James Delahunty
3 Mar 2005 20:15
Up until now, we have seen copy protected music CDs and Digital Rights Management attempt to stop unauthorized copying of music files (or CD ripping). Now two New Yorkers, Mark Bocko and Zeljko Ignjatovic, have come up with a new method that may seem like more of an annoyance than a copy protection. Their invention could make it possible for you to hear a disturbance on a pirated file when played back.
Details of the this method are scarce so far, but to give an example of what you might get, imagine just simply using an Audio Ripper to rip from a CD or something to MP3. Now imagine playing back that MP3 and hearing the artist give out to you for ripping the music to MP3. That would be a pretty weird experience wouldn't it? But this new invention could maybe make that a possibility.
With help from the US Air Force Research Laboratory, the inventors found they could bury around 20kb of speech data in a song without affecting how it sounds. Their technique exploits the fact that the tones of a musical instrument are made up of a complex pattern of randomly phased harmonics. These phase shifts are so small they are imperceptible to the ear. But a software decoder, which could be built into MP3 players or file-sharing applications, detects the phase shifts and turns them into speech.
Weird huh? Remember that the example I gave above could very well be false, as I couldn't find more details. I thought I'd write it to spark some interesting comments from you guys however, so come on then, hit the Post Your Comment button ;-).
Source:
New Scientist