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A new tracking system could allow (http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=5671) music using a new type of digital watermark to be tracked back to the original owner. Will this help curb piracy? What about music ripped from CDs and then shared and so on? This ought to be interesting.







The Fraunhofer Institute has developed prototype technology to help curb the sharp rise in online music piracy, which ironically has been enabled through another invention of the renowned German research group: MP3 audio compression.

Im willing to bet that after a full 18 seconds on the market it will be hacked and bypassed.



The music industry should work on making GOOD music instead of the normal BS that they piss out and expect us to pay for. The industry is flooded with alot of the same crap and noone wants to listen to it anymore. For example how many "remixes" do you want to listen too of puff daddy flubbing his way through something or someone else thinking they are cool. Maybe if they burned the contracts for all the useless garbage artists they have signed theyd save a crapload of money.

I am already comming up with solutions for this, I wanna see a little more info on it tho. This watermarking fingerprint, really doesn't make sense, how they are going to trace it back to the owner. Is this strictly for people that download music off a webstore and pass it on, or copying a cd to your computer and passing it. This will be foiled or someone will sew them, for privacy violations I can here it already.

copyright*

and i'm with zan, no way that any software watermark could withstand everything the scene could throw at it.

worst case there will have to be a watermark rewriter software package

The problem that execs cant seem to fathom is the fact that to the underground communities this is a game of capture the flag of sorts. They want to be the first community to smear thier fingerwork all over cracking the security. The execs think its a fool proof way to stop the hackers in thier tracks but in reality it spurs them on and keeps them busy in thier 9-5 (probably) IT jobs.



If they want to put some brakes on the underground then produce quality items at a low cost. People dont buy windows XP because its full of bugs and costs around 400 bucks. Make it a decent product and around 100 bucks and some more people might actually buy it. Of course Microsoft is really probably just targeting the corporate world with outragous license fees and could care less about the general public (prime example windows XP home or WindowsME). I purchase licenses on almost a monthly basis for software for our work and its insane how much money we spend on licenses, especially for Visio.