It's now illegal to turn on your computer

[Joshua Zeidner]

On 12/30/07, der.hans <PLUGd at lufthans.com> wrote:
> Am 30. Dec, 2007 schwätzte Scott so:
>
> > I think you're getting a little over-excited there.
> > The point, I believe, that Josh is trying to make is
> > that the RIAA had a number of songs flagged awhile
> > back that could "phone home" when they're downloaded
> > via the internet.
>
> The songs called home? Or do you mean they released some with specific
> watermarks in order to track them?
>
> There are claims that the Apple DRM-free songs are watermarked to track
> who purchased them. Wonder if a binary diff could be used to drop the
> watermarks.

   In the case of audio watermarking, in the schema I am familiar with
the data is encoded in the spectral dimension.  A simple 'binary diff'
would not work.  AMOF, a binary diff wouldn't work to identify the
similarity between two different mp3 encodings of the same song.  It
has been proven however, that any watermark can be stripped from a
file, but *not* necessarily detected.  I would imagine that if the
recording industry chooses to invest sufficiently in watermarking,
they would not do so without at least a minimum of legal support
(criminalizing the removal of the watermark).

  http://www.ece.uvic.ca/~aupward/w/watermarking.htm

  -jmz


>
> > There's a certain paragraph there that says the words
> > are "I suppose...", which tends to mean that there is
> > some doubt as to how hard-line the RIAA is actually
> > attempting to claim its absurd position in the matter.
> > Since these cases revolve around the fact that these
> > people were actually sharing copies of songs that they
>
> The pdf Craig linked to claims there was sharing via kazaa, not just
> copying from the CD. Still, if they are also claiming that shifting to
> digital from the CD is copyright infringement and the court upheld that
> claim it's a major shift in shrinking fair use.
>
> ciao,
>
> der.hans
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