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October 25, 2005
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Metatags or Meta-DRM?
Mark Gibbs has a nice piece in Network World discussing the proposal for ID3 tags for music files. The gist is that ID3 tags could be added to any digital encoding format (ogg, MP3, etc) and that these tags could contain information such as table-of-contents. Thus, you could rip a whole album to one file and yet retain the ability to skip around to various tracks within the larger file, using a player that read the ID3 information. In theory, Version 2 of the ID3 tag proposal permits any sort of tag, including very long ones. Given that freedom, it's easy to see that DRMistas and others will have many uses for them, including encrypted watermarks, hidden alternative encodings, and I'm sure you can all think of other amusing nastiness.
posted by Alan Wexelblat |
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1. michael on October 26, 2005 4:21 PM writes...
The author's problem outside of questionable ID3 tag use is that he wants to record a bunch of songs from an album without having automatic gaps between the songs.
This is a vagary of many audio formats, including MP3.
Just thought I'd drop a line, though, to say that OGGs don't have this issue.
Also, it would be a matter of hours--no, minutes--before software was created to strip an audio file of the new ID3 tags. This is a non-issue.
-M
Permalink to Comment2. drwex on October 27, 2005 1:12 PM writes...
I disagree that it's a non-issue. Imagine an encrypted watermark that's chaffed inside an otherwise useful ID3 tag. If you think the Cartel aren't smart enough to use various forms of steganography then I think you're underestimating them. I agree that obvious DRM and related crap can be stripped; I worry about the non-obvious stuff.
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