TIME is running out for audio pirates and broadcasters who fail to pay
royalties and dodge copyright controls. Over the next six months, the music
industry will be subjecting a raft of audio watermarking and copyright
technologies to rigorous independent tests. In 1998, once the industry knows
what works, it will start using the technologies to protect recordings.
The project, called Muse, was set up in September 1996 by the International
Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and the European Commission鈥檚
directorate-general for industry, DG III. Europe鈥檚 ESPRIT programme is providing
half the funding, with record companies such as BMG, EMI, PolyGram, Sony,
Universal, Warner and Telstar giving the rest.
The IFPI is seeking a reliable way to bury codes in music recordings or video
soundtracks to control copying, monitor use on the Internet and let copyright
owners track broadcasts. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not that we don鈥檛 trust broadcasters to log and
pay for what they transmit,鈥� says Paul Jessop, the IFPI鈥檚 director of
technology. 鈥淭his way we don鈥檛 have to worry about trusting them.鈥�
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The IFPI wants the embedded signal to be inaudible to the human ear and
robust enough to survive conversion between analogue and digital formats,
compression and transmission. The embedded signal will also have to work with
any future recording equipment.
Jessop has contacted all the companies working on embedded signalling. An
advertisement placed in the 7 June issue of New 杏吧原创 asked those
with working systems to get in touch. By the closing date of 26 June the IFPI
expected to have six serious and six amateur ideas to test.
The IFPI will send anyone with a serious proposal a CD of music. Within six
weeks the developers must treat the music with their protection system and lend
the IFPI the software or hardware to retrieve it. TNO, the Netherlands
Organization for Applied Scientific Research, will then try to decode the
message after treating the music just like broadcast stations, Internet servers
and domestic users do.
To forestall complaints from hi-fi buffs that embedded signals ruin
recordings, TNO is recruiting a 鈥済olden-eared鈥� panel of testers to listen to
treated and untreated music.
The IFPI will not reveal details of proposals, but other firms are making no
secret of their participation. Thorn EMI Central Research Laboratory in Hayes,
west London, has developed a system that filters out a tight band of frequencies
and fills the gap with the watermark. The coded signal is added only when there
is enough sound at neighbouring frequencies to hide the gap.
The Recording Industry Association of America is backing technology developed
by US company Bolt, Beranek and Newman. This system spreads the digital code
across the sound spectrum. The RIAA claims this makes the code inaudible and
able to survive digital processing and compression before broadcasting.
US company Aris Technology is proposing a system that looks for regularly
occurring peaks and troughs within the music waveform and adds replicas of them
to convey coded ones and zeros.
The idea for a watermark comes from a record industry dream of a 鈥渟poiler鈥�
system that stops people copying commercial recordings. The Beatles鈥� production
company Apple promised one in the 1960s that would be used on the Sgt.
Pepper鈥檚 Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road albums. Both discs
copied perfectly because no spoiler can work reliably unless the recorder is
designed to work with the signal. It was clearly impossible to modify the
millions of recorders that even then were in use.