dobro
Well-known member
Here's an extract from a piece by Mark Lewis, writing about recent SDMI (Secure Digital Music Initiative)attempts at instituting 'watermarking' into digital audio files:
"Despite calls by some hackers and open-source programmers to boycott SDMI's public challenge to break proposed audio
security systems, other hackers and interested parties participated in the "Hack SDMI" contest to remove watermarks
developed by Verance, Blue Spike, CRL and Samsung/MarkAny [see 9.22.00 Hackers and Open-Source Community
Largely Opposed to Helping SDMI]. Those companies are the four remaining contenders in SDMI's search for a security
system that won't prevent individuals from making copies of CDs for their own use, but will make digital files from those CDs
unplayable if they are transmitted by email or through a file-sharing system such as Napster."
Two things: first, if the Industry ever get this together, it'll be helpful to anyone offering their music as free downloads.
Second, watching the Industry desperately trying to protect what they consider to be their turf in the face of a technology that's blown the roof off the old house reminds me of what Arnold Toynbee says about times of big cultural changes:
"During the disintegration of a civilization, two separate plays with different plots are being performed simultaneously side by side. While an unchanging dominant minority is perpetually rehearsing its own defeat, fresh challenges are perpetually evoking fresh creative responses from newly recruited minorities, which proclaim their own creative power by rising, each time, to the occasion. The drama of challenge-and-response continues to be performed, but in new circumstances and with new actors."
It'll be interesting to me to see if the Industry turns out to be the dinosaurs Toynbee describes, or whether they'll be flexible and innovative enough to survive. My guess is that they're too big to be really flexible.
"Despite calls by some hackers and open-source programmers to boycott SDMI's public challenge to break proposed audio
security systems, other hackers and interested parties participated in the "Hack SDMI" contest to remove watermarks
developed by Verance, Blue Spike, CRL and Samsung/MarkAny [see 9.22.00 Hackers and Open-Source Community
Largely Opposed to Helping SDMI]. Those companies are the four remaining contenders in SDMI's search for a security
system that won't prevent individuals from making copies of CDs for their own use, but will make digital files from those CDs
unplayable if they are transmitted by email or through a file-sharing system such as Napster."
Two things: first, if the Industry ever get this together, it'll be helpful to anyone offering their music as free downloads.
Second, watching the Industry desperately trying to protect what they consider to be their turf in the face of a technology that's blown the roof off the old house reminds me of what Arnold Toynbee says about times of big cultural changes:
"During the disintegration of a civilization, two separate plays with different plots are being performed simultaneously side by side. While an unchanging dominant minority is perpetually rehearsing its own defeat, fresh challenges are perpetually evoking fresh creative responses from newly recruited minorities, which proclaim their own creative power by rising, each time, to the occasion. The drama of challenge-and-response continues to be performed, but in new circumstances and with new actors."
It'll be interesting to me to see if the Industry turns out to be the dinosaurs Toynbee describes, or whether they'll be flexible and innovative enough to survive. My guess is that they're too big to be really flexible.