Re: hacksdmi?

[Christian <christian () dijkstra murdoch edu au>]

On Tue, Oct 17, 2000 at 08:52:30AM -0400, Ian Stoba wrote:

> My own take is that if any type of SDMI type initiative is going to be successful, the watermarking will need to be 
> outside the audio stream. For example, bands could release MP3s encrypted with their private keys. The files could be 
> freely distributed, but for playback you would need to purchase the decryption key from a CA. In the case of a 
> service like Napster, they would just need to check that they were distributing the encrypted files only.

I don't think this would really work.  All it would take would be one
person to purchase the public key.  They could then publicise this key,
for example, by distributing it along with the encrypted MP3 (perhaps in
the ID3 tag if it's big enough: how long would it be before free
software MP3 players gained the feature to automatically decrypt and
play a song based on this?).  Alternatively the user could decrypt the
song and then encrypt it with another private key with this key pair
being shared by the entire community.  (This is even assuming the
restriction that a Napster-like service could be required to enforce the
encrypted MP3 restriction to begin with which, with things like Freenet
etc., would seem to be a pretty big assumption.)

The whole idea of secure, remote content control doesn't seem like it
has any solution right now, if ever.

Regards,

Christian.