use in the infinite abundance of the digital universe, and it's not what Mr. Shamoon has been led to believe. Watermarks have a compelling use not as a basis for copy protection/management (erroneously referred to as "rights management"), but rather for reputation management.
Think forward to an age where everything -- including physical objects -- can be copied infinitely and perfectly at zero cost. Attempting to control copying in such a world becomes utterly pointless, not to mention childishly foolish. However, being able to track down the original artist(s) behind a given work will become extremely important. One way to do this is with difficult-to-remove watermarks. By scanning the work and recovering the watermark, you are able to identify the original artist, possibly to negotiate with them to do additional, similar work, and you're able to make this identification no matter how many hands the work has passed through. Thus, the artist is assured that their reputation will be preserved, and the recipient of the work knows they can track back directly to the originator rather than a faceless publishing house.
If Mr. Shamoon were to re-think his strategy from identifying and protecting copies (again, a pointless exercise in the digital universe) to identifying and protecting artists, I think he would find a good deal more support from artists, technologists, and consumers.
As for this new SDMI stuff, be very alert for it, as the media corporations are arm-twisting high-tech companies to cram it into everything. For example, Intel is working very hard to incorporate SDMI-like "features" into IEEE-1394 (FireWire). Also, the new Digital Flat Panel signalling standards from the Digital Display Working Group have space in the specs reserved for similar copy protection measures.
Personally, I can't understand why the high-tech companies are giving these guys the time of day. They won't be buying these devices; the consumer will, and the consumer has already made it clear they don't want this stuff.
Schwab
A sense of proportion here (Score:1)
But, I suspect, it's a name you chose to hide your real identity while you post inane comments.
I would apologise for calling you a bigot. In fact I will. When you prove you're not. But the attitude expressed in both the posts here seems to indicate that you consider that mocking someone because of their name is somehow acceptable. Maybe it is. Maybe I'm out of touch. Or maybe you need to grow up, move out of that sad little corner of the world you live in and get a life. Appreciate some diversity. Learn to accept that we're not all called Bubba. And, frankly, (I hate to break this to you) in most places, it's unusual for your brother to be your uncle as well.
Sweetness and light,
Chaz
Re:Hooray for SDMI (Score:1)
Why not? I think that if the consumer were alowed to choose which rights they wished to purchase, and what cost would these would entail, it would be no less intuitive than, say, long distance plans (I'm not throwing this up as an example of something which is easily understood, but rather something which is deemed "understandable enough" for the general public).
It wouldn't have to be unwritten. It could be something along the order of "this song costs $2.00, plus $0.25 for each additional playback device, 5 addition devices for $1, volume pricing available. Rights to an addition playback devices can be purchased at any time after initial sale". I think this would be quite understandable, even if it is different than the way things currently work.
-User
This man is the root of all evil... (Score:3)
... Nuff said.
========
Stephen C. VanDahm
You don't *need* to decrypt it. (Score:2)
A watermark is useless unless it points to a pirate.
And if the watermark bugs you, why not just nuke it. Run a diff on two versions and discard any differences. Even if you have to do it downstream of a SDMI sanctioned player.
X.
Re:This guy is clueless! (Score:1)
I like CD's a lot, and vinyl also, but I do welcome the advent of a new technology, as long as it is technically superior (MP3 is far inferior to either). Of course, the people who develop this standard realize that they will have to make the product substantially better to make up for the lack of convenience, so I don't anticipate this being a problem.
Right on! (Score:1)
The key word is disenfranchisement, meaning "deprivation of a privilege, immunity or right" [m-w.com] . Regardless of the empirical or anechdotal evidence we may have as to the root cause of music trading, the fact remains that the public has been deprived of:
- The right to pay a fair price for exactly the music they want, no more.
- The right to both time- and space- displace the purchased music and listen to it in any and all the audio appliances they own.
- The privilege of choosing from among the entire spectra of music, not just selected genres or unsigned artists.
- The right to integrate music into their culture, to treat it as any kind or manner of culture is treated: examined, commented, exchanged, emulated, deconstructed and reintegrated.
At a risk of sounding Katzian, I think it's a good insight, and one that is apt to be co-opted into any real-world discussion on digital music.THS
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Re:Hooray for SDMI (Score:1)
As to fair use being some sort of natural right, the courts and legislature in the U.S. might not agree with your idea. Fair use exemptions are intended to feed a democracy with a stream of accurate and useful information about important things, and to prevent copyright holders from unduly restricting that flow. By guaranteeing the legality of appropriate uses, they're guaranteeing a healthy democracy as well. And since the Founding Fathers in the USA believed that democracy was an inalienable right, they might well assert that fair use was in fact also an inalienable right.
Kurt
greed and snake oil (Score:2)
But that's nonsense and based on selling snake oil. Watermarking technologies fundamentally aren't robust, and even if those kinds of "open" players with some rights management ever made it to the market, within months, people would hack the managed content and make it unmanaged. The industry would then scream "crisis" and "starving artists" and release the next version of the player such that it only plays music that has identifiable keys, keys held by the major record labels and nobody else.
In fact, Shamoon states clearly himself that he doesn't expect open players to survive, so all this other stuff about watermarking etc. is just posturing:
Once that happens, the incentive for hardware providers (often in conglomerates with content providers anyway) to produce players capable of playing open formats will go away, and you'll be left with proprietary formats, proprietary closed-source encoders, and authoring controlled by a few big companies.
Oh, and if that is not enough, after throwing out all your LPs and buying everything in CD format (guaranteed to oxydize out of existence in a few years), we are now supposed to pay for all that music yet again in the form of some future encrypted format that we can do even less with. How greedy can these people get?
On the plus side, their greed may kill their business. More and more musicians will find it easier to just record and publish outside the mainstream media conglomerates. And streaming Internet access (wired and wireless), as well as small, general purpose wearable computers, will make control of player formats meaningless.
What the industry should do is forget about all this player and encryption nonsense and simply gear up for a future in which everybody can have their own personalized radio station, with just enough ads thrown in to cover the costs but not enough to bother people sufficiently to switch to something else.
Oh, yes, that probably means lower profits. But the music industry right now is an anachronism, like weavers or blacksmiths were after the industrial revolution. It used to take lots of sound engineers, record factories, broadcasters, producers, etc. to get a piece of music to the end users. These days, it takes none of that. Of course their profits should be much lower because their product has gone from being a premium product that's difficult to produce and distribute to something that's almost free to produce and distribute.
artists dont own the music. The RIAA members do! (Score:2)
Even if such a scheme were started by the artists themselves, it would still be illegal under current law (far more illegal than using Napster, in fact!) because teh artists don't have distribution rights to the music. The label does. Artists surrender LOTS of control just in order to get signed.
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______________________________________________
Could someone send this guy a clue or two? (Score:2)
And what, with Napster, you can set up direct connections with all of your friends?
"So where the dangers surrounding Napster, regarding viruses and child molesters, were moderately nebulous, they're going to be very severe with Gnutella."
Did I read that right? Child molestors and viruses pose a threat to Napster? Good freaking God! As for Gnutella, viruses might pose a threat, but that's why there are these things called virus scanners.
Well, judging by the interview, if this guy is indeed a key technologist for the SDMI, then there's nothing to fear
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Re:The RIAA is very, very close to the abyss ... (Score:1)
Failing that, music distributors simply need to implement the same sort of EULA agreements that the software industry are so enamoured with. Instead of just buying a cd at a store, you get your cd and sign a contract at the register stating that you will not distribute the music contained on the disk, and specifing the penalties for doing so (say, $25,000 per violation). This nice bit about this is it removes the issue from the messy arena of copyright law, to just another contract.
Re:You don't *need* to decrypt it. (Score:1)
This won't work. Every bit will be different.
Properly designed watermarks will be truly impossible to remove (i.e. removal will come at the cost of adding so much noise that the music is unlistenable)
Re:where's the consumer value in SDMI? (Score:2)
Huh??? The ethical thing to do is to get your music from Napster (or copy the CD if you need higher quality), and then directly pay those artists whose music you really enjoy via something like fairtunes.com [fairtunes.com]. That way, you get to exercise your fair use right to try-before-you-buy, and a $5 donation via fairtunes is over 5 times as much as the artist would get in royalties had you spent $18 for the CD. Plus, you can do your part by sharing the music which is important to you with the rest of the world.
Happily, because of the AHRA this is every bit as legal as doing what the RIAA would have you do: buy all new devices to pay-per-listen to lower quality music which denies you your Constitutional fair use rights, all in the name of perpetuating the RIAA's obscene profits and stranglehold over the distribution of music they had no part in creating. I think it's pretty obvious which approach is the more ethical one.
Re:They still have some work to do... (Score:1)
Re:What if..... (Score:1)
_____
Re:Cluestick! (Score:3)
Walt
P.S. There is some small risk in other people knowing your IP, but it ain't safe to be connected to the internet if that's an actual risk for you.
Securing vs. Watermarking (Score:1)
BUT...
Suppose they took this watermarking technology they say they have an use it for just that - watermarking. When you buy a track from the record company, it would be invisibly watermarked with your tracking information - but keep it in mp3. Simply watermark the signal. While copying is easily possible, it discourages the average joe from posting his song to the net, as it can be tracked back to him. It also would still allow trading between friends. Fair use or not, that's another story...
I don't know whether this can be done with audio, though they seem to be claiming it can. It's been done with images for quite some time now. (Digimarc and the like)
Yes, there are many holes in this idea, but it has a chance of being accepted by the community. (vs. SDMI... blech)
Re:Watermark Copy-Protection Exactly (Score:2)
But then again, it could be feasibly possible to add thousands of different watermarks, making it impossible to tell who pirated it.
Only if the watermarks you put in in correspond to actual people. I assume that the watermarks will be some sort of ID number, not your name in ASCII, so you won't know which numbers have actually been assigned. I you just make up watermarks at random, you'd probably have no better chance of making one that corresponds to a person than if you made up credit card numbers at random.
Re:It's perfect (Score:2)
What makes you think that people putting this stuff out over Gnutella or Freenet will in any fashion be using a credit card or bank account that can be traced back to them? Were you SDMI suppporters born this stupid or what?
He didn't say he supported the SDMI or thought it would work, I think he was just frustated with all the people who are thinking that watermarking encrypts the song.
It won't work. (Score:1)
As stated before his solution would work if the whole system was under some control but that's not likely to happen. Why would I want to add restrictions to the music I download when there is a ton of it free out there? Even if online method of music transport is shut down there still are friends!
I heard one once (Score:2)
I mean, for f*cks sake, if you're gonna pirate MP3s, why go through the effort to put crap like that in?
Pope
Freedom is Slavery! Ignorance is Strength! Monopolies offer Choice!
Re:Yeah, Right... (Score:1)
Re:The problem is... (Score:1)
As for the watermarking, you can either ignore it (your MP3 will still play)
The watermark is not intended to keep you from playing the audio, it's intended to discourage distribution in the first place by making the purchaser of the SDMI music traceable. Of course, people could buy SDMI music with stolen credit cards and distribute that, but they'll probably just buy the CD and rip that. CDs are not going to be phased out anytime soon.
I'll never buy this (Score:1)
- stop working when someone declares a mysterious "phase 2" start
- have built-in chain-letter marketing mechanisms
- require "protected" players and wires to transfer
would you even consider using it? No music can be that good!
If "watermark" is 128-bit encrypted (Score:2)
However, if the "watermark" code is 128-bit encrypted, then you can essentially make it almost unbreakable. After all, in order to break 128-bit encryption, you either need a very powerful supercomputer or a 400-plus node Beowulf cluster running in massively parallel fashion on a high-speed LAN, and even then it would take five to six hours just to break the encryption. This is of course way beyond the means of almost every hacker and cracker on this planet.
This is why I expect by 2010 most commercial digital media to have at least 256-bit encryption.
And why cant we remove watermarks!? (Score:2)
surely the watermark will involve some kinda of ciphering or message-digest wont it?
The Origin is dirty! (Score:1)
Shaloom is sitting in his high chair pulling humongous amounts of money for participating in setting up a new faulty system. Shaloom, when you wash your hands, don't let them see you laugh.
People so distant to reality decides the future which sooner or later breaks apart. Why? Perhaps because those people weren't the one to decide. Instead we would need an open system, a mixture of the napster, gnutella systems and the one I commented earlier. (reply to 1st post regarding destinympe). If the users doesn't like it, it is not for the users to use. (happens to some extent with windows though, but people learn from their mistake in this case, regardless of what the heads might say). Lets do it right. Lets do it with honour.
The consumers don't want it. (Score:1)
-John
Re:Child Molesters? (Score:1)
He doesn't really think that--it's even worse! He's knowingly trying to help spread the meme that only the worst kind of perverts criminals use peer to peer file sharing.
You don't seem to understand the technology (Score:2)
The responsibility is not on Freenet or Gnutella. That's the point. This technology does not matter how it is distributed, but who originated the copy. The responsibility is on the person who originally violated copyright and gave it someone else.
All they need to do is track the number of copies on Freenet (or whatever swapping channel is used) which originated from you, then multiply by the price, and then sue the pants off you for that amount, since it is trivial to show you did that much financial damage.
I will remind you that this very technology has been used to track and prosecute people who have illegally pirated pornographic images from web sites and put them on other sites.
Re:Hooray for SDMI (Score:2)
Where is it written? Amendment I, United States Constitution:
Most of the States have similar clauses in their own Constitutions. For instance, the California Constitution says:
So even the Beautiful People's Republic of Hollywood has fair use, regardless of what the SDMI wankers say."Audit trails" won't work (Score:1)
Watermarks are only undetectable if you can't distinguish them from the background. If you have 2 or more copies of the same work, but with different watermarks, you can compare them to get a much clearer view of what the watermarks are...
As a brute-force example, if you get 100 copies with different watermarks and average them together, each watermark is reduced by a factor of 100. This will also actually reduce the *total* watermark noise by a factor of 10 (20dB), giving a measurable (and probably audible) improvement in audio quality.
If you want to be a little more refined, take the difference of 2 copies. The music will cancel out, leaving the difference of 2 watermarks; the problem of distinguishing watermarks from music has been reduced to distinguishing watermarks from each other -- much easier. You can then decode the watermarks and remove them completely from the original.
You can still make watermarks work by burying the watermark below an additional layer of noise. If you can't distinguish the watermark from the additional noise, you can't remove it. Unfortunately (for the watermarkers), this will drastically reduce the volume/data available to hide the watermark in, and make it more vulnerable to averaging and more subtle distortion techniques.
Frankly, I doubt audio tracks have enough room to make this technique practical. Video might, though.
Re:The genie IS out of the bottle (Score:2)
Isn't Gnutellanet being stopped right now due to some kind of DoS attack (randomized request packets & such)? Have they figured out how to fight those attacks yet?
MojoNation (Score:2)
MojoNation [mojonation.net]
Burris
Yeah, Right... (Score:2)
Why would this be any different?
That's not watermarking (Score:2)
That's not watermarking. That's copy protection by another name. This, with the "secure wire" and "secure codec" comments, indicate that the objective is to produce music which gets marked up at each transfer stage and becomes unusable after a limited number of transfers.
That's the same method that they tried to apply to DAT -- make the hardware OEMs build transcription security into each step. Remember DAT?
Re:Cheap MP3s are the answer (Score:2)
Re:Yeah, Right... (Score:2)
The problem is, it might work for songs transmitted over the net (A 'La SDMI) but CD distribution will still be vulnerable unless you can encode a watermark on a CD by CD basis. I'm not sure that's feasible with current technology. It'd be amusing if this is what ends up making CD distribution obselete...
Another qustion is about making a watermark that anyone could verify but not remove. I recently had a friend griping that someone had stolen several images off her web site, cut the copyright mark off and claimed they'd done the images. Though registering with the copyright office would prevent such easily resolvable disputes, not too many people ever actually bother to do that.
The genie IS out of the bottle (Score:3)
No matter what ingenious encryption or watermarking system is used, it boils down to this: at some point, between the 0's and 1's and the analog output, the music must be decrypted/decompressed/whatever. There is nothing -- repeat, nothing -- that will ever stop people from capturing the signal somewhere in the chain, recording it as an mp3, and putting it up on Gnutella. Sure, there might be some quality loss -- but since that doesn't seem to bother people now, I doubt it will bother them then.
Cheers,
IT
It's perfect (Score:2)
The DVD situation was really quite useful for us. They picked an encryption system that marketting people portrayed as wonderful, unbreakable and ergonomic.
We dont want them to come up with what is actually an unbreakable music system - we should encourage them to use weak crappy protection
Anwyay it stands to reason that unless u need a dedicated decoder card in your pc that they cant really have any control over the music since your soundcard drivers will be given a complete decrypted stream.
Re:This guy is clueless! (Score:2)
Now look at the options present with 'digital music.' It's highly compressed, thus losing some degree of quality which may or may not be significant. It's easily damaged or lost by conditions that aren't your fault (bad file transfer, crashes, hard drive problems). It will be highly encrypted and beyond your control if people like Shamoon have a say in anything to do with it. And worst of all, DIGITAL MUSIC IS NOT TANGIBLE! You can not carry it around, move it from place to place (if the RIAA implements SDMI and only through media even then), feel it, or look at it. And if a problem comes up with your hard drive or media or internet connection, it's gone for good and knowing the RIAA you're expected to buy another copy. There's just something about the thought of paying money for an encrypted file and having no tangible backup of it that just makes me foam at the mouth.
So is that why you want with the end of cd's?
The RIAA is very, very close to the abyss ... (Score:3)
Well, the genie's not really out of the bottle. This is one of my big problems with the way people analyze this market. If you see it as a war between pirates and content creators, then it's under a completely different light than how I think it should be seen. Really, these are market conditions that have caused a black market to emerge. People are copying music because they feel somewhat disenfranchised with the options they have at their disposal in the digital space. It's up to the content industry to create value in the digital arena and they've made phenomenal steps in that direction.
I must disagree. This is a war between people who want to share music, and people who want to prevent others from sharing music. Too bad for the RIAA that Congress legalized all non-commercial music copying in 1992!
The Court of Appeals, in reversing the Napster injunction, basically told the lower court that it was completely wrong in its interpretation of the law, and explained how the law should be interpreted.
So what is the RIAA going to do, when either this court, or the appeals court, hands down a ruling that the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act completely legalized music sharing, and that the monetary interests of the RIAA have been completely accounted for by the collection of royalties on blank media, as provided for in the AHRA, and clearly spelled out by Congress, both in the law itself, and in the legislative history?
People will stop feeling guilty about using Napster, when they realize that the industry has been lying to them, and actually has been collecting royalties for 8 years on blank digital audio media, and then the war -- the war for people's minds -- will be over.
SDMI is just another attempt to use technology to make it physically impossible for consumers to exercise their legal rights. I think that SDMI products will die in the marketplace.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain
Re:The *Correct* Use for Watermarks (Score:2)
If I hadn't already commented I would mod this up.
The real problem most producers (not distributors who call themselves producers) have with unlimited copying is not losing imaginary revenue, but people taking credit for other people's work.
If I release a piece of software, people are going to pirate it (unless it's GPLed), but I am going to receive the market value from my work. That is, assuming I price it reasonably, I am going to get back money according to what the piece of software is worth.
The same goes for music - if it's catchy people will pay for the MP3, if it's good enough, some people will buy the CD.
The problem is with people taking credit for other's work (something which record companies have been known for). If someone sells my MP3s in another country it _is_ ripping me off, because they should be buying it from me (they can probably get a better deal from the source, but they won't know that), or getting it from a friend, not paying some dude for it and thinking they are supporting the artist.
Can SDMI do something about this? Probably not, as it's designed for big distributors.
What I'd like to see is a reference in MP3s - a URL for the producer of the MP3 which is difficult to tamper with. Then whoever gets the MP3 can visit the artist's site, check out the music, maybe buy a CD and find out if they got ripped off.
<RANT>This is the problem I have with napster, gnutella et. al. - I have got songs on my HD that have no ID3 tags - I don't even know who the artist is. Even if I like it, I'm not going to buy the CD because it's inconvenient. I can look for more "free" music, but actually compensating the artist is difficult.
Put references in and artists (maybe not record comapnies) will flock to digital music. Artists need attention - if their website is only a few clicks away who's not going to visit it if they like a song?
And, btw, I'm not talking about animated ads and annoying soundbytes every time you want to play an MP3 - a simple "go to website" button on the MP3 player is all it would take.
</RANT>Trusted Client (Score:2)
That's exactly what the DMCA is for - to legislate everything into trusted clients. Okay so it may not actually stop anyone with a clue, but so long as it doesn't get onto the click-and-drool interface where Joe Average can work it, the monopolist types are happy.
How do you pronounce SDMI? (Score:5)
Re:SDMI can't work (Score:2)
The SMDI is a pipe-dream, and my guess is that you will reach armed rebellion before you stop people from trading MP3's. The recording industry is still treating this the wrong way, I'm sure (because I've been told) that there are others within those member companies that really want to explore some interesting ideas, but the dinosaurs at the top won't admit that they have no f-ing clue about what is going on.
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Use a general purpose microcontroller (Score:2)
Re:Yeah, Right... (Score:2)
If the cost of music wasn't so ridiculously high, then the incentive to copy it would disappear very quickly.
Watermarking is doomed to failure because it strips away all possibility of fair use. You'll have to buy two copies of the same track just so you can listen to one in your car and one in your stereo. It's ridiculous.
<rant>
Copyright is not God-given. It's an incentive for creators created by government. The industry does a great job of making it seem like copyright is this birth-right that is usurped any time Joe Random makes a copy of his favourite tracks for his Walkman.
If you ask me, these people are wasting their time. They'll no doubt create some technically sound method of mangling tracks just enough so that only one person could ever listen to it. But it won't catch on, no matter how much the industry pushes it, because it will be a pain in the arse for the consumer.
Ultimately, it's all about what customers are willing to put up with. Up until now, it's been $15-20 for one or two good tracks and filler. But people are beginning to see the light. There's absolutely no good reason that the average person should subsidize the Malibu beach houses and Ferraris of some no-talent bums who got signed because they had the "look" that makes them marketable on MTV.
</rant>
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Re:SDMI can't work (Score:2)
Hardware can be made pretty hard to reverse engineer. A couple of months ago, playing devil's IANAL (grin), I suggested that the industry would move to a decoder/decryptor/DA-conv on a chip. Make the packaging tamper-proof, and you have a system that is not really feasable to hack.
I'll leave it up to cypherpunks to work out a protocol that allows both disconnected use and pay-per-play, but back of the napkin indicates that it should be do-able. You'll need to give it battery backed memory to resist replay attacks, f.ex.
Since the output of the secure packing is analog, the input is secure digital, the pirate would be reduced to re-comressing re-sampled data. Presumably this will turn enough noses so that it isn't an option. (not that I can tell the difference, eh)
So, it can work, but infrastructure is a bitch.
Johan
non-commercial use != personal use (Score:2)
The law does not say personal use in its fair use clause, it says non-commercial use. There is a critical difference, as non-commercial use does allow things like tape trading among fans, etc. Clearly, swapping digital music as is done on napster would fall into this same non-commercial usage. It would be a severe stretch to say that fair use applies to one medium and not another, a stretch which I do not think the courts will, in appeals, be able to uphold.
This may not get napster off the hook (they are, after all, a commercial venture) but it does get the end users off the hook, as well as distributed architectures such as gnutella and freenet.
I trust this guy... (Score:2)
We simply can't count on an organization that's funded mostly by the record industry to develop a standard for music interchange that consumers will benefit from.
$50 says that whatever these folks come up with will, for the same amount of music, end up costing the consumer just as much (OR MORE) in the long run.
The only real disincentive to "piracy" is being able to conveniently obtain a quality copy at low cost.
My time is valuable to me. I certainly do have much better things to do than search Napster for music. And it can be a chore to find anything other than mainstream music on Napster. I recently tried to find a piece from Mozart's Don Giovanni. I tried Napster's own servers, I tried several OpenNap servers and I even tried a few others. Nothing.
Rather than waste time searching Napster for incomplete, fuzzy mp3s, I'd much prefer paying a reasonable fee and being assured of a high-quality, fast-downloading digital copy I can call my own. And I don't think a "reasonable fee" is $1 per song as some people have suggested.
The idea is to compensate artists, not create bigger and richer ones. A token $0.01 will go a long way if the music is good enough and in demand.
We don't need these stupid watermarks crapping up songs and creating a new generation of inferior "pirate" copies. What we need is a new paradigm for music distribution. One that doesn't GOUGE customers and that FAIRLY compensates the artists, not their keepers.
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Re:Yeah, Right... (Score:2)
If I was to encode an mp3 with PGP, send it to one of my friends only to have you somehow intercept that message, the only way you'd hear that music is if you went to the store and bought the CD yourself.
No. The easiest way for me to get that mp3 would be to wait until your friend puts it up on OpenNap [sourceforge.net].
(Well, that's not true in my case, but for someone with broadband Internet access it would be.)
Encrypted human-readable content is only as secret as the human to whom it's sent.
Why is this news? (Score:2)
SDMI will work fine, as long as you can prevent people from re-encoding the audio stream that comes out of their speakers... in other words, never. This guy is the mathematician. Even if they somehow monkey up an inaudible watermark that survives the re-encoding, there will always be players & file-sharing systems that don't look for a watermark, so SDMI will never work. QED.
The funny thing is that everyone knows this, especially the people designing it, but I'd still put better than even money that SDMI will go into production anyway. My guess is that it's just one of those doomed projects that everyone is still stoically plugging away at so they can collect their paychecks. I'm actually quite disappointed in Hemos for not acknowledging that this technology is bullshit right in the story.
We need lyingbastard.com, a site devoted to debunking tecnological arguments that can be debunked in one paragraph or less. Knowing the US, though, it would be shut down for "libel."
Their vision of the future... (Score:2)
I hope the whole thing backfires on them spactacularly.
Mutual Distrust (Score:2)
The industry doesn't trust their customers not to pirate their music.
Customers, in turn, don't trust the industry not to sell "scientifically derived profiles" of your psychological state to your bosses, your friends, and eachother, based on the music you buy. It only needs to be accurate enough to sell; nobody in the industry's going to get fired when you do.
So you've got a watermark. What's in it? If it ain't the identity of the licensed listener, in some form, the watermark might as well not be there at all.
That's why MP3 has been allowed to spread so far, incidentally. The end result desired is per-user tracking. A few years of piracy should have worked to make the public accept per-user tracking. But the piracy was too good, and the privacy was too lacking.
They're reaping what they've sowed. Greed in fighting privacy regulation has decimated the inviolate personality(one of the better concepts trumpeted by Slashdot recently); the widespread support for that atrocious e-signature bill is simply disturbing.
Show me an industry that supports touch-tone phone presses as legal signatures in a court of law and I'll show you an industry that's losing touch.
What a tragedy, a soap opera, or a comedy of errors, depending on your perspective.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
"Little Caesars? You do pizza?"
Comment removed (Score:3)
urgh... (Score:2)
And so this portable device that I own, that I bought, that I'm holding in my hand, can still only be used in such a way that the people that I bought it from like.
What if gas stations sold gas that only worked if it was in a car? Oh, most people wouldn't have a problem, but what about the person who takes it out to a bonfire to start a fire? Why is the person I bought it from deciding how I should use it?
Unethical as it would be, it would be so tempting to play their game and fight stuff like this the dirty way. Write software that supposedly supports it, but is broken in some fundamental way. Circulate FUD. Circulate broken SDMI music files. Make it so damn difficult and impractical to use, that no one bothers to even try.
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Re:SDMI can't work (Score:2)
Damn straight. Unless an encoder shoud ever fall into the 'wrong hands'. Then, it's open season. A system like this can *only* work if there is a secret algorithm. (alright, theoretically it can, but unless they implant chips in us all...)
And (this is important) a system that relies on a secret algorithm is not secure. Once the algorithm is public, the game is over. Insert billions for new game.
The only way SDMI can be done is if *every* file transfer requires a new key. Theoretically possible, but not realistic.
A small bet: If SDMI is not cracked wide open within one year from now, I will buy you a beer.
Peace, Love and MIPS.
Wrong. (Score:3)
It would require an optimal computer [*] about 250 megawatts of power [**] and a full year of time to break a 128-bit cipher.
[*] We don't have anything close to this.
[**] 250 Mw is a hell of a lot of power. Don't ask me how you'd keep your computer from melting down from the heat. Or how you'd keep it at 3.2 K, for that matter.
128-bit ciphers are secure for the indefinite future. I don't expect anything short of enormous advances in quantum computation to make a dent in them.
The danger (Score:2)
You are largely correct, unless of course the music industry pulls an MPAA and effectively subsidizes the new format/technology by offering at or below cost to customers, as you alude to. But I think the scenerio may go a little differently.
There's a reason DVD is so cheap compared to laser disks, despite being newer (and in many ways better): it has built in access control (CSS) the studios love, and you can't record on it. The industry would like nothing better than to see VCRs disappear or become crippled (e.g. Tivo -- how many people do you know with libraries of tivo recordings? Zero, because there is no data persistence at all), and one big step in that direction is to offer a non-recordable format with superior sound and picture and get everyone excited about it.
If the RIAA were to do something similar (say, sell CDs for $18 each, while Audio-DVDs with draconian access controls BUT superior audio quality are selling for $8 each), people might well flock to the new medium.
Granted, this won't work for SDMI (initially), but the strategy would be to depricate unencrypted CDs in favor of DVDs (in much the same way vinyl was depricated), then leverage the DMCA to make all non-approved digital formats (e.g. mp3, ogg) effectively illegal, as ripping music to those formats would be "circumventing a copy protection scheme."
Lo and behold, suddenly the only music is on access-restricted DVDs you can only play in your consumer DVD player or Windoze box, or in pay-per-hear SDMI format
Hopefully the customer won't stand for this sort of thing, but this is exactly what I would expect the recording industry to try, and I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss the possibility that they might actually succeed in doing so.
I think the napster/mp3 thing is a short term battle for them -- they aren't ready to ditch CDs yet (we can thank the DeCSS authors for that), and this delay has probably thrown what digital strategy they did have into some disarray. Hopefully we as consumers will keep in in disarray, forever.
Re:Hooray for SDMI (Score:2)
I wouldn't worry too much about SDMI though. It will sink faster that DiVX. In fact, it's already pretty much dead in the water. Lot's of companies signed up, but no products. They wanted to have them out last Xmas, but as far as I can tell right now there is only a single Sony SDMI unit available. More importantly, lot's of non-SDMI players are already on the market. So I think this battle has already been lost.
Hooray for AHRA! (Score:2)
The manufacturers of the devices [not consumers] receive statutory immunity from infringement based on the use of those devices by consumers. It also means, however, that neither manufacturers of the devices [computers], nor the consumers who use them, receive immunity from suit for copyright infringement
In the RIAA's wildest dreams!
Here's what the Appeals judges had to say about this when they overturned the Napster injunction:
The court reached its conclusion that Napster users were engaged in direct infringement in part because:
o it ruled that 17 USC 1008's protections only applied to copying by specifically identified devices rather than, as this Court said in RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia Syst., Inc., 180 F.3d 1072 (9 th Cir. 1999), to all noncommercial copying by consumers.
If you want to know your rights, don't go to the RIAA looking for information.
Re:Watermark Copy-Protection Exactly (Score:2)
-Vercingetorix
Yep.. The public isn't completely stupid... DIVX? (Score:2)
And also, don't forget about the phase-1/phase-2 players.. The idea is that every player has an embedded shutoff switch, after which it WONT allow MP3's to play anymore. Then, come in a few years, every CD released has that trigger embedded in it.
'because its better'? (Score:2)
Uh huh.. Right. So give me the choice between a SDMI and non-SDMI protected digital audio player and see which one I choose.. Exactly how is SDMI going to improve music from a consumer point of view?
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Re:This guy is clueless! (Score:3)
When I read the last paragraph of this interview, I nearly leapt out of my chair. I, as a consumer, DO NOT WANT CDs to go away! I still have and play old LPs (these are titles that will never be available in the CD format). If this guy thinks I'm going to start replacing CDs with some new digital format he's got another thing coming. And I'm sure he'll hear from thousands of other music enthusiasts as well.
I'm positive that the replacement format will require payment every time I download their watermarked MP3 format files. Whoops! My hard disk crashed. Whoops! The batteries died (or whatever). Guess I'll have to repurchase my music collection. I got the impression that an ulterior motive of the SDMI might be to corner the market on digital audio players just the same way that the CSS got a stranglehold on the licensing of DVD players. Next thing you know, you and I are paying royalties per listen.
Also, I'm already not any fan of a new format that is a step backward in terms of sound quality (MP3s are that sort of step as far as I can tell). I wonder how long it will be before people begin noticing that they can, indeed, hear a difference in the sound of watermarked audio files after all. Some of us consumers aren't half deaf.
Let's hope that the marketplace has the sense to make the SDMI watermarked audio format Dead On Arrival.
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The problem is... (Score:2)
As for the watermarking, you can either ignore it (your MP3 will still play) or try to remove it. They don't say much about it, so I don't know how hard it would be. What I know is that, in theory, a "perfect perceptual encoder" will get rid of it. Think of it, if the watermarking info if impossible to hear and you have a "perfect perceptual coder" that encodes only the information you hear, it will completly remove watermarking without altering the sound at all (well, it will alter it, but you will not be able to hear it).
Re:Watermark Copy-Protection Exactly (Score:3)
-Vercingetorix
Re:Simple fact. (Score:2)
Re:Use a general purpose microcontroller (Score:2)
Writing your own player firmware is not easy. I bought a copy of ISO 11172-3 (the MPEG1 audio spec), and it's quite complicated. There are lots of open source players, but they all use floating point math, because it's so much easier and runs fine on any modern PC. Maybe I'll write this someday. If I do, I'll GPL it.
For now, I'm not using this EP7209 chip right now, mainly because it's in a 208 pin high density surface mount package, and one of the goals of my homebrew MP3 player project [pjrc.com] is to offer a design and components that an average electronics hobbist can build.
Of course, it'll be a challenge to make the existing decoder chips (MAS35077D and STA013) SDMI compliant, since they don't interact with the user, so they could only see the trigger and perhaps tell the microcontroller chip to prompt the user. Since these chips lack non-volatile memory (and probably always will), any player like mine that is open source will allow the user to interact with the chip however they like.
I doubt they'll manage to make these chips SDMI compliant in any meaningful way, but it's still a very scary thought... this guy's obviously in bed with the RIAA and maybe he's just speculating, or maybe he knows something?
This guy is clueless! (Score:2)
People like this are exactly the problem with the whole digital music movement today. Pirates do not exist just because mp3's are out there, they exist because consumers are growing weary of buying overpriced cd's and have the option to get the music free. (Note: I am vehemently anti-piracy, but I understand some of the rationale aside from the whole 'its free' thing) People want to pay for music they can listen to. I think I can speak for many music fans when I say that they do NOT want to spend the same amount of money (on music that they spend on cd's) on watered down digital content with no actual medium. I understand the costs behind the making of the CD's, but if the RIAA actually had any sort of clue they would offer digital songs very cheaply (perhaps some subscription service) so customers could just use them as previews, and then maybe lower the price a dollar or two (let's be realistic, making and recording the full cd is fairly expensive) while increasing the artists cut.
Why this won't work (Score:2)
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Re:SDMI can't work (Score:2)
That will never work. It assumes that all existing playback and record devices will somehow cease to exist.
This is one of the amusing things. Does the RIAA think that they will ever be able to stop selling compact discs? Do you know how many players there are out there? I couldn't believe the public outcry if CDs got stopped - there's be riots in the streets. The RIAA, like the MPAA, in their greed, has made the default format a perfect unencrypted copy. Doh. What's to stop me from ripping the CD? (Like I do now?). You're going to watermark it, oooh, big deal. Going to ban cash purchases, too?
Re:SDMI can't work (Score:2)
Of course they can. Vinyl and cassette tape are pretty rare nowdays.
I think it would be pretty easy to kill off current CDs, especially if you replace it with something backwards-compatable. Ideas: DVD-Audio, or weirdo files on CD-ROM.
All they have to do is sell players that can play old CDs and the new stuff too. Then sell the new Britney Spears album for $15 in the new format and $20 in the old format. Pretty soon Joe Sixpack will decide to buy a new player so that he can save $5 per album. After a few hundred million of the new players get sold, they can drop old CDs just like cassette and vinyl.
You're just not thinking evilly enough.
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Re:Hooray for SDMI (Score:3)
If music players all force you to only play music that is "signed" by this technology, guess who gets to decide what kind of music people listen to? Only music labels.
The promise of digital technology was that it could make things like producing and distributing things like books and music accessible to anyone with a computer and microphone. But I guess we can't have that if it threatens the music industry. If this kind of technology spreads from the music industry to other places like software and publishing, we're really going to be in trouble.
Music publishers want to have it both ways. The freedom of the internet, and the control of copyright enforcement. These two forces are opposed to each other. Something's gotta give, and I hope it isn't freedom.
Artists will make great music even if they aren't paid. I have the recordings to prove it.
-jlg
ps. use Debian! www.debian.org
Cheap MP3s are the answer (Score:2)
where's the consumer value in SDMI? (Score:2)
Face it -- SDMI provides no benefit to the consumer. It's sort of like the "PCS" technology marketing in the cellular telephone market. At introduction, the audio quality of the digital cellphones was worse and the signal weaker than good analog phones. The marketing of "digital" phones was dismal because it offered the customer no real benefit. However, the cellphone companies that could push 3-5 digital calls per cellsite radio instead of one analog call had a real incentive to make the service attractive, and started adding customer value (like messaging, call management, etc) and marketing the package as "PCS" as distinct from "digital." PCS has been successful, because there's value in it for the customer.
Same goes for SDMI. Until there's some value in it for the customer, such as offering music subscriptions or access to digital liner notes, artwork, etc, SDMI is dead as a doornail. And even then, it'll be relatively trivial to bypass it by conversion to open formats. If Shamoon's strategies are the best that SDMI has to offer, then SDMI is in real trouble.
Hooray for SDMI (Score:2)
Remember, the goal of the free software movement is not to liberate other peoples' work. You don't see Linus or RMS pirating 0-day Windows 2000 betas or reverse-engineering competitors' formats. Instead, they built a brand new alternative from the ground up, and it's gaining new followers every day. Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing Napster or Gnutella or anything; as I said, most artists are in support of them -- we just have to consider the needs of those who aren't.
Choice is always a good thing; in fact, it's the principle that the open source community was built on. We've got different distros to choose from, different window managers, different desktops, etc. It's nice to see that there's now different alternatives for digital music distribution.
They still have some work to do... (Score:3)
Re:thats like (Score:2)
Cluestick! (Score:4)
OK, the author here needs a HUGE whack on the head with a cluestick. With napster, you ask a central server for a song, and then you set up a direct connection. With gnutella, the only difference is that you have to do so before you log on. He's right so far. But then he goes on to say that this increases the risk of virii. Grade A prime bull. You can't possibly get a virus unless you actually transfer a song. No client is brain-damaged enough that it will accept code (vbs or otherwise) from its nearest node without asking for it. And the stuff about child molesters is pure garbage. Chat is chat, whether or not you're using a decentralized server. Knowing someone's ip address doesn't help you hunt down their house.
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Simple fact. (Score:2)
a) We can cheaply and easily build portable devices to play music in whatever format we want, regardless of 'standards'.
b) What prevents us from doing what we want anyway?
Re:Poag, what is your problem? (Score:2)
I dont see what the big problem is. The SDMI was defeated long ago -- Apparently several clueless Slashdot authors failed to realize this before posting the article. Meanwhile, hundreds of other articles are rejected. Another fact of the matter is, is that Slashdot is not the way it used to be, despite promises that it wouldn't change.
Have a great day,
Bowie J. Poag
Re:where's the consumer value in SDMI? (Score:2)
(And I should have thought twice before clicking on 'submit' -- Shimoon did mention adding value, but the threadbare mention says a lot about how trivial the industry thinks of the issue, and deserved a bit more flaming, but that's water under the bridge.)
Stupid! (Score:3)
Oh, gee, what realistic requirements! Sadly, it will be hard to transfer data to your PC when it's secure (ie, turned off inside a safe at the bottom of the ocean). They're actually expecting end-to-end hardware protection! This would required rebuilding everything inside the machine (if it's possible at all, which I doubt). Not to mention the fact they you still have to trust whoever you got it from (ie, trust that nobody tampered with it over the wire). OK, let's rebuild the internet too! But we'll stop those pirates! (haha, yeah right).
SDMI can't work (Score:4)
The only hard bit is identifying the unnecessary data. But, it's only a form of steganography. If you know the message is there, then all you have to do is find it. It may be hard, but given the past history of the companies involved with SDMI, it won't be *very* hard.
This is another example of the 'Trusted Client' problem There ain't no such puppy as a trusted client. There can't be.
The millions being invested in SDMI is a waste. I hope the people involved have a *very* good set of excuses ready for when the shareholders start asking where the money went.
In the meantime, I will pay for the music I listen to. I'll pay for the DVDs I want to watch. But I'll play them on the platform *I* choose.
Share and Enjoy.
This guy needs a cluestick in another orifice.. (Score:3)
I can't help but wonder if these people are in a deep, deep, deep case of denial. They need pills, or something. Can't they see that they're fscked? I'd guess terabytes of mp3's swap hands every single day. There's no putting the genie back in the bottle. For some unknown reason, sales still are up. What, people are maybe at their core honest?
There is no digital protection scheme short of implanting an RIAA chip in your head that will would because you need to hear the music. This guy has a degree from Cornell. He's still an idiot, he's just an idiot with a degree. If there's a watermark, you can bet there's a pissed off hacker out there who's better than you who's going to take care of your watermark real fast.
The format is too widespread, there's no control over players and the numbers of people make it impossible and possibly not legal to sue everyone collectively. (Civil disobediance, who?)
Find a model that doesn't rape consumers and makes people happy for once, find a model that makes the artists happy - no, not Lars and his happy gang, but the 99% that get fscked when they sign on with the labels. Or face a horrible, horrible obsolecence. You won't be missed.
Doing my part to end RIAA monopolistic practices since 1996. :)
Re:Yeah, Right... (Score:2)
That's kind of a sweeping generalization there with little basis in fact.
If I was to encode an mp3 with PGP, send it to one of my friends only to have you somehow intercept that message, the only way you'd hear that music is if you went to the store and bought the CD yourself.
That gives me an idea...
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"Quality Experience"? (Score:2)
Re:Cluestick! (Score:3)
He's a fucking idiot if he thinks Gnutella helps child molestors and if he doesn't think that, he's a lying sack of shit.
He doesn't have a fucking clue about the technology. SDMI has nothing to do with his audio compression experience and he didn't invent anything, digital watermarking has been around since the 80s... I went to a conference in the early 90s where Xerox was showing off technology to watermark copies so they could be tracked back to the original copier, even after being photographed and scanner or photocopied in several older photocopiers first.
Talal Shamoon is lying, purely to hurt other technologies for his own personal gain. If he feels otherwise, let the bastard show up and post in his own defense.
Fuck, I hate people like that, rotten to the core.
Watermarking doesn't seem to have any effect (Score:2)
Even if fully adopted, there will always be the possibility of "renegade" MP3 players that disregard the watermark entirely. So, why would watermarks be useful in this "playback" regard?
For protecting integrity of the content, watermarks are great. For blocking reproduction, they fail. Anyone have any thoughts on this?
Re:Hooray for SDMI (Score:2)
Huh? What? But it says.... Nope, it says that Congress shall not abridge the freedom of speech. This doesn't say "You have the right to free speech", it says Congress shall not abridge whatever rights and privileges to free speech you may have
Huh? What? Are you stoopid or sumthin? Ok, I'll spell it out for you: there is nothing that give copyright holders "rights" ... nothing but laws written by the congress, which "shall not ..."
Is that simple enough for you?
Watermark Copy-Protection Exactly (Score:2)
This does not stop you from copying the song - but generally you cannot find out which bits were altered very easily (maybe Im wrong). Thus when you buy a song and copy it, your finger print will remain on the song, and if it appears on Napster, you will be fingered as the person who allowed the copyrighting...
Obviously you can also do copy-protection based on this as well, but as it is so easy to circumnavigate, it is more likely that the watermark fingerprint would be used.
Winton