RIAA Unveils Net Tracking Tag for Online Sales 301
openbear writes "A story over at MSNBC talks about the Global Release Indentifier (GRid). It is a code akin to the Universal Product Code (UPC) bar code found on a CD or cassette tape in stores. Each track will be distributed online with an individual GRid serial number and will be reported back to rights societies and collection agencies sold or transferred."
Jennifer Lopez Is My Cousin (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Could this technology (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's totally different from a UPC (Score:5, Informative)
We tried to use actual UPCs, but they are only 12 digits. 6 Are the manufacturer ID, 1 is the classs of the item and 1 is a checksum. That only leaves 4 digits for the SKU - only about 10,000 items. We called UCC (the UPC equivilant of ICANN) and asked for 400,000 numbers, because we figured that would cover something like 90% of the music sold in the US. UCC said, "You realize, if you have a bin of screws, you don't put an individual UPC on every screw, you just assign a number to the bin, right?" We explained that we knew that, and that we really did expect to have 400,000 individual, unique items for sale. They said, "We don't think UPC is the solution for you." So we made up our own SKUs, and gave those to our licensees.
Remember that you need one for the album and one for each song - an an average of 13 per album. Every format you provide that in gives you another set of numbers. So, for example, if EMusic wanted to license its 150,000 song catalog in 128kbps MP3, 256kpbs MP3 and Windows Media, in songs and albums, it'd need nearly 500,000 numbers. And EMusic isn't very big, in music terms. If they need half a million, it's very easy to imagine someone really big might need millions. As all programmers know, you should figure out what the maximum amount you could every possibly need and then increase it by at least an order of magnitude.
The Complete Military History of France (Score:1, Informative)
Hundred Years War - Mostly lost, saved at last by female schizophrenic who inadvertently creates The First Rule of French Warfare: "France's armies are victorious only when not led by a Frenchman."
Italian Wars - Lost. France becomes the first and only country to ever lose two wars when fighting Italians.
Wars of Religion - France goes 0-5-4 against the Huguenots
Thirty Years War - France is technically not a participant, but manages to get invaded anyway. Claims a tie on the basis that eventually the other participants started ignoring her.
War of Devolution - Tied. Frenchmen take to wearing red flowerpots as chapeaux.
The Dutch War - Tied
War of the Augsburg League/King William's War/French and Indian War -Lost, but claimed as a tie. Three ties in a row induces deluded Frogophiles the world over to label the period as the height of French military power.
War of the Spanish Succession - Lost. The War also gave the French their first taste of a Marlborough, which they have loved every since.
American Revolution - In a move that will become quite familiar to future Americans, France claims a win even though the English colonists saw far more action. This is later known as "de Gaulle Syndrome", and leads to the Second Rule of French Warfare: "France only wins when America does most of the fighting."
French Revolution - Won, primarily due the fact that the opponent was also French.
The Napoleonic Wars - Lost. Temporary victories (remember the First Rule!) due to leadership of a Corsican, who ended up being no match for a British footwear designer.
The Franco-Prussian War - Lost. Germany first plays the role of drunk Frat boy to France's ugly girl home alone on a Saturday night.
World War I - Tied and on the way to losing, France is saved by the United States. Thousands of French women find out what it's like to not only sleep with a winner, but one who doesn't call her "Fraulein." Sadly,widespread use of condoms by American forces forestalls any improvement in the French bloodline.
World War II - Lost. Conquered French liberated by the United States and Britain just as they finish learning the Horst Wessel Song.
War in Indochina - Lost. French forces plead sickness, take to bed with the Dien Bien Flu.
Algerian Rebellion - Lost. Loss marks the first defeat of a western army by a Non-Turkic Muslim force since the Crusades, and produces the First Rule of Muslim Warfare: "We can always beat the French." This rule is identical to the First Rules of the Italians, Russians, Germans, English, Dutch, Spanish, Vietnamese and Esquimaux.
War on Terrorism - France, keeping in mind its recent history, surrenders to Germans and Muslims just to be safe. Attempts to surrender to Vietnamese ambassador, fails after he takes refuge in a McDonald's.
The question for any country silly enough to count on the French should not be "Can we count on the French?", but rather "How long until France collapses?"
Observations: 1.)Going to war without the French by your side is like going deer hunting without your accordian.. You are leaving a lot of noisy useless baggage behind. 2.)Europe caused WWII by trying to appease Hitler during the 30's and refusing to enforce the Treaty of Versailles 3.)With "friends" like this...Who needs enemies.
Unique ID's on CDs (Score:3, Informative)
I believe this is why some software includes a key on a sticker that you have to type in. The CD will recognize a whole bunch of keys, but by entering the one on the sticker, you give your software an ID number.
This being said, I don't think we are in immediate danger of getting unique ID's on CDs. Unless someone knows if there's a manufacturing process for writing small amounts of data on a mass-produced CD?
Unintentional /. Troll Topic (Score:5, Informative)
For you geeks out there, it is a CLASS_ID, not an OBJECT_ID, meaning that the number will be the same across all instances of the class.
For example, when a consumer goes to hoohaa.com and purchases an audio track from the latest Hoodies album, hoohaa.com's product database will contain an SKU number to track the PURCHASE so that they can report to the vendor how many tracks of that song were sold so that the artists (the "manufacturer") can get their money. It MAY be included in the track itself, but it would make it easier to automate the process, since the product itself can be polled when they put the track up for sale online, and no one has to manually enter the number. The number should not vary from track to track of the SAME EXACT song. They may put in a serial number in the download, but that would be something completely different than what they are talking about here (and easily foiled for piracy tracking purposes).
All they are doing is Standardizing the domain of these ID numbers across the entire industry so that the money from the sale goes into the right pocket. This is ESPECIALLY important where there is no tangible object being sold, and thus, no purchasing audit trail from the reseller to the vendor.
Sounds like a smart system to me, and one that has nothing to do with our "online rights"; at least no moreso than the computer industry standardizing on Tech Data's SKU numbers for ordering computer parts. Hmm. Wouldn't that be cool?
Re:Tim Russert Is My Cousin (Score:3, Informative)
From the spec at:
http://www.cidf.org/japanese/english/docs/ge
"This Identifier can also be used for usage surveillance services called Net-Police, which uses web spider to search out sites that might potentially be infringing content."
The pdf at that URL is *much* better documentation than the news article.
Re:Similar to a Custom Watermark (Score:2, Informative)
All you can do is corrupt the watermark. You need to break the encryption before you can control the audit stream.
The really fun part of this though, is that any musical artist can create the facilities to help hack the watermark. What is the matermark of silence? Pink noise? White noise? That provides useful clues to breaking the encryption.
Re:Could this technology (Score:2, Informative)
That is if they decided to use so-last-century technique of encoding the message in the least significant bits of data. There are numerous ways of encoding the message in the most important bits of data, and without adversely affecting the usability (visual or audio quality) of the material the message is encoded in.
I suggest some reading up of spread spectrum encoding techniques. Robust (tamper-resistant) watermarking technologies employ one or another implementation of that for a number of years now.