7 comments

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  ianbetteridge

  1 year ago

  "What would happen to mashups?"
  
  Nothing, at a guess. I can't imagine a technical system which would allow a watermark to survive the typical cut/paste/sample process of a mashup. Of course, if someone just used the whole track, it might - but in that case, it's hardly a creative mashup, is it?
  
  "How would it affect the principle of fair use?"
  
  It wouldn't. Using music as an example, were I to use a track and be covered by currect fair use tems, then it wouldn't matter that it was traceable to me - what I was doing would, by definition, be legal. Of course, were that song to be found in its entirety on your friendly local file sharing service, being downloaded by thousands of people, then there is no fair use defence.
  
  "Would Internet service providers start to block specific activity on the Web based on whether a watermark was detected?"
  
  Unlikely, unless the ISP simply wanted to cut the amount of P2P activity - and there are easier ways of doing that. Far better to just maintain the current fiction that they have no responsibility for what travels across their networks, allowing them to continue to claim "common carrier" status.
  
  Plus, it's worth baring in mind what Nick Carr says in his article:
  
  "Such watermarks could be used by ISPs to automatically block the transmission of files through peer-to-peer networks, achieving one of the aims of DRM by other means."
  
  If they did, indeed, block such traffic why should we care? After all, the law doesn't allow you to share copyrighted material with thousands of strangers for free. Watermarking doesn't prevent you from exercising the rights the law already allows you over copyrighted material that you buy. It *could* be used to prosecute you *if* you break the law. Isn't that a good thing?
  
  "What would have happened if GC Coleman (the drummer) or Richard Spencer — the composer who holds the rights to the song, and is now a high-school social studies teacher — had a watermark on that sample?"
  
  Surely the point of watermarking is to be able to trace the provenance of a piece of music? Given that, in the case you cite, we actually know the provenance of that sample anyway, it seems likely that watermarking would have made precisely no difference. Would more bands have been sued? No - we already know where that sample has come from (and it's easy to spot).
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• 

  mathewi

  1 year ago

  Well I guess there's nothing to worry about then, is there Ian :-)
  
  Except that fair use isn't so easy to determine, and I would expect
  there to be many more cases where unknowing users were prosecuted
  unfairly. And ISPs have been known to do all sorts of things -- and
  are under pressure from the RIAA and others to filter more rather than
  less.
  
  As for the technicalities of watermarking, Microsoft's El Dorado
  (according to the Wired piece) resists "all typical kinds of
  processing, including compression, equalization, D/A and A/D
  conversion, recording on analog tape and so forth. It is also designed
  to survive malicious attacks that attempt to remove or modify the
  watermark from the signal, including changes in time and frequency
  scales, pitch shifting and cut/paste editing."
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• 

  tomreeves

  1 year ago

  Pardon me if you'd rather not have a link posted, but YouTube has a great video on the Amen brake. The link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac
  
  I love your blog.
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  mathewi

  1 year ago

  Thanks a lot, Tom -- relevant links are always welcome.
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• 

  tomreeves

  1 year ago

  I linked to this article and also the YouTube video. And complemented the author. The juxtaposition of the Wired article and the discussion of the Amen break video is brilliant. I wish I had something more insightful to add, but both my football teams lost. I'm going to go sulk now.
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  Aaron

  1 year ago

  Heh... I listened to that same episode of the History of New Music. Great show, great piece... I do wish he would have actually played more samples, rather than just using the (rather poor, IMO) example he did.
  
  Not to mention completely ripping off this YouTube video. Poor form, Alan Cross!
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  mathewi

  1 year ago

  He got a lot from Wikipedia too, I think -- still, great piece.
  reply