By: Frank Hecker

Frank Hecker — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 04:56:09 +0000

At one time eMusic was in fact using watermarking technology, or at least planning to do so; google for “emusic watermark” and note the stories from 2000 about eMusic trying to determine if eMusic-supplied tracks were being shared over (the original) Napster. However I have no idea whether eMusic does watermarking at present; remember that since 2000 eMusic has come under new management (who might have different policies) and also has changed MP3 format (from a fixed bit rate to variable bit rate encoding).
But in any case this is an easy thing to check: I recently downloaded Of Montreal’s album “Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?”. The first track on that album is “Suffer for Fashion”; for my copy of the corresponding MP3 file (of length 4722197 bytes) md5sum gives the output b35bf48d8f6ecd6de1d3ff18964fe2c2. Try downloading it yourself and see if you get the same value or something different.
If the MD5 values are different then we can presume that the files have an individualized watermark; if the values are the same then either the files are not watermarked at all or at worst they have a watermark identifying them as being distributed by eMusic. (eMusic might have a business interest in doing the latter, as a way of determining whether or not there is significant “leakage” from eMusic onto to P2P networks.)

By: Bill Weiss

Bill Weiss — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 02:00:16 +0000

The “watermarking” scheme you link to in reference to eMusic doesn’t do MP3 watermarking, at least in the sense I think you are using it in. TRM seems to be about recognizing music from audible cues. Unless eMusic is adding in significant audible material, would this system do anything useful?

By: Adam

Adam — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 22:51:50 +0000

Use the http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink new york times link generator, and 'defeat' the NYtimes DRM. :)

Comments on: DRM, digitally coded music, and information

By: Frank Hecker

By: Bill Weiss

By: Adam