New Scientist Technology - Invention

I searched around and didn't see anything about this on HA yet. There are so many things wrong with this that I don't know where to begin. I can understand why this would appeal to the recording industry by why would anyone ever put this special decoder in their portable or program? At least that is the understanding I got from it, that they are going to alter the decoders to produce this undesirable result. So are they expecting that the recording industry might be able to force portable makers into including this? The article is too brief for me to understand how this works exactly. Would they be inserting this inaudible noise into the original CDs or is this just about purposely releasing bogus files over P2P applications - which has been done for quite a long time anyway.

I don't really get it, either. At first, it sounded like they were claiming to be able to hide stuff in the original audio signal that would get turned into some guy yelling at you if you threw out the data necessary to encode it into an MP3, but then they started talking about the decoder having to detect the stuff. If it's the second one, it's not going to do anything, since people will just go find a non-broken decoder. I don't think the first one is possible unless you spend a lot of time targeting one particular encoder and psy-model, but I can't see what benefit it would have since it would really anger a whole bunch of people who buy CD's legitimately and then encode them to listen to either from their computer or their portable MP3 player.

I don't know the affiliations of the inventors mentioned in the article, but I can't see this going anywhere unless the record companies really are that stupid...

didn't they already do something similar to that with some Madonna song? As far as I know they distributed some fake Madonna file where Madonna was shouting at the middle of the song..it was all over the news and all of a sudden everyone was looking for that fake version of the song...so they shot themselves in the foot

However, I don't get how they can tell the difference between someone ripping his one files and some pirate that downloads these files...

- Yawn -

It's the (pretty old) idea to personalize a copy using a watermark - mocked up in some yellow press phrases.

It might bear some sense if players refuse to play such files or the root customer could be identified using the watermark.

However, using some (again inaudible) white noise will destroy the watermark - rendering this copy protection useless (as so many others).

Edit: typos

Indeed what an "invention". I wonder how many millions of dollars are wasted in such fruitless research. It's simply an unattainable goal. In the end people will find a way to rip/listen/do-whatever-they-like with their music without restrictions, period. Keep the money wasted for DRM research and make the CDs cheaper.

Most (or all) of pirate copies floating in illegal channels will be free of this "protection" anyway, at least after some period when proper tools are out. If this nonsense ever gets widely used that is.

Yeah, this is basically watermarking.



Somebody should point out the word "steganography" to them.



So they can hide data in music, which then might survive an MP3 encoding (possible, if the bits they put in are redundant enough to live through it), which then would need a decoder to turn the bits into speech and play it.

Of course, how you get rippers to a) care and b) run the decoder to hear themselves "berated" is not addressed in the article.

And watermarks are fairly easily destroyed with some simple techniques, so it's not all that useful anyway. So there's nothing new to see here. Move along, move along.

If it is dependant on cooperative music players (like Macrovision for VHS), then you might as well just encode a copyright flag that will survive the compression process and have the player pick a nastygram it already has in memory.

The whole thing sounds like an attempt to commercialize some project originally meant for spooks (embedding secret messages) that is either obsolete now, or turned out not quite secure enough for that purpose.

two things that give me concern about this -

1 - Since the "protection" is contained in the audio mix, it seems that this scheme would comply with CD-DA standards ...? (though I'm unsure whether it really matters in the end)

2 - Isn't this a corruption of the original audio? Is it even possible to find a solution which removes this corruption (via a reverse algorithm or whatever) AND which returns the audio stream to it's virgin state?

I doubt it will be inaudible, too. Not that you'll hear a guy yelling at you, but that you will hear a guy yelling at you, be affected by it, and not consciously realize it.

In addition, the more is known about this, the easier it will be to curcumvent.

Lastly, let's hope that there will be a good listing of albums mangled in this way, that we can avoid them like error-added CDs.

I am very impressed as day to day the RIAA demonstrates to be more inflexible and lack of intelligence...

In my opinion these stupid actions could cause to future the inevitable death of the RIAA.

I totally missed that! (As in never heard of it before.. )

The article doesn't actually say that the RIAA is planning on rolling it out, just that a couple guys applied for a patent on it.

I know this. I read the article. But you would have to know that the RIAA is the main organism that approves and supports these absurd ideas and adopts them. It's well known.

For one example is the infamous DRM, invented by Microsoft and after supported and approved by the RIAA.

It's very probably that the RIAA approve and support this "new" initiative...

It's an interesting take on an old idea.

As for whether it's useful or not, it's useful to the people who invented it if they can make money out of it, or sell the patent.

It's useful for the record companies if it makes it look like they're fighting piracy, losing, and so need even more help from congress to enforce something.

The game isn't really to stop piracy completely using technological means. Everyone accepts that that is impossible - certainly with current formats. There are other reasons for proecting things - if it stops one copy attempt in 100, and is priced cheaply enough, it must make financial sense, even if it seems stupid to techies who can avoid it easily.

Cheers,
David.

Same here. A Google search produced this interesting page:
http://www.irixx.org/madonna/madonnaremix.html

In case anybody cares, the resume of one of the two inventors of this scheme can be found there.

And the other one is there.

If one is to trust the description of the invention, it is nothing more than an audio steganography scheme (i.e. hiding information inside an audio file). If you don't have the required decoder, you'll never be bothered with the "booming voice".

One practical use I can see against piracy, though, is burying such an audio watermark in the audio track of a DVD on advance copies given to insiders (or journalists), in order to track the origin of a "leak", as it seems that in some instances, DivX files spreading on P2P networks came from Hollywoord insiders or Oscar jury members, or so I think I read somewhere.