Tuesday, Jul 8, 2008
Talal Shamoon, a key technologist for the Secure Digital Music Initiative, says that he's found the key to protecting copyrighted tunes.
Jul 31, 2000 | Talal Shamoon is in the digital music world but has yet to be sucked into one of its heated legal battles. While Napster, Scour and other file-swapping services exchange courtroom blows with the record labels, Shamoon remains on the sidelines, working to create a system that he thinks users, recording artists and the record labels will all choose not because they have to, but because it's better.
To achieve this, Shamoon juggles two jobs. He chairs the Perimeter Technologies Working Group at the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), -- an association of 180 music and technology companies that seeks to "develop open technology specifications that protect the playing, storing and distributing of digital music such that a new market for digital music may emerge." And he is an executive vice president at InterTrust Technologies, a digital rights management company that helps clients like Universal Music Group and BMG Music decide how and when to distribute their content online. Basically, Shamoon is using his dual roles to find a way for record companies to gain control of digital music and stamp out piracy.
It's a task for which he is uniquely qualified. His doctoral thesis at Cornell focused on audio compression and at the NEC Research Institute, where he worked until joining InterTrust in 1997, Shamoon was one of the original four scientists who developed watermarking -- a way to lace digital content with invisible copyright information that can then be used to limit access. The record industry is hoping that watermarking will give it back the keys to its content kingdom, but Shamoon says protection is only part of the problem.
Last week, as Napster battled the recording industry in court, millions of songs were being traded free online, and other peer-to-peer technologies like Gnutella started drawing crowds. If widespread music-sharing continues -- if the genie is already out of the bottle -- can record companies really expect consumers to cross over to their own SDMI standards?
Well, the genie's not really out of the bottle. This is one of my big problems with the way people analyze this market. If you see it as a war between pirates and content creators, then it's under a completely different light than how I think it should be seen. Really, these are market conditions that have caused a black market to emerge. People are copying music because they feel somewhat disenfranchised with the options they have at their disposal in the digital space. It's up to the content industry to create value in the digital arena and they've made phenomenal steps in that direction.
So the way you stop people from ripping music and using things like Napster is you basically put music out there in protected format and you make it a good, quality experience. And there are steps being taken in these directions.
And SDMI is one of them?
Yes. SDMI is a standards body which is sort of intent on finding ways for open MP3s to cohabit with protected music. What SDMI serves to do is create a parameter between the open world and this new protected world at least in order to buy the protected world a little bit of space while people fill it with music.
How do the members of SDMI plan to do this?
The specification that's been written so far speaks to two things. One is a set of good housekeeping tips on how to keep protected music protected. So it's not a specific technology. All the specification says is, "if you download a song to a PC it should be protected; if you transfer it to a portable device, the wire along which it travels should be protected and the portable device itself should keep it protected." How you do that is up to you as long as you conform to these rules.
The other part of SDMI is more specific. It talks about screening technology, which at this point uses a specific set of algorithms from a company called Verance. The goal of the screening technology is to solve the following problem: You have an SDMI portable device that plays protected music. You want to let people transfer MP3s they've ripped to that portable device. You don't want to let them transfer MP3s they've gotten from somebody else who's ripped them, i.e. from something like Napster. And what you want is technology that basically examines an open MP3 file that's being transferred to a portable device and decides whether or not it should be admitted to the portable device.
So in order to do that, there's a call for technology from different parties to provide that screening system. We're about a third of the way there. Today, in deployment, we have an algorithm by Verance that's sitting there dormant waiting to be activated.
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