Posted on 12/30/2002 5:11:11 PM PST by Drippy
No, I didn't ignore anything of the sort. My argument stems from the legal, moral and long term consequences of this downloading.
Regardless of what Mr. Lewis thinks about it, that is the focus of the article we are commenting upon.
People who steal.
Again, what's going to happen is either:
1) There will be fewer artists.
2) Sophisticated means of copy protection will be mandated by law, effectively punishing the majority for the actions of a few.
3) Both.
Don't fool yourself, this is very likely and in fact has already been discussed. Remember what happened when the insurance companies decided they wanted everyone to wear a seatbelt?
Make no mistake, if this continues it will be addressed at some point. Of course, folks like me who don't do this "downloading" will just be punished right along with all the rest.
Times have changed. Technology has progressed. The issue is sharing. The new technology improves the efficiency of sharing.
Why shouldn't I be able to share my collection of older CDs with those who are willing to share their newly purchased CDs.
Note that there are only so many hours in the day. Most people listen to but one tune at a time. One can't take "full" advantage of the semi-infinite number of tunes available to for enjoyment. There is an upper bound on how far this can go. The technology improves the efficiency of the consumers' entertainment $. Live music is still the most desireable. Musicians will still be compensated.
It's a market situation where the record companies are just going to have to adapt to the new, technological driven efficiency of using recorded music.
No, I am not willing to do that.
They have as much right to call their congressman and complain as you and I do.
Just because you become a business owner or executive doesn't mean you lose your first amendment right to free speech.
Be no reason to have it..
No, the point is that it would be CHEAPER to buy or download this watermarked music because the record company wouldn't need to worry so much about piracy. If you are paying to download, they automatically know your PayPal ID and email address or some comparable identifier, and it doesn't cost you anything extra. If you are buying a physical CD at the record store and you want to pay cash, you pay full price but get a rebate when you send in the card with your name and address.
Databases are cheap to maintain now. My 80GB hard drive could easily handle all the record purchases in the USA for a month.
I'm not saying this is the right way to go, just making the point that it's technically reasonable to implement. I wish the record companies would wake up and realize they could do a lot better than this with a different business model, but this would at least be better than what they have. It's a bad situation now because of the "moral hazard" -- a certain type of unethical and illegal activity has become quite a bit easier to get away with.
I also wish that the artists would wake up and realize they don't have to idiotically sign away their rights with the same boilerplate contract language that has been used for decades.
I'm not, but I'm serious about putting it to the test. I assume you have a working implementation of this? Why not put out a watermarked audio file, and let me hammer on it for a while? Let's find out if your watermark is as robust as you hope it is ;)
The point is not to make copying impossible, just to make HIGH-QUALITY copying SUFFICIENTLY difficult that people will buy the CDs instead, and this is certainly achievable.
Come, now - you're obviously smart enough to spot the flaw in that kind of plan. Namely, it only takes one person figuring out the magic formula for munging your watermark to kill your plan stone-dead, just like it only took one person figuring out the way the DVD CSS system works, and how to beat it, in order to render it totally ineffective at stopping anyone from copying DVD's at will. And that's because the next step is to write a program to automate the munging process, and make it available to everyone.
Just ask Jake Johanssen. High-quality from-scratch copies of DVD's are well beyond the abilities of most people, but pointing and clicking is not. And it doesn't matter that the vast majority of people have no idea how DeCSS works, or how later, cleverer solutions work, or what you'd have to do to go about solving the CSS problem for yourself, because they don't need to know those things. Some clever person did the hard work for them. You don't need a whole planet full of smart people to kill a scheme like this - you only need one ;)
I don't have this implemented, I just know that the theory of it works -- it's my own scheme, inspired by the postings on this thread. Trust me, I have the Computer Science background to know this is doable -- feel free to implement it yourself and try to patent it, I'm sure you will find someone has beaten you to it.
Come, now - you're obviously smart enough to spot the flaw in that kind of plan. Namely, it only takes one person figuring out the magic formula for munging your watermark to kill your plan stone-dead, just like it only took one person figuring out the way the DVD CSS system works, and how to beat it, in order to render it totally ineffective at stopping anyone from copying DVD's at will. And that's because the next step is to write a program to automate the munging process, and make it available to everyone.
There are actually two separate kinds of piracy problem this is trying to address.
The first is simply to make it difficult for people to untraceably copy their CDs and give them to their friends who then won't have to pay the record company and the artist. My scheme certainly does this, because it becomes provable who bought the original copy of the music. This is not really compromised by allowing people to pay extra for an anonymous cash purchase -- you're balancing a lot of little thefts against a lot of little extra bits of revenue. A pirate would always be able to get hold of the music without identifyng himself anyway, by stealing a CD.
The second problem is the large-scale commercial pirate who munges the watermark or provides software for others to do it. The beauty of my scheme is that even if he does this, it is still provable that the music has been tampered with because the watermark is munged. Many people will have illegal munged copies of the music, but they will all be identifiable as munged (someone who has an unidentified UNmunged copy will be able to say that he paid cash, so there is no evidence he did anything wrong, but someone who has a munged copy is in the position of a person who bought a paperback book with the cover missing, prima facie evidence of participation in an illegal activity).
The place public-key encryption comes in -- it allows the record company to provide free software which will make it easy for anyone to READ a watermark or see that the watermark has been munged, without allowing people to create their own watermarks or easily munge them. This could be a feature in apps like RealPlayer -- when you play the music file, the serial number of the copy it came from is displayed.
If I did that it would cost me an extra $5 a week. The discounts are worth the sacrifice in privacy for me, as they are for almost all the supermarket's patrons. Voluntary exchange, nothing wrong with it. Why is what Shop-Rite does a good and ethical business practice while doing it for music would be bad?
So I take it you also think 'sharing' (e.g. pirating) software is okay?
Oh, I'm sure it has. But I have a few ideas on how to attack it, and a little CS background myself. And I also know there are people out there that are smarter than me, who are much more serious about attacking it than I would be ;)
The first is simply to make it difficult for people to untraceably copy their CDs and give them to their friends who then won't have to pay the record company and the artist. My scheme certainly does this, because it becomes provable who bought the original copy of the music.
The economics of the plan are not working in your favor. Essentially, you can no longer have a single master copy, from which you press your millions of copies for individual sale. Each copy has to be unique, which means that you have to have some way of inserting a unique watermark on to each individual disk during the copying process. While I'm sure this is eminently doable, I'm also pretty sure that nobody has implemented a means for doing this yet, meaning you have to create your own disk production facility from scratch, rather than simply using the existing industry-standard solutions for pressing ten million CD's. Your watermarked disks are inevitably going to be more expensive than non-watermarked disks, or less profitable than non-watermarked disks, until you recover the costs of such a watermarking process.
The second problem is the large-scale commercial pirate who munges the watermark or provides software for others to do it. The beauty of my scheme is that even if he does this, it is still provable that the music has been tampered with because the watermark is munged. Many people will have illegal munged copies of the music, but they will all be identifiable as munged.
And then what? You can make a pretty good inference about the legal ownership of music available through P2P systems now, but what good is that? Unless you have some means of enforcing your desires, it does you no good to merely be aware that 10,000 people have an illegal copy of your hit song.
The place public-key encryption comes in -- it allows the record company to provide free software which will make it easy for anyone to READ a watermark or see that the watermark has been munged, without allowing people to create their own watermarks or easily munge them.
That's fine, if you can eliminate and replace Red Book audio with some secure format from the get-go. For downloadable music that you sell, you can probably make it work. But audio CD's are not encrypted, and can't be encrypted without breaking literally billions of CD players out there. Consumers are not likely to be enamored of an album that requires them to buy a whole new stereo to listen to it. And then you're back to square one, limited by the fact that the standard consumer audio format is totally insecure. It's just plain old PCM audio, with no encryption or anything, and no security beyond your ability to make robust watermarks.
You can watermark to your heart's content, but once you stick it on a Red Book audio CD, you've abandoned any hopes of preventing people from ripping it and trading it. If your watermark holds up, you'll be able to identify the illegal copies, but then again, big deal. Last I checked, there are something like 60 million P2P users worldwide, and that number is growing quite rapidly. We're going to need a lot more prison space if you think you can seriously make a dent via enforcement ;)
This could be a feature in apps like RealPlayer -- when you play the music file, the serial number of the copy it came from is displayed.
Unless you have total control of my computer, hardware and software, any solution that depends on a trusted client is doomed, doomed, doomed. Even for a secure, encrypted audio format. How long will it take someone to disassemble your player and pipe the output someplace you'd prefer it didn't go?
The manufacturing is not the problem, in the software industry they routinely make a hundred thousand unique but functionally equivalent CDs in one run.
A big difference from the current system is that nobody is restricting file-sharing software like Napster which has plenty of legitimate uses. The problem now is that once you have the music on your hard drive no one can tell where you got it from, whether you read it from your own CD or illegally downloaded it from a hacker network. With my system, legal innocent activity is utterly unrestricted.
You can make a pretty good inference about the legal ownership of music available through P2P systems now
Not true, these systems have legit uses; and the difference between "a pretty good inference" and legal proof is important. Atlas publishers and dictionary publishers routinely introduce tiny intentional mistakes into their work to snare illegal copyists, and that stands up in court -- this would be similar.
You misunderstood me on encryption. I wasn't recommending that players be crippled so they can't play old music -- just that the DISPLAY the watermark if there is one, while still playing the music if there isn't. I'm not encrypting the whole watermarked audio -- I have regular audio with an encrypted watermark. Get the difference?
I don't care if I can't trust the client machine. I'm NOT trying to place restrictions on how you can listen to something! I'm just making sure that an evidentiary trail remains in order to discourage you doing something illegal. The user's experience is exactly the same as before. And you may copy the file and give it to whomever you want -- but if you do so illegally you will have more to worry about than before, because it is no longer "a perfect crime". The RealPlayer app displaying the serial number or a "munged" flag is a feature that is there for SOCIAL reasons -- remember the analogy with ripped-cover paperbacks or notch-jacketed LPs. You may have a circle of friends who views such things with equanimity, but for some the disapproval factor will be there.
The RealPlayer app displaying the serial number or a "munged" flag is a feature that is there for SOCIAL reasons -- remember the analogy with ripped-cover paperbacks or notch-jacketed LPs. You may have a circle of friends who views such things with equanimity, but for some the disapproval factor will be there.
LOL. I don't think it's a matter of anyone's circle of friends - the history of payments on the honor system is not a particularly positive one. Ask any author of a reasonably popular shareware program what he thinks the rate of payment is among people who regularly use his program - and then realize that he's fooling himself if he tells you much more than about 10%, and in my experience, 5% is usually closer still to the actual truth.
And then, of course, many people will find their consciences assuaged by simply using a player that doesn't read or recognize such a watermark. And all this is still assuming that your watermark is robust enough to survive dedicated, repeated attempts to find a method of wrecking it, which, as I've noted, I have my doubts about...
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