Internet, DVD audio lean toward music-industry watermark scheme
eetimes.com
By Junko Yoshida and Margaret Quan
EE Times
(03/12/99, 6:09 p.m. EDT)
WASHINGTON — Digital watermarking, a kind of electronic branding of
audio and video, is emerging as a must-have technology that could gate the
release of music and films for next-generation DVD and Internet
consumer-electronics systems.
In discussions to be held in Washington next week, the Secure Digital Music
Initiative (SDMI) will take up the issue of whether to require digital
watermarking for audio as it hammers out a plan for Internet music players
that could be built before the end of the year. Separately, EE Times has
learned that a private group of four major companies is evaluating leading
audio-watermarking technologies — including approaches from four
little-known companies — for coming DVD-Audio players.
The private working group expects to make its final evaluation "in a matter of
months," according to a source in the group. Its scheme may be adopted by
the SDMI as well.
"Watermarking is a crucial piece of the copy-protection system we are
seeking," said a senior executive at a major record label based in California,
who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Sooner or later, any encryption
system can be broken. We need watermarking technologies to tell us who did
it."
At the SDMI meeting here, consumer manufacturers concerned with the
cost and timing for the launch of Internet audio players are expected to argue
that a good encryption system is adequate to the task. But music-industry
representatives are likely to counter that in the long run, watermarking is the
only way to keep audio pirates away from their intellectual property.
"Watermarking will be pursued as a part of the overall copy-protection
system" within SDMI, said Steven Marks, vice president and deputy general
counsel of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). But
Marks would not say just how or when watermarking and encryption
techniques would be merged into a single security system for audio.
Digital watermarking is an attempt to hide information within an audio signal
as a way to identify the ownership or origin of a creative work. In addition to
providing a powerful forensic tool for tracking the trail of audio pirates, it also
can offer a mechanism to control whether additional copies of a given file
can be made and, if so, at what resolution.
Watermark companies are angling to license their algorithms to hardware
manufacturers for implementation in a DSP for DVD audio players. But chip
makers are still trying to gauge the processing requirements for detecting
watermarks and handling copy control.
IBM, Intel, Matsushita Electric and Toshiba staked a claim to watermarking
by announcing recently that they had reached an agreement with major
record labels on a content-protection framework for the DVD Forum's
DVD-Audio standard. The group claims to have backing from BMG, EMI,
Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music
Group.
The private group is expected to select one of five audio watermarkeking
technologies it is currently evaluating as part of a security system for
DVD-Audio which will include encryption technology.
"We've established with the music industry a basis for terms and conditions
on how music content should be protected for DVD-Audio," said Alan Bell,
program director for digital media standards at IBM. The new framework
will use both watermark and encryption technologies to protect music on
prerecorded DVD-Audio disks.
Although the group plans to use the encryption system — which is
"somewhat related to CSS," a content-scrambling system used for the
DVD-Video standard — "we're still in the process of evaluation" for digital
watermarking technology, Bell said. But the group of four companies hopes
to move fast, selecting a standard "within a matter of months," he said.
Even though Bell and representatives at four watermarking companies
declined to identify the technologies under scrutiny, several industry sources
close to the deal named the contenders as Blue Spike Inc. (Miami), Aris
Technologies (Cambridge, Mass.), Cognicity (Minneapolis) and Solana
Technology Development Corp. (San Diego). A fifth contender is IBM's
Madison technology now in field trials.
Many sources said the watermarking decision made by the group of four will
set the tone for what SDMI decides. "It makes sense not to have two
different types of watermarking technologies," IBM's Bell said.
The goals of the group of four and SDMI are by and large the same, said
Michael Moradzadeh, director of strategic planning at Intel Corp.'s
home-products group. "We see these as complementary efforts," he said.
Yet the industries involved disagree on how soon watermarking may become
a mandate for Internet music players. Dave Maher, head of secure-systems
research at AT&T Labs, said watermarking may not be required for SDMI
devices in the short term. That's because there simply isn't time to evaluate
watermark technologies before the planned year-end launch of portable
SDMI-compliant players.
Most critical now, Maher said, is finding a way to ensure that the players can
translate any or all of the current protected-music formats. The other
question is whether they will play unprotected music. One of the main targets
of the SDMI effort is the hugely successful MP3 (MPEG Audio Layer 3)
movement, which has been a source of some pirated content and thus a
threat to recording companies.
War of faxes
In a war of faxes this past week, recording and watermarking companies
pushed their agendas. The music industry' fears that the less expensive, and
more easily compromised, solution — unless vigorously countered — will
become entrenched.
"The two most important questions to ask are, 'Does your watermark survive
MP3?' and 'Does your watermark get over-encoded when using the same
process a second time?' " said Scott Moskowitz, chief executive at Blue
Spike. Moskowitz said his company's technology handles both situations.
"We demonstrated that our watermarking technology meets the requirements
of ASCAP," said Robert Warren, president of Solana, which recently entered
into a non-exclusive agreement with that performing-artists' rights
organization. One unique feature of Solana's technology, Warren said, is its
ability to encode transactional marking at a server's site without
decompressing and re-encoding an original music file. "Our technology can
save a whole cycle of decompression and compression," he said.
For its part, Aris Technologies' MusiCode scheme watermarks analog,
radio-broadcast and digital music. Aris said its watermarks can survive
multiple analog tape generations as well as radio broadcasting without
altering the fidelity of the recording. They are also said to facilitate "pay per
listen" and digital download transactions.
Aris DSP engineer Eric Metois said his company's approach is based on a
form of "statistical feature modulation, where some features are measured in
the audio content and [then] modulated, so the resulting audio carries the
digital data or watermark."
Meanwhile, Cognicity's lead scientist, Mitchell Swanson, said his company's
AudioKey scheme is designed to survive 15 to 20 separate distortions, with
different audio-coding formats as the primary concern. "We've tested it
against every codec we could get our hands on," Swanson said, "and it [our
watermarking] survived."
The technology is based on modulation, he said, not the spread-spectrum
used by other vendors. "We view the audio as the information carrier, rather
than as channel noise, which is what many companies do," Swanson said.
"And we change characteristics of the audio."
Bill Velez, president of the SESAC performers' rights organization in
Nashville, Tenn., made no secret of how political the watermarking debate
has become. SESAC "took a gamble" on Aris, Velez said, becoming the first
music-licensing society to employ MusiCode to identify and track
performances. Why? Because of the political clout Aris has gained since
David E. Leibowitz, former executive vice president and general counsel of
the RIAA, became vice chairman of its board of directors.
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