DrJ used our newssubmit on our wondefull page (did anyone noticed the slight layout change on top? ) to tell us about an article on internet.au. The article is already written a while ago but it mentioned a new technology I never heard of (or can't remember 🙂 ). It is named 'AudioKey MP3 tMark', and it prevents the unlimited sharing of music files by adding a watermark in the file. A quote from the article:
AudioKey embeds an acoustic watermark in each file download from an online merchant's Web site. The watermark is inaudible to the human ear, and contains details of the merchant and the copyright owner or artist. It also marks the file with a transaction ID that includes the purchaser's details, which means any file can now be tracked back to the original purchaser, all too easily. Microsoft has recently demonstrated a watermark that remains attached to a music file and is undetectable, even when the file is played aloud and re-recorded from speakers. The scientists working on the project have claimed they will be able to include an expiry date into the media file, so that the Windows operating system would refuse to play the file beyond a certain date.
Microsoft's watermarking technology has yet to be named, or released commercially, but once the technology is out there, copyright laws will become far more difficult to break. It appears as if this (water)marks the end of free music trading over the Internet
I find the expiry date option very interesting. Because if this technology could work the music business has a nice future coming
Source: Internetau
