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MP3 coalition wants to watermark MP3's 90

Posted by CmdrTaco from the is-this-the-answer? dept.
Fang wrote in to send us a link to a CNN article that talks about the MP3 coalition's new plan to WaterMark MP3s so that they can be better protected by the owners. Hopefully this is a step closer to online music distribution, but it doesn't look like a leap. Will someone leap already?
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MP3 coalition wants to watermark MP3's More

MP3 coalition wants to watermark MP3's

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  • How is watermark supposed to stop piracy? how does it work?

    alex

    ---
  • OK, so assume I like one song on a CD. I'd be willing to pay $3 for that song. I'm utterly uninterested in the rest of the songs on that CD. And they aren't willing to sell me that song for $3. So I can't buy it at an acceptable price. Instead, I "pirate" it. How does this hurt anyone? Explain, please?
  • 1) What if I buy the CD at the store with cash? They have no idea who bought the CD with that particular watermark in that case.

    2) How do they prove in court it was me that pirated the CD? How do they know it wasn't my brother? Or one of my friends that I let borrow the CD?
  • Posted by stefaanQuix:

    is an invention of the devil
  • Posted by korto:

    they're going to do THAT?
    why not brand'em in iron?
  • Two problems with this:
    • The record companies don't create. They're middlemen with lots of cash and more-or-less divine power over the industry. They don't give a damn about creativity unles they think it's something they can sell, but most artists go along with this because, well, until now it's been the ONLY way you could make it.
    • When you get your big break, you lose all your rights. That's right -- almost all "big break" contracts have language in them that signs over all rights in the recordings to the label, leaving artist with a percentage of that (if anything above and beyond the initial advance for cutting a pro-quality album) for their trouble. Allright, I guess I can give you this one, since it is the label cutting the check, but still, you do lose the rights to that album. This is why so many groups go on tours -- they couldn't make it on the peanuts the labels throw at them, and they can't redistribute the songs themselves without handing over all the money, so they go gigging and get the money from the ticket prices and merchandise sales. Oh, and lest I forget, the labels also stick their fingers into the sheet music -- the majority of the music publishers out there are affiliated with labels (MCA, EMI, Sony, BMG, Warners and PolyGram -- the same Gang of Six responsible for the RIAA).
    This is the real problem. The piracy issue is just an attempt to distort the issue, and thwart what is going to become a revolution in music distribution: digital music, distributed over the Internet by the artists themselves, with them setting the rules as to the prices and distribution (they could even give away some songs if they wanted). The record companies are harping about it because their decades of total control over the industry are (hopefully) almost over, and they want to scare people into thinking their way of doing things ($11-16 CDs, and maybe $2 or less per going back to the artist) is still the Right Way.
  • The RIAA model is not the only way for musicians to make money. It is the only way for the *studios* that the RIAA represents to make money in the huge amounts that they do as middlemen.

    It's also the only way for a composer to make money. The song writer, who is not a performer, cannot go out and make money without getting paid for a song.

    In the current system, the copyright holder gets half of the money from ASCAP or BMI everytime the song is aired or performed publically. The convenience of this is that songwriters cannot create licenses for the songs. Anyone can cover any song, and while the songwriter will get paid, he cannot stop the song from being performed.

    But getting back to where I came in, how, in a make-money-by-performing-it model, does a song writer make money? Nobody wants me to sing an R&B ballad, but maybe, I want to write one and sell to somebody. Should I just not bother, since I won't be performing the song?
  • in 5-10 years, bandwidth and storage will be such that it will be just as economical to trade in stolen .aiff files as .mp3 today, and no loss in sound quality.
  • Suppose I purchase 2 copies with different CC# and compare the differences (after decompression, of course). That should tell me which bits to twiddle to obscure the existing CC#, shouldn't it?

    Not necessarily. It's quite possible that what you'd find if you did this is that all of the bits are different. (Well, not *all*, really, just randomly setting bits won't generate more than a 50% difference. I just mean that the entire data stream may be different. Not just a few bits in a header.)

    The point is that the meta-data about your identity will be merged holographically into the audio data stream.

    By "holographically", I don't mean "with lasers" or anything like that. I'm referring to the fact that removing a chunk of a hologram does not remove a chunk of the holographic image it can create, it merely degrades its resolution. You can't mask out part of a holographic image by masking part of the hologram, you have to affect the entire hologram in a way that's difficult to calculate. The same type of data storage could be done digitally with mp3.

    The watermark will be much more like analog data storage than digital. It could be really hard to filter it out.
  • The way I understand it, watermarking could only stop piracy if *everything* was watermarked, including ordinary CD's.

    Not everyone in the world is ready to switch from CD's to mp3's. There's still a hell of a lot of audio equipment out there which is built to play non-compressed CD's and there's still a demand for traditional compact discs.

    The problem is that the entire music distribution industry isn't set up for this. CD's are stamped im mass production. Making each CD unique would drive up the cost immensely, and getting and recording a valid ID from all the teens buying CD's in the mall seems like an impossible task.

    But if this is not done, if there is an easy source of non-watermarked data, then pirates will be just as easily able to create non-watermarked mp3's for trade as they are today. Warez site and piracy will not be thwarted in the least.

    Forget about trying to remove the watermark. Just buy one CD, compress, upload/download to your heart's content.

  • I listen to a lot of music from mp3.com [mp3.com]. Here are my Python scripts to manage my MP3 collection: http://wildgoose.tandu.com/~zooko/ PythonHacking/ [tandu.com]

    Of course, 90% of the music on mp3.com is crap, but then, 90% [tuxedo.org] of everything [vt.edu] is crap. [hycyber.com].

    Among the best mp3 selections are Goss [mp3.com] amer [idrecords.com] and Manifest [mp3.com] Vision [manifestvision.com].

    Regards,

    Zooko [xs4all.nl]

  • First of all an MP3 relies on the use of lossy compression. What this means is that information is encoded and statistically ranked, anything that is viewed as 'statistically insignificant' during the ripping process is discarded. So when you play it back you hear something that approaches 'almost, but not quite the original'. This isn't necessarily fatal, digital media like CD players do the same thing by quantizing the amplitude or loudness of a signal. In practice I find that MP3's are fine for listening to through cheap headphones at work, or if I had a car player, would be fine in that environment. I don't like the sound quality that comes through my home system however. Everything sounds like a ghetto blaster or annoying bass-o-matic car stereo system.

    Anyway, a digital watermark doesn't have to be audible. It could be a 1 bit difference in the amplitude of a signal at certain instances, which would be a 1/65536th difference in volume.

    This is pretty similar to steganography, the technique of imposing a piece of information in another piece of information. Like hiding a secret message in an audio stream, or an image etc. Steganography wouldn't work if it was obvious that 'something was amiss' about the audio stream or image.

    Any artifacts of the watermarks in DIVX is only proof that the engineers behind that particular implementation are morons and should be retrained as 'custodial engineers'
  • In Linux, it is theoretically impossible to protect an audio file from copying. If it were't for the ioctls, anyone with basic shell experience could do something like "mv /dev/dsp /dev/realdsp; mkfifo /dev/dsp; tee savedmusic.wav /dev/realdsp" to intercept sound. In any case, anyone with C/Unix programming experience can make a kernel module to do the same for any app. (if ALSA doesn't make that possible already, of course...)

    I think you can do the same in Windows - don't the "MP3 radio stations" work by intercepting sound from any player on the system?

    Exactly how do these "secure MP3's" plan to do the technically impossible, in spite of the fact that "audio I can play once" == "audio I can record (or recompress) and redistribute/play as often as my conscience lets me?"?
  • ... because you guys have bought into the meme that the RIAA is spreading by using the words "piracy" and "theft".

    Theft implies the loss of the item being stolen from the possession of its rightful owner. The owner does not lose music when it is copied with or without permission.

    Piracy combines theft with personal violence. There is no violence involved when music is copied with or without permission.

    By accepting those emotive words in a context to which they do not naturally apply, you have in large measure already lost the battle for unrestricted online distribution for which so many are fighting.

    In a community that appreciates the benefits of OSS and regularly comments on the harm caused by IPR and patents, that really sucks.

    The RIAA model is not the only way for musicians to make money. It is the only way for the *studios* that the RIAA represents to make money in the huge amounts that they do as middlemen. There is a difference between those two things, but that difference is obscured quite effectively once the music-buying sheep can be made to think in terms of piracy and theft as if those terms were at all valid in this area.

    I expected better from the folks here.
  • Appealing to higher authority rather than to logic is bunkum. You know very well that the copying of music without permission is not piracy in the classical sense, yet the word still carries its old stigma despite everyone (including Websters) using it in its new computer-age context. And the RIAA and studios are counting on precisely that, because if it sounds nasty then they must be right.

    > if someone creates something, they should be
    > able to do whatever they want from it: give it
    > away for free or charge a billion dollars

    I agree. Unfortunately, that does *NOT* happen with music, because the middleman acquires the rights and then feeds the musicians peanuts, and of course the musician has NO say as to whether it can be given away for free or for billions, and there is NO possibility of passing on copies along with the same rights we acquired when we obtained our own copy. The entire structure is contrary to the freedoms that seem so natural on the net.
  • > If I "trivially" borrow your car, drive it
    > around the block and return it to the exact
    > same position should I be in trouble?
    > Assuming I refilled the gas tank to the same
    > level, I have done no damage to you.

    You're totally missing the point that the car is no longer available to its owner once you've "borrowed" it. Material and intellectual "properties" are utterly different in this respect. In fact the term "property" is downright misleading when applied to something that can be copied for free without loss of the original, and may be the source of so many of these problems.
  • Alternative distribution channels *ARE* being shown to musicians, not just mp3.com's "take 50%"-style but also self-promotion and direct patronage.

    It's happening, but very slowly because of the inertia of a century of doing things the old way.

    Meanwhile, it doesn't help when folks that are vastly more clued up on things like OSS and on the potential of the net still fall for the RIAA's use of emotive words that simply do not apply here.
  • What it really comes down to is that the price of CDs is massively overinflated, does not reflect the huge drop in cost of CD replication, and does not reflect the fact that there is now competition in the form of trivial online replication.

    If the free market were working normally here, the studios would have dropped their prices to the point where they could view MP3s as a highly effective channel of popularization, just like broadcasting. *Everyone* likes jewel cases and sleeve notes of their favorite artists; they just don't like being ripped off by an industry that feels it is above market pressure.
  • I sift through www.mp3.com quite a bit, and there are some real gems in there.
    There are several sites dedicated to promoting small or unsigned bands on the web; you just have to look for them.
  • Is it me, or is the thought of the recording industry having control over mp3 a little scary? The implementation of a "watermark" system would mean that the mp3 player (winamp and the like) would have to write in special code to check for the watermark and reject anything that lacked it. This gives the record companies immense control over the format, in my not-so-humble opinion. Watermarking is not good. It does degrade quality. It also will stop me, as an everyday consumer, from making MP3s from my CD collection for my own personal use. CD's get scratched and generally mutilated. MP3s are an easy way of maintaining a backup. 'nuff said.
  • I see your point and you're probably right... it was just my 8am paranoid ramblings. If given the option of paying a buck to download an mp3, i'd probably opt to that as well. 99% of my mp3 collection is ripped from my own cd's (i own over 400 cd's). i like the medium as a form of backup and i get a little paranoid about having that option taken away from me... 13 albums on one disc is great... now i have to figure out a way to play them in the car. *grin*

  • What's to stop someone from lifting an MP3 device that has MP3's on it tagged to someone's credit card number, and then blasting *these* all over the net?

    Why would they encode credit card numbers in it?! It'd be more like how cookies are used on web sites; a seemingly random string that identifies the download.

  • well, we've been doing it for a few months, all free downloads, and now a SHOUTcast station to boot
    ...check out http://curvedspace.org

    in particular, the /. crowd may like crypto outlaw

  • If you could download an mp4 that was like the first 45 seconds or minute and a half or whatever and a full cut was like less than a dollar. I usually buy a cd based on three or less tracks- this would maybe lure me to spend money on music online. hmmm.
  • The ideas are really applied steganography. That is, one tries to perform undetected communications. Only, if you were to do this without telling people, they'd denounce you as sneaky. So how is it done?
    Firstly, we want it to be transformation-proof. I'd say turning it into analog and back should preserve the watermark, though it might "smudge" it. So what do we do? We create some piece of data that is seemingly random and forward-error-correct (introduce redundancy so that it can be perfectly reconstructed in the presence of errors ... preferrably with the correct error model).
    Then we encode it into the "analog" data. How do you encode info? You modulate it. Frequency modulation and amplitude modulation are familiar from the radio, phase modulation is in every modem. Pick and choose, I'm not an expert, so I don't know what would work best with music.
    Now add this to your music and encode the music as an mp3. This could pose a problem, since mp3 uses compression, knowing what the ear (and psyche) pick up on and leave out the bits we don't notice so much. So some of the info might get lost, but if you try to encode 128 bits, which FEC-ed turn into maybe 2k, into something that is uncompressed maybe 20mb, that should be quite well spread, un-noticable, unless you know what you're looking for and fairly indestructible (depending on your FEC you might be able to chop parts off or out ...).
    Now how would you go about extracting this? You turn the mp3 back into 20mb of raw data and perfrom some signal processing. U-Boats are found by doing a convolution of the data against itself, GPS uses similar techniques to extract the spread-spectrum very-low-bitrate data from the noisy background.
    Once you have it, extract the original data and hey presto.
    Now, I'm into databases, not security. I'm just trying to apply *from memory* what I *should have learned* half a decade ago.
    Please excuse any inaccuracies and those cryptographers, please feel free to correct me.

    I now hope people see how this could be used, un-noticeably, to identify some signature. My scheme depends on a secret, making it impossible for users to detect forgeries. I don't know whether that would be useful, but it should be enough to get a litigation going.
  • I'm suprised no one has yet spoken up about the quality issues with watermarking. Watermarking is audible. You can take this technology, watermark something, broadcast it over FM radio (or AM radio) and analyze the signal from somewhere else and tell what the watermark is. This destroys the integrity of the signal. That is, you can hear the watermark, and it sounds like someone did something to your MP3. It sucks. DIVX does this to MPEG-2, and it looks like waterdroplets on your picture. Watermarking is simply not the answer.

  • "Most people, when given the opportunity to do so, won't take pirated things."
    if they really believed this were true then signing would be unnecessary...
    my dad has a saying "Locks only keep honest people from taking your stuff".

    and secondly will I be able to sign the tracks that i rip off my own CD?
    --

  • Are they going to require IDs on all music purchase? If not, what will stop someone from buying something and paying with cold, hard cash?
  • copyright law allows me to distribute copies of Open-Source Software (OSS) but forbids my distributing copies of most songs.
    I do not want to spend the time to try to convince you to stop unlawfully distributing songs, but please do not suggest that the use of OSS is similar to your illegal copying of songs.
  • I would think part of the 'problem' in embracing the MP3 music standard is the lack of people trying to use it in order to gain ground in an entrenched industry!

    I think you've got this completely backward. The reason it's being fought against is because people ARE using it to gain ground in an entrenched industry.
  • thinks to highly of people and underestimates the ability of the average person. Why are MP3's so popular - I would suggest they are because they are *free* and easy to share. Even if I'm wrong, what's to keep someone from writting a utility to remove the watermark (if it can be added, it can be removed). I love MP3's and I hope more artists will release MP3's of thier albums, but I don't think digital watermarks are going to stop those that want to pirate.

  • People who wish to violate copyright will continue to do so. Besides, will this watermark survive a conversion to and fro and back again across formats?

  • MP3 (Score:1)

    by kevlar ( 13509 )
    Gee @%@$%#%ing wizz.... I guess I won't be able to use the existing mp3 format or dump the watermarked raw version of the sound file to my harddrive.... guess they really got me!!! I call this an extremely lame and ignorant way of trying to control people which is doomed to fail miserably. I laugh in the music industry's face.
  • People have fore years tried to find ways around theft of copyright and intellectual property as well as everyday common thuggery and where doe sit all go? The crooks just dfind some way to circumvent it, so we develop a new way to keep it safe, ad infinitum.

    This watermarking scheme is no different. As well (from my knowledge on the subject) it would be incredibly irritating just to try and keep track of all of them and where they went and whom they were licensed to. MP3 may very well be a valid medium for musical distribution (ignoring the fact that at aroun 2 MB a song I wouldn't have near as many as I do CDs), but a strategy like this.... doomed to failure
  • How difficult would prosecuting
    this be? despite the watermarking,
    it would seem to be one huge job
    to simply *find* who's breaking
    the law, let alone do anything
    about it.
  • The whole idea about watermarking is that each instance of the file has a unique serial number embedded in it. The watermarking agency will have an id for each watermark, as to get the MP3 file, you will have to use a credit card (E-commerce only; no cash allowed.), giving the copyright holder a target to drag into court when they find that watermark blasted all over the Net.

    MP4, on the other hand, apparantly uses a one-time decrypt key as part of the copy-protect standard. You get the file for free, but each one-time-use decode key costs, like, $0.50 or so. It would not surprise me in the least if the RIAA companies are spending billions to make this happen.

    -C
  • Hi,

    Just to mention few.

    http://www.unsigned-music.com
    http://www.rockband.com/
    http://www.pe.net/~unison/showcase.htm
    http://members.theglobe.com/buzzer23/mp3.html

    And of course last but not least ;)

    http://www.iki.fi/tav/prudence/

    Cheers
  • So far the hubbub is over piracy of mainstream distributed music and labels, the Mariah Careys, Whitney Houstons, Elton Johns, etc. If the digital revolution and the internet is so empowering, where are the good homegrown music stars? The rock bands? The techno artists? This would be a good medium under which to get exposure and name recognition, right? I would think part of the 'problem' in embracing the MP3 music standard is the lack of people trying to use it in order to gain ground in an entrenched industry!

    As such all the music I listen too is well represented on CD, and the only impetus to switch to MP3 is to store all my music on 1 or 2 CDs, as opposed to 10 or 15, but there are otherwise no real advantages; none in sound quality, none in value, none in pc friendliness, just convenience. Why would established artists even care about the MP3 standard if the current industry works for them? Only the disgruntled and the newcomers would care, and they don't have the resources or the 'quality' to be comfortable with the mainstream industry, because if they were, they wouldn't be trying to push MP3 or something...

    Any comments? Is the garage band dead? Are there modern equivalents in this digital age? Midi Rock? =)

    -Twinkie
  • When was the last time you used cash to buy something on the Internet?
  • I still don't see what prevents people from implementing a filter that removes the watermark. Suppose I purchase 2 copies with different CC# and compare the differences (after decompression, of course). That should tell me which bits to twiddle to obscure the existing CC#, shouldn't it? If they are relying on security though obscurity, than nobody will be able to implement players for it, and it will go over like a lead balloon.

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