p2pnet news | DRM:- Amazon DRM-free downloads, launched yesterday, apparently aren’t quite as DRM-free as the company promises.

“What’s in a name?” – asks Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet.

“That which we call a rose

“By any other name would smell as sweet …”

Over at Microsoft, Bill and the Boyz already own a patent introducing the concept of ‘Tamperproofness‘ under SAW, short for Stealthy Audio Watermarking.

Says United States Patent 7,266,697, Kirovski, et al, September 4, 2007:

The seemingly unattainable “El Dorado” of watermarking technology is an encoded watermark that is unalterable, irremovable, and cannot be de-synced without perceptually and noticeably affecting the audio quality.

Likewise, the seemingly unattainable “Holy Grail” of watermarking technology is an encoded watermark where a malevolent attacker may know how the watermark is encoded, but still cannot effectively attack it without perceptually and noticeably affecting the audio quality.

In short, SAW, DRM, watermarking, whatever, is still CCC – corporate consumer control, and, “A spokesperson for Amazon confirmed my theory that the unprotected MP3s it started selling today contain watermarks that identify the songs to a certain extent,” says Wired’s Listening Post.

“According to an Amazon spokesperson, the watermark only contains data indicating that the MP3 was purchased at Amazon (in other words, there’s nothing in the file that indicates who purchased it).”

But a rose is still a rose and as Wired adds:

Since Amazon itself does not apply the watermarks, and labels presumably supply only one MP3 copy of any given song, there’s no way for a label to directly identify and sue an individual if, say, someone were to steal that person’s iPod and share its songs all over the internets.

Of course, if Sony/BMG, Warner Music Group, and/or Universal Music Group were to get their music included in the store (or all of its music, in the case of UMG, which currently allows a subset of its catalog to be sold on Amazon without DRM), they could insist that Amazon watermark each file with a unique identifier that could be used to trace the song directly back to its original purchaser, were it to appear on file sharing networks.

Definitely stay tuned.

Slashdot it!

Also See:
DRM-free downloads – Amazon MP3 downloads, September 25, 2007
Tamperproofness – Stealthy Audio Watermarking: DRM, September 13, 2007
Listening Post – Some Of Amazon’s MP3 Tracks Contain Watermarks, September 25, 2007

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