From: Alex de Joode <usura@replay.com>
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Message Hash: 904ec6be8a53c5f4495816e51024881f9a3d153d372c8b44f2b66f90a4ca8312
Message ID: <199607222127.XAA22946@basement.replay.com>
Reply To: N/A
UTC Datetime: 1996-07-23 07:37:10 UTC
Raw Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 15:37:10 +0800
From: Alex de Joode <usura@replay.com>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 15:37:10 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Digital Watermarks for copy protection in recent Billboard
Message-ID: <199607222127.XAA22946@basement.replay.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain
[..]
: > The system will have to rely on proprietary tech and security through
: > obscurity. Even know how watermarks are stored without understanding
: > the math, one must be able to somehow garble the sound without
: > distorting it, but which renders the watermark useless.
: Actually, this would be quite easy. The "watermark" would be a
: signal that plays inband, but out of our hearing range during the
: entire CD. The human ear can only hear in the 20-20,000 (Hz, KHZ?,
: whatever) range. It would be trivial to add a digital ID signal at,
: say 30,000 or 15 or something like that. This could then be decoded,
: if need be. This seems the easiest and most efficient way. This
: could also be defeated with a lot of $$ (and/or a LOT of HD space).
: If the frequecy is known (it can be found out) it can easily be run
: through recording studio eqipment that can very effectively isolate
: the frequency and cut it out. If you have a LOT of HDD space
: (digital audio at 2 stereo tracks, not sure of the sampling rate or
: bit resolution, takes about 20MB of HDD space per minute (2 tracks,
: good sampling and bit rate) ) you could probably find the freq.
HDD space is -cheap- 2 gig drives sell voor 350 usd in Holland,
most music cd's contain 70 minutes of recording thus -at your
20 Mb per minute rate- would require 1.4 gigs.
So basicly 'CD-pirates' need to buy a PC with a 2 gig HDD and
a CD-R, a 'one-off' investment of say 5000 usd; besides their
normal cd maunfacturing, packaging and transportation, those
additional 5000 usd are peanuts compared to the total investment
for pirating CD's.
: fairly easily by isolation and just edit it out, and write the new
: stuff to a CD-R. If the signal is purely digital, I would imagine
: that it might be even easier that if it were an analog signal (?).
: Someone w/ good equipment (Digital Labs' stuff, or SAW (Software
: Audio Workshop) would be able to do this w/o much problem. The
: question is is the price/effort worth it? In quantity maybe. On an
: individual basis, only if you already happen to have the erquipment.
: I have a suspiscion that this type of thing will not really come to
: any kind of fruition due to not only the ability to defeat this, but
: mainly due to things like buying at a garage sale, etc. If it did,
: only MASS market piraters would be investigated. (Another example of
: a law creating it's own violators. Don't make the law, there won't
: be mass piratingof "clean CDs"
bEST Regards,
--
-AJ-
Return to July 1996
Return to “Alex de Joode <usura@replay.com>”
1996-07-23 (Tue, 23 Jul 1996 15:37:10 +0800) - Re: Digital Watermarks for copy protection in recent Billboard - Alex de Joode <usura@replay.com>