Keeping an Eye on Your Ears
Major labels and some tech firms want to keep tabs on when and how digital music is used.
By Tech Live staff
August 29, 2001
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After being burned once by Napster, the recording industry wants to make sure that it can keep a tight leash on music copyrights in the Internet Age, when music piracy is as easy as clicking a mouse.
If the industry and some tech companies have their way, the Net-connected portable audio player of the future will keep tabs on its owner's listening habits and will make sure that the user has paid for the right to download copyright tunes from subscription-based sites.
For example, a wireless audio player being developed by electronics maker Sonicblue is able to go online, find a particular song selected by its owner, and then check to make sure the owner has already paid to download the song.
"The device allows [music sites] to license a particular user with a specific set of rights," said Andy Wolfe, chief technology officer at Sonicblue. "And the way most of the sites work is they identify the device and generate a key specific to that device, so [the user] has to have both the device and the key in order to play that particular piece of music."
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But getting these smart devices out into the public is only one half of the music industry's strategy to make sure people pay for downloaded music.
The major recording labels and some tech companies also want to ensure that they can track music on the Internet by placing an indelible mark on each and every music file.
The Secure Digital Music Initiative, a consortium of recording industry and technology companies, is developing a file format that contains digital watermarks -- encrypted pieces of code that indicates who the file belongs to and tracks how many times the file has been copied.
So far, however, SDMI hasn't been able to come up with a hack-proof file format that prevents users from tampering with the watermarks. Earlier this year, a Princeton professor and a team of graduate students answered SDMI's public challenge and cracked its prototype watermark encryption system.
But privacy advocates warn that even if digital watermarks and other anti-privacy technologies are successfully implemented, they may infringe the privacy of consumers.
"That's certainly something about watermarks that we're very concerned about," said Fred Von Lohmann, staff attorney of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit organization that monitors privacy on the Internet. "Traditionally, you went to the store, you bought a CD, and when you went home you played that CD. Nobody kept track of when you played it, how many times you played it, what you played before it, what you played after it."
Privacy issues and technical roadblocks aside, most industry watchers believe secure file formats will be the basis of music distribution in the future. Making sure that digital music is distributed legally and fairly may even bring artists closer to their audience, Sonicblue's Wolfe said.
"People who listen to music like to listen to different kinds and use it in different places, and they'd prefer to get music directly from the people who create it," Wolfe said. "So by having this secure tech, artists and the publishers are going to put music out there for customers to buy and then customers are going to listen to that music on new kinds of devices that give them more freedom."
