Record labels looking to keep their property off of illegal file-sharing networks have begun experimenting with a technology called 'watermarking' as the successor to DRM, or digital right management. DRM is a system of adding a small amount of data to an audio file, which puts draconian limitations on copying, burning, and playback of the material.
Customers dislike these restrictions and hackers have easily broken the protection, making DRM more of a nuisance than an effective anti-piracy tool. With a little extra work, DRM can be easily circumvented by non-hackers as well, thanks to the so-called analog gap. Simply burn your purchased track to a CD, then re-rip in your preferred format and the DRM copy protection is gone. For these reasons, labels and online stores have been abandoning DRM en masse over the past few months.
EMI,
Universal and Sony are all joining the DRM-free bandwagon, as have countless indies on the completely DRM-free
eMusic site.
Universal is now planning to place supposedly inaudible watermarks into the audio itself. Watermark audio is comprised of slight oscillations at frequencies that the human ear cannot detect, but that a decoding device easily can. Because the watermark is placed in the track as audio, simply burning and ripping will no longer work as a means of erasing the extra info slipped in there by the record label. Though watermarks could be used to track individual songs back to pirates and file-sharers, they will not be used for that purpose at first. Instead, Universal will be using the watermarks simply to identify that a track began as a legal download to see if stripping a song of DRM has an
impact on piracy.
Activated Content, the company licensing the technology to Universal has posted a '
Third Party Audibility Test,' which says there is no objective evidence that watermark is audible in two test tracks ('Beautiful Women' by
Boyz II Men and 'English Roundabout' by
XTC). However, a similar watermarking system was tried with the
DVD Audio format (music on DVDs) and many audiophiles -- about the only people who bought DVD-A discs -- complained that the watermark was often easy to hear. Whether the audio is inaudible to humans ears or not, the truth is that the original music as it was intended to be heard by the artist has been altered.
But, labels will always want to track and try to dissuade the theft of their content, so for now watermarking seems like the obvious next step after the failure of DRM. Whether or not we'll see a massive backlash or an easy way to break the protection remains to be seen.
From
Slashdot and
Cnet
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