Re: off: Audio CD's and Microsoft

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On 9/16/07, Rick <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Good for you, but not for allot of us, anything add to the encoded audio
>> recording...in is IN its "signal path", will degrade the audio quality.
>> (DRM) for example.
> [...]
> 
> You realize that you are writing about this on the mailing list for a
> perceptual audio codec which, in its common use case, throws out
> 9/10ths of the raw audio data? ...

> 
> But while we're here, I do want to say that I don't have too much
> sympathy for the anti-watermarking crowd. The loud argument I see over
> and over again is "OMG QUALITY!" without any objective data to back
> those arguments up...  To uniquely identify a listener with a
> comfortable amount of redundancy, what do they need 64bits? 96bits?
> ... and the goal is to robustly smuggle that into many megabytes of
> compressed audio?  That sounds 'easy enough' that I think the burden
> of proof should be on the people who claim that it hurts quality.
> 

I'm not sure why you feel the burden of proof lies with the
people saying that modifying the signal is going to affect
audio quality.  That seems like a perfectly reasonable
starting hypothesis.  In addition MS is the company that
gave us 64kbps 'CD' quality WMA; their QA department appears
to own a rather tinny pair of laptop speakers.  The problem
is also harder than fitting 96 bits into many megabytes:
you must be able to get the watermark from a shorter clip.
That said it is probably possible to achieve and most people
do not listen to music in ideal conditions anyway.

> The rest of the opposition to the use of watermarking to mark
> commercial audio downloads really seem to reduce to "Oh shit, if I
> break the law I might get caught" ... Or in other words, your real
> problem is with copyright law and not with the watermarking.
> 
> People demanded freedom from DRM which turned their own devices
> against them. Fine. So the industry starts using watermarking. You
> should be happy, oppressive DRM is gone.  It seems to me that people
> are not happy about this turn of events because they never really
> cared about avoiding devices which were defective by design, never
> much cared about their freedom to do legal things... but were really
> only worried about their ability to get away with making illicit
> copies.

Personally I don't like DRM for the first set of reasons,
they were designed to undermine the ways people traditionally
used music and to try to screw a bit more money out of customers
by making it possible to force them to pay over and over again
for something they previously would have bought once.  I agree
though that many people who talk about privacy are concerned
about their privacy in breaking the law.

-- 
imalone