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Audio Watermarking may be new alternative to DRM

15 August 2007 19:08 by Dave "Davedough" Horvath | 55 comments

Audio Watermarking may be new alternative to DRM Several record labels such as Sony Music and Universal Music have been courting with the idea brought about by a Seattle based company called Activated Content which places audio Watermarks on MP3 files. The purpose of these watermarks range from digital tracking of content, to marketing matrix that allow companies to get statistics on who has listened to their particular audio.

Audio watermarking works by placing an audio stream within the music itself that is not perceptible by the human ear, but can be read and deciphered by audio tracking software much easier than DRM standards. Since it becomes part of the audio, and not merely another layer within the audio, it becomes harder to strip it away, thereby leaving its mark to sit with the intended consumer. Should this same mark show up on another person's device, this could then give easier legal grounds for record companies to go after music pirates. The CEO of Activated Content states that it would take a user with a supercomputer and about a month's worth of time to be able to successfully Track down and remove an inserted watermark.

Earlier, Universal Music had declared that it was going to offer music without content protecting DRM on it. Universal is listed on Activated Content's website as a known partner. The CEO of Activated Content refused to comment on whether or not these DRM-free music offerings were going to have audio watermarks placed on them or not.

Additionally, although Activated Content has their own watermarking technology, it was announced that they have signed an agreement with Microsoft's research division, who is currently in charge of the development of DRM techniques and standards.

Source:
PCWorld


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    Discuss this article!  There are more user comments available, read them here
    DXR88 (Member) 16 August 2007 19:59 Send private message to this user   
    Dont like it The tracking idea the Water MArk the invasion of personel preffernce. Oh and you still dont own the music. If some one manages to here the water mark whats it gonna say. Were greedy basterds copy these and more money comes are way.
    alim20 (Newbie) 17 August 2007 5:31 Send private message to this user   
    So let's say I bought 50 cents album from itunes. (g unit is a client of the company behind this article selling drm technology) and I made 5 copies for my friends. Are they saying that could come back to harm me legally some time down the road? This is stupid. Out of all my friends there is not one person I know who has never received a cd for free from a friend.
    redux79 (Junior Member) 17 August 2007 8:03 Send private message to this user   
    Originally posted by c1c:
    That's great that the human ear can't hear it but I dont want my dog barking for no reason or a bunch of deer dancing in my yard.
    Now that would be a very intresting news report, Just imagine the disclaimer they would have to add to every product.
    anubis66 (AfterDawn Addict) 17 August 2007 10:12 Send private message to this user   
    Quote:
    Originally posted by anubis66:
    this is just going to cause lots of lawsuits on people passing the songs unknowingly to friends. not to mention music travels once it is digital. plus, i dont want they knowing what i listen to and know where i am. that is just bs.
    If you are going to share your music, just share it with people you know. Not with 1,000 people on bittorrent, or any other file sharing medium that can be tracked. And who the heck uses bittorrent for sharing music anyway?

    DRM sucks, but I see no problem in this technology. Unless it evolves to the point where my PC gets remotely scanned unbeknownst to me for a song that I may have ripped from a friends CD.
    accually, i use torrents to download music, and not lame pp programs. with torrents, i cant get a whole album in one swing with higher transfer speeds than anything else. even when i need one song or two, i will download the album torrent and select only the songs i want for dl. its so much easier than dealing with p2p programs like limewire.
    spydah (Junior Member) 17 August 2007 17:31 Send private message to this user   
    This article is funny because the more ways they come up with to stop music downloads and mark their stuff people find easier ways around their so called anti-piracy product.
    webe123 (Inactive) 17 August 2007 17:37 Send private message to this user   
    Sorry, but this is NOT songs with no DRM in them. I do not buy that for a second.

    They DO have DRM, in that they are watermarked! They may not have traditional DRM that restricts you on what devcice you play it on, but that does not mean it does not track you....which is only a little different than what traditional DRM does...as DRM is restrictive as to what device it plays on.

    So basically this is DRM music that is tracked on the net with compatibility for all players. OR another FORM of DRM! That is it in a nutshell.

    If you are going to be stupid enough to fall for this, I feel sorry for you.

    This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 17 August 2007 17:41

    Andrew691 (Senior Member) 18 August 2007 20:45 Send private message to this user   
    Originally posted by webe123:
    Sorry, but this is NOT songs with no DRM in them. I do not buy that for a second.

    They DO have DRM, in that they are watermarked! They may not have traditional DRM that restricts you on what devcice you play it on, but that does not mean it does not track you....which is only a little different than what traditional DRM does...as DRM is restrictive as to what device it plays on.

    So basically this is DRM music that is tracked on the net with compatibility for all players. OR another FORM of DRM! That is it in a nutshell.

    If you are going to be stupid enough to fall for this, I feel sorry for you.
    As long as you dont do anything you shouldn't with it, i.e upload it onto the internet, it seems fully reasonable to do this. The only people this should bother are the people who buy music then upload it to bittorrent, those are the people who will get snapped quickly, anyone else should not even be bothered by it.
    That is providing it is truly undetectable to both the human ear, and as mentioned, animal ears as well(which is probably the biggest problem). All in all I would say its still not perfect, but its a bloody big step in the right directon.
    Mez (Senior Member) 19 August 2007 17:16 Send private message to this user   
    webe123 these are tunes without DRM no matter what you say. The only big reason not to accept these is to imply that you would share them with others.

    MightyOne you are asking the right questions. Most of this is developers trying to make a buck off the even greeder pigs that have no sense of technology. I would not need a super computer to foul the water mark. Any standard audio tools will bugger that one up. I hope the pigs are not listening! I love to hear that they have bought yet another doomsday device that only a fool would believe that it would work.

    Weirdname I am impressed! You can't have much of a life and must have been doing this for ever. At least you can't be married or have the most amiable wife ever! That would take a serious amount of time effort to manage. What software to do use to manage it. I have been using Media Monkey and have been very pleased.
    borhan9 (AfterDawn Addict) 19 August 2007 20:50 Send private message to this user   
    I am so not for this this is worse than drm. No to anything that can be placed and tracked or traced.
    WierdName (Senior Member) 19 August 2007 21:07 Send private message to this user   
    Originally posted by borhan9:
    I am so not for this this is worse than drm. No to anything that can be placed and tracked or traced.
    But haven't you heard? We aren't responsible enough so we need to be tracked like cattle with tags on our ears.
    enigma644 (Newbie) 20 August 2007 2:20 Send private message to this user   
    Quote:
    The CEO of Activated Content states that it would take a user with a supercomputer and about a month's worth of time to be able to successfully Track down and remove an inserted watermark.
    What rubbish! You just take two copies of the same track from different people (e.g. different audio watermarks) and then you compare them!! Then you'll find the audio watermark in seconds and you can scramble it.
    DXR88 (Member) 20 August 2007 2:25 Send private message to this user   
    WOW weirdname, whats next huh. Oh i know the day were born the put tracking chips in the back of are head. or mabey they well brand us with the must products we pushased most of when branded you can no longer buy competetor products or youll be shot on site and fed to the trolls.
    DXR88 (Member) 20 August 2007 2:32 Send private message to this user   
    enigma644, that depends if its using I/O bit Stop as a watermarking or not. there were games that used i/o bit stoping as drm the game would work it would just f itself up to an unplayable state.
    Mez (Senior Member) 20 August 2007 6:18 Send private message to this user   
    DXR88 could you explain a bit more about the using I/O bit Stop? This sounds interesting. Maybe they are smarter than I thought they were. Without really understanding that concept, I bet something like that might work. I do have a guess what I/O stop bits are. The first part of the file could be marked as being watermarked. Then they could easily select only the watermarked tunes to work on. They would need a flag at a defined spot not to waste time on non-watermarked files. They could harvest a bunch of files saving the IP address then work on them. They would need an easy test so they could discard the non watermarked tunes before they waste much CPU time on them.
    DXR88 (Member) 20 August 2007 13:10 Send private message to this user   
    I/O bit stop is basicly what it sounds like. Games were the first to use it. What happens is this A lot of video crackers will no what im talking about. the game would run but when the game was copied it was done so when I/O bit stop was enabled. Copyers and burner would appeare to reconize this data so it would be burned the thing is the code is reverised and scrambled when loaded into the buffers of copiers and burners. the game would appear to work fine except that one of two things would happen the grafics would blur out so much that you could see nothing. or your keyboard would stop unexpectedly. I/O bit stop however could very well be dangerous to Ipod or other internet connected Mp3 players. They could for instances kill your ipod built in os without having to kill the player. kill the os as in stop it temporaly or completly stop it.
    Or the music could render itself useless. However ripping the code out would do the same as destroying the music.
    DXR88 (Member) 20 August 2007 16:39 Send private message to this user   
    Simplest way to under stand I/O bit Stop is this (Sample code)<=1 >=0 (equal non stop bit encoded audio =101001110100100111000101/

    stop bit encoded audio=1>0<0>>0<<01100>01< were > < are encoded 1&0

    in sense of this there will be watermarks with stop bit information on > < sense ripping them out is now out of the question sense there bits of info not a stream. the water mark is likly 1=ultra high frequency beep while 0 more than likly will be an ultra low frequency. but ripping out any one bit will be like scratching a cd scratch enought audio no longer will play or it will stutter skip or just fail to start at all.

    my geuss is the only one way to find out and decode the info is to steal the keys from RIAA database server in witch the key will be gaurded by I.T lackey that get paid million to guard this stuff like a dog.

    however if one of the keys get stolen or decoded they could easily just replace it with a new code remember. the water mark is bing copy righted not the bits that hide the bit stop technology
    Mez (Senior Member) 21 August 2007 3:12 Send private message to this user   
    Sorry, I still don’t understand the =, > and < are you bracketing the information
    >information2<
    >>information3<<

    I was expecting the stop bit to be like a stop byte for character strings. In some programming languages, character strings are a bunch of bytes with a null byte on the end. The stop byte is not part of the character string but defines the end. However, you can only have one ‘flavor’ of NULL. I don't know that much about audio technology.
    WierdName (Senior Member) 21 August 2007 11:19 Send private message to this user   
    You know, this "solution" brings to attention the same problem of what if someone steals your music? Or say you lose an object like an Ipod or memory card etc. that had your music on it. Then what happens if someone finds it then posts all the music online? Are they going to implement something to report lost or stolen data? And if they do, how will you be able to remember everything you have/had? And even further into the issue, how do they know you don't just report stolen data so that you can post it online without them thinking it's you? This still leaves a lot of problems.
    rlessmue (Junior Member) 21 August 2007 12:49 Send private message to this user   
    o.k. maybe this will help. "We Humans" hear sounds from 20Hz (maybe some of us)to 20,000Hz (again, maybe some of us). "We Humans" don't really care for sounds past these areas (lower than 20Hz and Higher than 22,000Hz). So it is simple. Someone can use any good "wave editing" program to cut out the sounds past those areas - while keeping the other areas in place. Some programs call it a "High-pass filter" or "Low-pass filter" to help "clean-up" unwanted "noise" from the music they are editing.
    I'm "sure" that if "Audio Watermarking" makes it "mainstream" that someone will make $$ by creating a small program that you just pass your music through to "clean" them.
    DXR88 (Member) 21 August 2007 13:53 Send private message to this user   
    Wont work they will use a program to scan for the watermark. Whats the fbi going to do listen to stacks of water marked cd to see if they can hear audible water mark sounds. No i Doubt it
    DXR88 (Member) 21 August 2007 14:05 Send private message to this user   
    Mez the > < are incoded bits with bit stop tecnology. alright if this bit has been alterd with music stop on alter commandthe flag at the front and end are just start here stop here. but the real problims in the music itself

    start music if no alter found contenue play. stop music on bit alter and skip to end music intiate alert message warnig on bit tampering
    Unfocused (Junior Member) 22 August 2007 18:20 Send private message to this user   
    Would this watermark consist of a single frequency, or multiple tones?

    I forget the technical name for it, but my Clarion DSP has a noise filter built into it. This filter effectively flips the sound coming out of one channel, runs both channels through the processor and then flips the channel back to normal before putting this out to the speakers. The processor will remove any sounds that are identical on the flipped and normal channels. This works great for stuff like alternator whine, tape hiss, static, etc.

    I would think that this would effectively eliminate this watermark without a need to trim frequencies or re encode the source file.
    c1c (Member) 23 August 2007 18:45 Send private message to this user   
    What if you just 'record what your hear'? Problem solved.

    hp dvd 840, vaio pcg-frv27,Epson r260 Printer, Wacom Graphire 4x5, Verbatim 4X Printable DVD-R
    WierdName (Senior Member) 23 August 2007 19:42 Send private message to this user   
    Originally posted by c1c:
    What if you just 'record what your hear'? Problem solved.
    Because if the speaker and microphone are both capable of playing and recording the same sound, then the problem isn't solved.

    Doesn't expecting the unexpected make the unexpected expected and therefore mean your expecting the expected which was the unexpected until you expected it?
    Opinions are immunities to being told we're wrong.

    mm2000y (Junior Member) 24 August 2007 7:51 Send private message to this user   
    Another reason why peer to peer file sharing will continue. People will be worried about buying watermarked songs and it geting out to the net. I don't think the entertainment industry will care if your music was stolen or given away to a single friend who shared it with the wrong party. You will be sued as if you did it on purpose. You will have to settle in court for some outrageous figure because you will never be able to prove it wasn't your fault. The RIAA will have hard proof it was your mp3 making law suits quicker and easier for them. I would rather have DRM I can get rid of by simply burning it to a CD than a watermarked song which is there forever.
    c1c (Member) 24 August 2007 9:06 Send private message to this user   
    Just buy the watermarked song and then download the flac from the net. Nothing wrong here.

    hp dvd 840, vaio pcg-frv27,Epson r260 Printer, Wacom Graphire 4x5, Verbatim 4X Printable DVD-R
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