Digital Watermark
By Stephen Kent Goodman
For those of you posting your own compositions or arangements for the group and concerned with finding your posting being sampled, copied or pirated by people on the net it was intented for, you might find the following company of help:
The Dice Company has just released their software "Argent" that creates digital watermarks, it allows embedding of packets of copyright information and other material into song/music files. They can be contacted at: 1-415-326-4346 (Palo Alto, CA).
The software again is called ARGENT and sells for around $150.00. Fairly inexpensive when you consider the protection it affords you and your work. This way if your posting is found in other places than where you posted it, with this watermark you'll know where they lifted it from and can take action accordingly.
S.K. Goodman
[ Editor's Note:
[
[ When I first started working with Unix in the mid-70's,
[ I became aware of the word "salting". This is a technique
[ for protecting a copyright by inserting minor traceable
[ changes to a copyrighted document. For instance, the Unix
[ dictionary had some "extra" words in it that would allow
[ its origin to be traced. Rented mailing list often have
[ "extra" addresses in them. Likewise, maps often have
[ an extra town or street, or an intentionally mispelled
[ word somewhere. If you use maps other than government
[ maps for doing your map-making "research", you are likely
[ to get in trouble.
[
[ A MIDI file presents a variety of places to "hide" such
[ data. Shifting some note-on or note-off or pedal events
[ by just one tick would be inaudible but would allow a great
[ deal of data to be hidden. Extraneous MIDI control events,
[ pitchwheel events, or system-exclusive events could also be
[ used. MIDI events occuring essentially at the same time can
[ be reordered (although some instruments, like the Violano
[ Virtuoso actually care about even order). These kind of changes
[ are over and above the "obvious" things of adding MIDI text events
[ (Copyright and Lyric events).
[
[ I think that the suggestion of "watermarking" (or salting) a
[ tune file is a _GREAT_ idea. However some of these "marks" are
[ easily altered by MIDI sequencer programs. In fact, commonly used
[ programs like CAKEWALK delete system exclusive and (slightly) re-order
[ events. A pirating user might unintentially add "noise" to the
[ watermark simply by reading in and re-saving a marked MIDI file.
[ I would be interested in which of the above techniques (or
[ others) are used by the program you mention. In particular
[ I'm curious to know how "robust" the "watermark" is.
[
[ I've been hoping that at some point I could establish an archive of
[ rolls and tunes here. I think marking the tunes is a good idea.
[ I'd seriously consider using a program like this if the marks were
[ robust, but inaudible.
[
[ Jody |
(Message sent Sun 28 Jan 1996, 14:58:10 GMT, from time zone GMT-0500.) |
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