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Will Record Companies Have Secure Music?
John Haskowi
OSAll Contributor
The music companies were against cassette tapes when they first came out because they were too easy to copy. Likewise, when DVD came out, the movie companies were insistent that the easily copyable VHS format would not be repeated. The same problems have arisen now that Net music is becoming essential to the survival of the large music companies.
MP3 was the first real movement into digital music -- the WAV format was just too large for easy download, listening and storage. MP3 was perfect in the eyes of the listeners: it was small, high quality and easily reproducable. The record companies disagreed though -- they needed something more secure.
The Secure Digital Music Initiative, a consortium of industry experts from the computer, Internet and music industries, has finally come up with a set of standards to allow the downloading of "secure" digital music over the Internet.
The first stage of the plan set out by the SDMI calls for the support of all formats -- including mp3. After the first year the music industry will begin inserting digital watermarks into the music to "prevent unauthorized copying."
The main problem with watermarks is that they require software to recognize them. Any software which doesn´t adhere to the SDMI standards will have no problem reproducing the music, according to one musician who has embraced the mp3 standard. He says he received this information from mp3.com.
The music industry has actually challenged the sales of Diamond Multimedia´s portable mp3 player -- claiming it was specifically constructed for pirated music. They lost, of course.
Only time will tell whether SDMI´s new standards will be easy to defeat. Some think they will, and SDMI claims they won´t. Interestingly, the copy controls on DVD movies are easily defeated through the addition of a fifty dollar box available at your local Circuit City. If the DVD copy protection didn´t work why should the digital music copy protection work? |
