Now days Digital Music Industry is going through a difficult time ? prevalence of Internet Piracy. In resent past, the scale of piracy was not so significant. Of course, people were sharing new popular CDs with each other and fraudsters were making unauthorized duplications of original CDs for underground, but the losses of record companies are was not counted on billions.
music industry.
On the other hand, the government uses copyright law to reduce Internet piracy. Many illegal music Web sites and Peer-to-Peer networks were closed after the court?s decisions, but immediately analogues appeared.
It is obvious that the piracy problem will not be resolved completely, but still, it can be reduced through combination of law and modern technologies, such as Digital Rights Management (DRM) and Watermarking. Embedded in the audio record watermark helps to identify who owns the rights of the content and DRM systems control the music distribution. All those methods are imperfect and we will look into these during the research, and decide what decisions can be made to combat the problems that they have as well as offer a solution to the copyright problem and explore possible preconditions for the future development.
Aims and Objective
Objective is to protect music copyright using improved watermarking algorithm.
Aims of the dissertation are
to review current technical solutions for copyright protection of Internet music;
to propose a solution, which can improve the effectiveness of the protection of digital content from unauthorised access and distribution;
to explore the prospects of digital music development and the future of copyright protection methods.
Theory and methodologies
Digital music
Digital music has appeared recently in our world and become an essential part of human life. People listen to music online; download it to portable music players, and store thousands of tracks on the hard drivers at home.
Brief history of Digital music distribution
It all began with the invention of the digital MP3 format in December 1991, which developed by the German company Fraunhofer-Gesellshaft. An MP3 files, also known as MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, is a form of digital audio encoding and lossy compression format. It designed to reduce audio file size, while keeping as true as possible to the sound quality of the original recording.
In December 1997, MP3.com was found, enabling users to access their music online. Then in 1998 eMusic becoming the first website, which offers the MP3 files to download as well as subscription service and in April of the same year Saehan, a Korean electronic manufacturer, produces MPMan, the first MP3 player in the world.
One of the important developments in the spread of digital audio was the creation in June 1999, the first P2P (peer-to-peer) network called Napster, which was designed by Shawn Fanning, the student of University of Boston.
The network has become wildly popular all over the world but in July 2001, the US Circuit Court of Appeal made a decision to eliminate the Napster in connection with copyright infringement.
In October 2001, the first iPod was sold and in April 2003, Apple launches the iTunes Music Store that has since grown to account for 70 per cent of digital music sales. Four years later in 2007 Apple produces the iPhone, providing the long-awaited joint experience of communication and music [1].
Last year the founders of Pirate Bay, a peer-to-peer file sharing site, are sent to jail for a year by a Swedish court.
The Future of the Music Industry
Digital music technologies are developing at lightning speed. Even 20 years ago, people were unaware of the imminent appearance of the many delights of this world of digital technology. It is difficult to say anything about the future now. However, some possibilities are interesting to examine. For instance, the Internet makes it possible for artists to sell songs right to the consumer. This politic can make record companies obsolete. However, it is obvious that the big record companies will have to make major adjustments.
However, in the coming months and years, we will see an increase of existing and new independent labels offering a much bigger selection of music, via Internet retailers and satellite radio, to an expanding group of music listeners who want more options.
In spite of the RIAA furore, illegal downloading of music will continue.?Statistics suggest that the current barrage of lawsuits levied at P2P file sharers may be curtailing downloading, but it is certainly not eliminating it.
In addition, some new products will change the way to listen to music forever. Faculty at UC Berkley are constantly developing new technologies in the music industry. Whether it is inventing a new musical instrument or inventing new musical recording methods, they are constantly researching new methods to innovate the music industry [1].
Music and Copyright
Generally, the term "Internet piracy" refers to copyright infringement in the dissemination and use of literary, media and software products on the Internet. Copyright is a form of intellectual property protection, which means an exclusive right of a person or entity on the results of his intellectual activities.
2.1 Copyright Act
The origins of most music piracy lawsuits begin with the Copyright Act. The Copyright Act gives copyright owners a number of rights. Infringement of copyright takes place when a person can show ownership of content and can demonstrate that infringer broke at least one exclusive right of copyright holder. An owner of a copyright has the exclusive right to reproduction and distribution of the material.
A common defence to copyright infringement is fair use. To determine if fair use of a copyrighted work is allowed, one must take into consideration: (1) the purpose and character of the use; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for the value of the copyrighted work. Fair use has not been a very successful defence in many musical works copyright infringement cases [2].
Types of Music Piracy
Music piracy is a trend that has been around for a long time but never has it reached the force that it has now. Music pirates can be noticed in various ways: (1) those who illegally upload or download music online, (2) online companies who build businesses based on stealing music and encourage users to break the law, and (3) criminals manufacturing mass numbers of imitation CDs for sale on street corners or at retail stores. The main music theft groups are considered to be very frequent peer-to-peer users.
There are four specific types of music piracy. The first type is pirate recordings, which are the unauthorized duplications of just the sound of legal recordings. This does not include the duplication of the original artwork, label, title, sequencing, or the combinations of titles. The second type is underground recordings, which are the unauthorized recordings of a musical broadcast on radio, television or on the live concert. Counterfeit recordings are unauthorised recordings of the pre-recorded music as well as the unauthorized duplication of original artwork, label, trademark, and packaging. Online piracy refers to the unauthorized download of sound recordings from Internet sites or other nets [3].
Current technical solutions
As discussed above, copyright protection against Internet piracy is a global problem of modern music industry. The main way to protect audio content is the law and modern technology. Despite the wide range of developments, the main for the protection of music are Digital Rights Management (DRM), Watermarking.
3.1 Digital Rights Management (DRM)
Recently, there is a dramatic increase in number of online music stores. In turn, these online music stores are attracting users, who switched to digital libraries, to download audio files into the personal devices. In this regard, the music industry has introduced Digital Rights Management (DRM) to control access to those digital contents.
Copyright provides more of a base for protecting content against illegal reproduction and distribution, whereas DRM systems are used to limit the distribution. For example, the number of times that the music files can be burn onto a CD or can be put onto a personal MP3 player [4]. Figure 1 shows the main components of a DRM system.
Fig.1. General Architecture of a DRM system.
There are two main types of online music stores; the first type is the similar stores with Apple?s iTunes, where users can download single tracks as well as being able to buy whole albums from an artist. The other is a subscription service, such as having a premium account with Spotify. The latter is one in which consumers pay a flat monthly fee subscription for the privilege to stream music directly from the internet.
Concerning sites such as iTunes, DRM sets the number as well as type of devices that a music track can be played on. The system that Apple currently uses controls the value of the music files that are downloaded from its site, all the way from the download on the iTunes website to the player that it is stored and played on. Therefore, if a user decides to switch from using Apple?s software and MP3 player their entire music catalogue that they have purchased from Apple will be unusable. Apple does provide music files at a competitive price but has a very strict DRM system [4].
Existing online music stores operate using a file format that locks the consumer into a single file format, a specific music player, and specific playback device, such as an iPod. This means that many of the music files can only be reproduced on a personal computer and not redistributed, or can only be distributed a limited number of times. Therefore, many existing DRM systems have problems.
3.2 Audio Watermarking
Watermarking technique is used to protect multimedia contents ownership, which embeds the ownership information into multimedia content by modifying the content slightly [5].
In the most general form, audio watermarking hides a user specified bitstream in digital audio such that the addition of the bitstream (the watermark) is perceptually insignificant. Fig.2. shows the block diagrams for both embedding a watermark into an audio stream and recovering an existing watermark. As this figure shows, to watermark digital audio, the original audio and the bit stream are inputs to the encoder along as well as a secret key. Only the watermarker knows this secret key; it is used to hide the bitstream so that no other party can locate the watermark in the digital audio. To recover the watermark, this secret key is used along with the watermarked audio. In some cases, recovery requires the original unwatermarked audio [6].
In other words, audio watermarking is a method to enforce the intellectual property rights and to protect the audio from tampering. There are two types of audio watermarking: Blind and Non-blind. If the detection of the digital watermark can be done without original data such techniques are called blind. On the other hand Non-blind techniques use the original source to extract the watermark by simple comparison and correlation procedures.
Fig.2. Watermarking block diagram.
In the past few years a large number of algorithms for secure and robust embedding and extraction of watermarks in audio files have been developed. A broad range of embedding algorithms goes from simple Least Significant Bit (LSB) methods to various Spread Spectrum schemes. Spread Spectrum schemes have gained a lot of popularity because of their innate robustness to intelligent attacks e.g. dual watermarking. However, Spread Spectrum schemes fail to give a good performance against simple signal processing attacks such as mp3 compression and re-sampling.
Audio watermarking algorithm must satisfy at least two constraints: inaudibility and robustness. Embedded audio watermarks should be almost inaudible. In addition, the algorithm should be robust enough to withstand attempts such as removal or alteration of inserted watermarks. These two constraints may seem to be contradictory. However, they must be satisfied.
Project Planning
In order to be able to do all the work in time project planning needs to be done. To achieve project goals the following timetable was designed
(Table 1).
Table 1 Project Timetable.
Name
Feb/March
Arpil/ May
June/Jule
August/Sept
Project title selection
Preliminary
Study
Objective agreement
Working on theory and methodology
Developing new algorithm
Exploring the way forward
Reporting
Summary
Theoretical research that has been done became a base for the methodology that will be developed. In-depth study of the watermarking mechanisms as well as DRM systems will help to identify all problems of current methods. In turn, this will draw conclusions about the required properties of a new music protection system as well as a future of music industry.
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Public release date: 15-Apr-2013
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