Ask Slashdot: How Do I Scrub Pirated Music From My Collection? 758
An anonymous reader writes "I tried out Google Music, and I liked it. Google made me swear that I won't upload any 'illegal' tracks, and apparently people fear Apple's iCloud turning into a honeypot for the RIAA. My music collection comprises about 90% 'legal' tracks now — legal meaning tracks that I paid for — but I still have some old MP3s kicking around from the original Napster. Moreover, I have a lot of MP3s that I downloaded because I was too lazy to rip the CD version that I own. I wanted to find a tool to scan my music to identify files that may be flagged as having been pirated by these cloud services; I thought such a tool would be free and easy to find. After all, my intent is to search my own computer for pirated music and to delete it — something that the RIAA wants the government to force you to do. But endless re-phrasing on Google leads to nothing but instructions for how to obtain pirated music. Does such a tool exist or does the RIAA seriously expect me to sift through 60 GB of music, remember which are pirated, and delete them by hand?"
rerip your CD collection (Score:4, Insightful)
Rerip all your CDs, this time to FLAC, since disk is now cheap as hell.
Get rid of all the old mp3s.
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Yes, that's certainly a productive use of someone's day. Taking all your CDs that have been ripped... and doing it again!
Re:rerip your CD collection (Score:5, Funny)
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I don't waste a lot of time during my life.
But when I do I re-rip my collection to FLAC.
Re:rerip your CD collection (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, if you're not using $33K Nordost Whitelight fiber-optic cables, you're just wasting your time, any way: http://most-expensive.net/audio-cables [most-expensive.net]
Re:rerip your CD collection (Score:5, Funny)
I'm an audiophile, I re-rip my collection to FLAC every week to make sure I keep everything pristine.
This only works if you have oxygen free monster cables supplying power to your computer.
Re:rerip your CD collection (Score:5, Funny)
You should also ensure that the laser in your CD drive is correctly aligned so that the photons it emits are in phase with the originals used to make the CD master.
You can always degauss your audio cds (Score:3)
http://www.gcaudio.com/resources/howtos/demagnetization.html [gcaudio.com]
Re:rerip your CD collection (Score:5, Insightful)
I've heard FLAC loses the DC component of the audio wave, as well as is ambiguous with relation to phase (0deg/180deg)
Also, they don't work well with higher precision than 24-bit floating point, it loses precision.
(trolling the audiophiles - a sport)
Re:rerip your CD collection (Score:4, Funny)
Unfortunately, Linux still doesn't run on FLAC. I've written many letters to Linus and the people over at FLAC, but nobody seems interested in fixing the problem.
Re:rerip your CD collection (Score:5, Funny)
I started collecting MP3s in about 2001, and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps, they just sound like crap. The bass is terrible, the midrangewell don’t get me started. Some of those albums have degraded down to 32 or even 16kbps. FLAC rips from the same period still sound great, even if they weren’t stored correctly, in a cool, dry place. Seriously, stick to FLAC, you may not be able to hear the difference now, but in a year or two, you’ll be glad you did.
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Re:rerip your CD collection (Score:5, Funny)
I'm an audiophile, I re-rip my collection to FLAC every week to make sure I keep everything pristine.
I used to do this as well, until I found the sound quality degraded over time because of weakening in the magnetix flux on the hard disk substrate. I've found flash drives to hold audio quality far better than magnetic media however notable picosecond pauses during playback are common as the player has to skip over bad blocks of flash. It does take a trained ear to hear them so to most Slashdot music cretins, the diminished sound quality will be undetectable.
Re:rerip your CD collection (Score:5, Funny)
I think you may have missed the point... can we get a 'whoosh' mod for the cases where a poster must have had to duck to let the joke go over his head? I've got points to spare...
Re:rerip your CD collection (Score:5, Funny)
He probably wouldn't hear the whooosh anyway. They are frequently very high frequency, even ultrasonic.
Re:rerip your CD collection (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually I can tell the difference between my q=4 Ogg Vorbis and my FLAC, but only on good equipment. Monster speakers or headphones or whatnot with golden cables don't do shit; but shitty speakers, poor sound cards, and the like really do degrade quality. I put a $10 Sound Blaster Audigy2 into my computer and I have decent speakers I paid $50 for and it made a huge difference; I want some Klipsch or whatever the brand is, I love their shit.
It's notable that q=4 Ogg Vorbis doesn't sound muddy, suppressed, or weird ... no notable artifacts. But when you play it against the FLAC, it does sound a little suppressed. The FLAC is obviously clearer, more dynamic, and has more depth. This is less important today, unfortunately, than it was 20 years ago; I have 20 year old CDs, and they're a lot quieter, with a much better dynamic range. High dynamic range is really noticeable when slapped down next to a fucked up compressed master.
But, on a standard RealTek AC97 built-in sound card, even on my decent speakers, you can't tell. The difference is non-existent. The audio hardware just sucks. Same with an iPod. My shitty motorola cliq cell phone is horrible, but the sound chipset is GODLY and when I swapped to it instead of an iPod for a media player I was seriously surprised.
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Rerip all your CDs, this time to FLAC, since disk is now cheap as hell.
Get rid of all the old mp3s.
What part of "legal meaning tracks that I paid for" did you fail to understand? Or, pray, tell us how he can legally re-rip as FLAC the mp3 tracks he bought online
Re:rerip your CD collection (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:rerip your CD collection (Score:4, Insightful)
Almost all of my original media (CDs and LPs) for about 60% of my collection were lost in a fire several years ago.
Re-ripping isn't an option. RIAA says if I download a new copy, it is illegal and I have to buy new media, which RIAA claims is only a license to have one copy, which I already bought. Sort of like if I lost the title to my car I couldn't get a new title without buying a new car.
So fuck them. Just upload the music you have. If you bought more than 30% of it you're probably better than most.
Re:rerip your CD collection (Score:4)
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Re:rerip your CD collection (Score:4)
None of this follows from copyright law, as far as I can tell. Assuming the rip is a copy of an original CD made under 17 USC 107 fair use provisions, there's no "license" involved. The destruction of the original CD has no impact on the fair-use copy. If it were a copy of a computer program involved, the provisions of 17 USC 117(a) would be involved, but it does not require that you destroy all copies when the original was destroyed either; in the insurance case, you could argue that the insurance company takes ownership of the backups (by 17 USC 117(b)), but in the no-insurance case, this does not hold.
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How To Scrub Your Music? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:How To Scrub Your Music? (Score:4, Insightful)
Bigtime. And while we're about it, take a moment to savour the full flavour, implications and meaning of "illegal music".
Quality (Score:5, Insightful)
From napster? A search for 128 kbit MP3 might be enough. Your legal ones are probably of higher quality.
No software can do that. (Score:3)
A software could identify files which were downloaded. But it can never detect legally whether you have the right to listen to that file. Unless of course oly drmd files are considered to be legally ok.
Sure it can (Score:2, Funny)
Through an Md5 database hosted on the RIAA website or funded by the RIAA. Every legal file could be known. And then every illegal file would be among those not in the official database.
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Then all you have to do is rip in an unusual bit-rate or file format and you get around the MD5 checks.
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Through an Md5 database hosted on the RIAA website or funded by the RIAA. Every legal file could be known. And then every illegal file would be among those not in the official database.
Won't work. From an article about whether iCloud's match could be used as a honeypot, that I thought was posted on /. a few days ago:
Then there will be MP3s that individuals created themselves from, for example, ârippingâ(TM) their CD collections. While these are not watermarked to the individual, they appear to be unique for each âripâ(TM). To confirm this, I ran a test with fresh installations of the exact same CD ripping software on two different computers. I then had them rip the same track from the exact same CD using the unchanged system default settings on both computers. The MD5 hashes did not match.
( http://betweenthenumbers.net/2011/06/is-apples-icloud-music-match-a-possible-honeypot/ [betweenthenumbers.net] )
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A software could identify files which were downloaded. But it can never detect legally whether you have the right to listen to that file. Unless of course oly drmd files are considered to be legally ok.
I was confused about this as well. From the post it makes it sound that if you buy a CD, then download the track for it, that track is somehow now "illegal". THIS IS NOT THE CASE, and FUCK YOU to the RIAA for making people think it is.
Ripped music (Score:4, Insightful)
Moreover, I have a lot of MP3s that I downloaded because I was too lazy to rip the CD version that I own
How can they tell the difference between an MP3 that you ripped from a CD that you own, and an MP3 that somebody else ripped from another copy of a CD that you own?
Top secret digital watermarks. (Score:2)
Why do you think they spend millions on DRM but can't spend that kind of money to secure gamers personal informarion?
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I think its an issue of covering your legal backside. When they go after you for having X,Y,Z songs you can prove, yes, I've owned this CD for years.
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Going by my own collection (~20gb, ~7000 files), OP probably has around 20,000 songs. Even if a tool only shows half of them as definitely clean, that's 10,000 songs he doesn't have to check.
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Look at the ID3v1 and ID3v2 data.
Many ripping programs add a signature there, and some even a fingerprint. And many pirates put text messages there like "RIPPED BY ZOOOMG".
And even though you own a CD and have the right to rip it, you don't have the right to copy a rip someone else made. That's when copyrights kick in. So if two MP3s were ripped by a program that adds a unique fingerprint, you can assume that one of them is illegal, and that the other person either is the victim of a crime where someone
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The method they *could* use to tell would be to take a hash of the file. When you rip the cd, you will get a different hash each time. With file sharing services most likely there are only 3 or 4 rips that are shared among thousands of people. Consequently, if you see someone with a copy of a particular song that has a hash of one of these commonly shared files, chances are miniscule that it isn't a pirated copy.
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It's because the error correction on CD-DA is not the same as the error correction that is used on a data CD. The error correction on an audio CD is quite a bit more lenient - and corrupt data from an audio CD generally sounds pretty similar to the original (to the point where you wouldn't know the difference by listening to it), whereas corrupt data from a data CD is generally useless because it has to be bit-for-bit accurate or everything blows up.
It's also why the specially-marked "data" CDs work just fi
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OP is trolling RIAA (Score:2, Insightful)
I assume the only purpose of this article is to make RIAA look dumb by trying to suggest that there is such a thing as an illegal sequence of 0s and 1s, especially when it may be exactly the same in meaning as a legal sequence.
Couldn't agree more.
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That raises an interesting question. If I rip a song using a particular program from a particular pressing of a CD, and you rip it using the same program from the same pressing of a CD, will the two end up with identical hashes? I've always been under the impression that ripping audio data wasn't entirely deterministic from a CD (no error correction), and thus two rips even with identical software and settings won't necessarily byte-for-byte match.
Not identical. The CD drive cannot determine accurately when a song starts, so when you rip a song, and then rip it again from the same CD on the same computer, each rip will have a small random amount of silence at the beginning. Then there is the question whether conversion to AAC or MP3 is deterministic, which depending on the software it might not be. Next anything in a Quicktime wrapper contains the creation date inside the file (which caused paranoia when people figured out that iTunes sets the creati
Sure, lazyness, let's call it that. (Score:2)
Afraid of being found? Hey, let's all call the lulz hackerz and lullify your ip!
Bah...
How is 'legal' determined? (Score:2)
What's a 'legal' MP3?
If you rip it from your own CD, how does that get flagged as 'legal'? I was always under the assumption that songs offered in Napster or IRC were just songs that someone else ripped from their CD (originally.) Would that song look any different if I ripped it myself versus someone else ripping it?
I would think the only MP3's that are flagged as 'legal' are those purchased from an online store such as iTunes or Amazon. Then they'd have a way to 'mark' that the song is legal for tha
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also, legality of ripped music is different in many countries. suppose you visit a friend in the Netherlands. he has a CD or DVD you like. you can sit down behind his computer and copy it, and the resulting copy is perfectly legal. it does not have to be a direct copy, mp3 or any music or video format is just fine. it's different if the friend copies it for you, in that case he's illegally spreading copyrighted material. you can take your copied CD back home, and it's still legal as far as I know, under the
You may not find a tool, but... (Score:2)
...if you're looking to make things appear legit, I imagine that proper tagging and song length will go a long way. If anything, that'd be what they're checking for (recording quality as well, but I imagine you've mostly MP3's so that's somewhat moot). Is there an easy way to do that? Use iTunes or WMP and sort through them manually. Beyond that? nothing I know of. There are plenty of music directories, and you can probably check the songs against their legit counterparts in various music vendors.
Howe
used cd's (Score:4, Interesting)
what you don't have in cd format, buy in cd format (amazon often has used cd's at ok prices. shipping is never reasonable but its their profit margin 'tax').
advantage of used cds: 'the man' does not get paid. no riaa income on used cd's. its just the buyer and seller (and some middleman, perhaps). disadvantage: no money goes to the band (but they made their money the first time on that 'first sale').
if you are worried (I would not be, I think you are paranoid) then make sure you have cds for every file. and like I said, used cd's deprive the riaa of any income, so that's probably your best route.
personally, I think your first and only problem is even considering these 'cloud' services. copy enough songs to your portable to last a day (or run a random mix uploader) and what's so hard? today's portables are even big enough to hold what used to be our whole collection. many people could fit their entire collection on portables. the cloud is about 5 years too late, to be serious.
What ARE the rules? (Score:2)
So he has the CDs for some of his downloaded music. Does that mean it's legal to listen to ripped versions? Wasn't it the dream of the RIAA at one point for there to be one device, one music license? Is that not the case any more? Can I buy a piece of music on CD, then play it on any of my devices? And if I have the cassette tapes, can I download for free the music and still be legal?
And if I'm asking these questions, should I really care? The RIAA should become the MAA (no, not Missing in Action Assoc
Legality (Score:2)
Moreover, I have a lot of MP3s that I downloaded because I was too lazy to rip the CD version that I own.
Is that really a problem?
Do you expect me to talk? (Score:4, Insightful)
Does such a tool exist or does the RIAA seriously expect me to sift through 60 GB of music, remember which are pirated, and delete them by hand?"
No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die.
I'm sure the RIAA would prefer you to simply delete everything and buy it again. Just to be sure. Remember... these are the folks who swore it was illegal to rip your own CDs and firmly believed you should have an individually purchased copy of media for each individual player you used.
Statute of Limitations? (Score:3, Interesting)
Basically, is the statute of limitations applicable to downloaded music? In my limited legal knowledge, it's not a felony to download music, afik, so misdemeanors typically fall under a 7-year statute of limitation, and so if you downloaded stuff from Napster's heyday, more than 10 years ago, could those mp3s even be used to legally prosecute you?
Of course I know we're talking about the RIAA here, and they act as if the law doesn't apply to them in their dealing. But I'm curious.
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It is a civil case, so I don't think the statue applies here.
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http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#507 [copyright.gov]
Re:Statute of Limitations? (Score:5, Informative)
If you still have the pirated[sic] songs, you continue to infringe.
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I see what you're saying, but the charges the RIAA has pursued are not "possession without financial remuneration" they are for "redistributing without a license". I think the question is valid and I'm curious what the answer is.
You're approaching the problem backwards (Score:2)
Just look at the "pirated" metadata flag (Score:2)
...just kidding. Sorry, but there is *no way* to automagically determine what the license status of a file is. The only way is for you to make a list of every song you actually own and compare it against the library. But track names, file sizes, etc could all be different so an automated diff won't cut it. And don't forget that even if you own the CD it's illegal to download a copy of the songs on it, so even if it's on your list you still could be "illegal". The only way to be sure is to start from sc
I have the RIAA approved answer... (Score:3)
"Delete the ENTIRE library and re purchase all of them to be sure. It's cheaper than our lawyers raping you..."
IF you call a RIAA office the above will be their answer. if you call any lawyer the above will be their answer. if you cant PROVE you bought it, it's pirated by default.
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I wonder if the same would be true of physical sources of music. Quick: Prove to me that you bought that CD! Do you have a receipt or something? I don't care if you claim you bought it a decade ago, I demand to see proof of ownership. No proof? You must have stolen it from someone. *flashes badge* You need to come with me....
Doesn't Matter (Score:4, Insightful)
If you have some ethical issue then just buy a legal copy of the music for anything you're unsure of. Having multiple copies for personal use IS still fair use.
There is no way for anyone to know which are legal (Score:2, Informative)
What if you own the music on a record album? (Score:3)
One of my pals has regularly shopped the thrift stores (Goodwill, Salvation Army, etc.) looking for albums of the music he has downloaded. His theory is that as long as he has the album with the music - regardless of the format - he's covered.
I think he's probably right, actually. Although it might cost hims some legal fees to get RIAA off his ass if they choose to land on him.
Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think it's possible in the general case. (Score:3)
To do such a thing you would have to define
1: a whitelist of files that are identical to copies sold by legitimate services or "perfect" CD rips.
2: a blacklist of files that were found on P2P networks and have sufficiant defects or other idenitifying features that it is unlikely they would match any non-pirate's copy.
You could then go through a file collection sorting files into white, black and grey. The technical aspects of implementing such a tool are trivial.
However the problems are
1: it's pretty hard to find every file that is out there on legit services and basically impossible to find every file that is out there on P2P.
2: Afaict it is also bloody hard to get a perfect rip of a track from CD (and that is before you start considering the encoding options)
3: your CD rips will probablly not be on either the whitelist or the blacklist (see point 1), unfortunately it is likely that many pirate files won't be either (see point 1). Unfortunately not being on the tool's blacklist doesn't nessacerally mean the file isn't on the music industries blacklist.
4: most people outside of the music industry would probablly not want to give them a helping hand by building a list of "probablly pirate" tracks and those trying to track down pirates and extort money from them are unlikely to want to release their lists either.
Goldfingerer (Score:4, Funny)
"...does the RIAA seriously expect me to sift through 60 GB of music, remember which are pirated, and delete them by hand?"
No, Mr. Bond, the RIAA expects you to die.
OMQZ!!! Pheerz the b00gy manz (Score:3)
They can't 'get' you, it's all a fear tactic. Especially for titles you have on CD.
Don't distribute them. There, you are fine.
It doesn't matter. (Score:5, Insightful)
It really doesn't matter. The only damages the RIAA can reasonably claim for you having pirated music is around $1/song. It's UPLOADING that music that they care about, because then they can pretend that your upload is providing that song illegally to 20,000 people and therefore claim that that single song is worth $20,000 in damages.
They RIAA has NEVER sued ANYONE for merely possessing pirated music. I don't think they've ever sued anyone for downloading music either. It's all about what you upload. If you aren't uploading anything, you should be fine.
You can't (Score:3)
You can't do it because ITunes leverages napster data.
I know this because I have some obscure tastes in music. I have a tape and a cd of an old band. I downloaded one of the songs that's only on the tape from napster. I was disappointed with the recording because of three glitches in the track. Years later, itunes pops up. I buy the song from itunes. Low and behold, same three glitches are in the itunes version.
This happened for not just one song, but two songs from two different artists in two different genres. One was a single glitch, which I would have dismissed as chance, but four glitches at the same timestamps from two different songs in two different genres?
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yea that will happen, if someone wants to impose new law onto the people then they also need to take the necessary measures to enforce it and not just hope it happens on good will
Are all criminals bad guys? (Score:2)
And are all laws just?
If you don't think so, then you shouldn't be concerned with whether or not it's illegal or not and should be more concerned with how users can protect themselves from corporate political aggression.
Which side are you on?
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how users can protect themselves from corporate political aggression.
Guns. Lots of 'em.
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I've done exactly the same things as the submitter, but if I wanted to use these services, I'd just upload it all and let google tell me if anything infringes. I'd say 99% of my music is stuff I have the CD for, and there are a few albums where I just downloaded because I couldn't be arsed ripping, or waiting for delivery after buying the CD.
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Sorry, but the reasoning in your post made me wince. For one, the term "bad guys" is simply a us-vs-them generalisation that holds no water. I haven't met a single person in my life who is incapable of a good deed, or a bad deed. So, the question really should be, "Is the act of breaking a law always bad?".
For two, even if the answer to this is no, it makes no mention of how many laws are unjust, and which ones specifically are. If a significant portion of laws are just, then we should certainly be very con
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I say fuck'em. Send it all back and ask for a refund as you don't agree with the terms. Stuff like that.
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The illegality of downloading track of a CD you own has yet to be proven.
UMG Recordings v. MP3.com (Score:4, Informative)
The illegality of downloading track of a CD you own has yet to be proven.
In which jurisdiction? In the United States, see UMG Recordings v. MP3.com.
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And as such, there's a moderately decent chance that an innocent person will be found innocent. But it still costs a hell of a lot to be innocent in a court of law.
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Face it - to a significant number of people, piracy isn't an ethical problem or a "real" crime. It's like speeding - sure, it's technically illegal, but last I checked pretty much everyone drove 5-10 mph above the posted limit.
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He didn't "blame" anybody else - he accepts that there are some illegal files and he wants to clean them out without the hassle of creating his library all over again. Even if you aren't worried about the hours spent ripping your old CD's, maybe some of those CD's are scratched or have been lost, and there are legal downloaded files mixed in too - and playlists and ratings or whatever.... The question is very valid.
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Re-encode breaks the MD5 idea. What you really need is a way to find whatever audio watermarks the RIAA will be looking for. Odds are there are not any though, and your MD5 idea is fine.
Re:That Anonymous reader works for the RIAA? (Score:5, Insightful)
One file may be legal for one person, and illegal for another. For example, if you rip your CD yourself, the resulting MP3 is legal. Copy the same MP3 onto a friend's computer, and it's illegal. I don't think such a software is even possible to write. Every pirated / illegal MP3 file would have to be already watermarked as such in order for the software to function. What if the "common" version of the file floating around on Napster was just a basic 128Kbps rip with a common MP3 encoder, and you used the same encoder to rip the same song from the original CD yourself? In theory, it is very possible that the resulting MP3 is bit-for-bit the same as the one millions of other people pirated from Napster, even though you own the original CD and ripped the file yourself.
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One file may be legal for one person, and illegal for another. For example, if you rip your CD yourself, the resulting MP3 is legal. Copy the same MP3 onto a friend's computer, and it's illegal. I don't think such a software is even possible to write. Every pirated / illegal MP3 file would have to be already watermarked as such in order for the software to function. What if the "common" version of the file floating around on Napster was just a basic 128Kbps rip with a common MP3 encoder, and you used the same encoder to rip the same song from the original CD yourself? In theory, it is very possible that the resulting MP3 is bit-for-bit the same as the one millions of other people pirated from Napster, even though you own the original CD and ripped the file yourself.
So just digitally sign everything you personally rip. I don't see how that could be so difficult. The computer you use to rip it could do it automagically.
Now of course if most stuff ripped isnt signed on purpose thats a different story. Maybe those Mp3s aren't legal?
True the md5 idea alone wouldn't solve everything but the guy asked if it could be possible to sort his files, and thats easy. Judging legality isn't easy even with lawyers and courtrooms.
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How much does it cost for you to build a time machine to go back to 1995 and make every audio encoder digitally sign every file it compresses? I don't see how that could be so difficult.
Re:That Anonymous reader works for the RIAA? (Score:4, Informative)
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With crappier rippers maybe. With a direct digital rip, it should be the same every time, in theory, from any CD drive.
Exact Audio Copy uses the AccurateRip system which somehow manages to tell me that my rips are exactly the same as hundreds of other random people via some central DB. The only time it doesn't match up, is when I have a massive scratch in a very old CD, and EAC took hours ripping and re-ripping the same sector to get the best results possible with what I gave it to work with.
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There is no such thing as a "direct digital rip". The CD standard doesn't provide one, there are no boundaries on the CD for one to work against, and as stated rip jitter is inevitable. The only question is how the software and hardware involved handle it. The post you were objecting to talks about one of the pieces of the magic used to help with this fundamental problem that you're not aware of, and there are some others too.
Drives that support what's called AccurateStream will guarantee you that they a
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For the naptster stuff, just check for anything that has a godawful bitrate. For the downloaded stuff, the file names will probably be very different to whatever he uses when ripping himself.. so he just needs to find a media player that can sort by bitrate, and list filenames (it will be fairly easy to just scan quickly down the list and check for any block of files that stands out, assuming he downloads albums at a time and not just lots of individual tracks..).
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Absurd. How would any algorithm be able to tell from an md5 if it is a legal rip or an illegal one? Two rips of the same CD should give the same bits, regardless of whether I own it or someone gives it to me.
The only way to tell is to compare to a db of your legal music:
- you ripped a CD and still have it (not legal once you sell or give away the CD, gray area if you lose it and don't have a receipt)
- you bought the bits and they are licensed to run on the device that you have
Legal status is not a property the file itself (Score:3)
The legality of the file is not a property of the file itself, and cannot be determined from the file's content. If I buy an MP3 on Amazon, I can legally use it. If I put it on bittorrent and you download it, you have the same file as I do, but the RIAA says you're not allowed to use it.
This idea is explored in more details in the following blog post What Colour are your bits? [sooke.bc.ca]
Re:Legal status is not a property the file itself (Score:4, Insightful)
The legality of the file is not a property of the file itself, and cannot be determined from the file's content. If I buy an MP3 on Amazon, I can legally use it. If I put it on bittorrent and you download it, you have the same file as I do, but the RIAA says you're not allowed to use it.
This idea is explored in more details in the following blog post What Colour are your bits? [sooke.bc.ca]
That doesn't mean it makes any sense from a technical or scientific point of view. The only reason that is the law is because special interests have decided to go with delusional impossible ideas to protect their profit engine.
Re:Lamest question I've ever seen on Slashdot. (Score:5, Interesting)
Smartest question I've seen on /.
If you yourself can't determine the legality of the (music) files you possess, how can the RIAA? a court?
Re:It doesn't work for kiddieporn so it wont work (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
In civil suits (which for a copyright lawsuit is what it would be), the standard is a "plurality of evidence", meaning that whichever side can present a more convincing argument to the judge will win, proof be damned. (IANAL, do not consider this legal advice, all situations are different, etc. etc.)
If RIAA wants one, let RIAA pay us. (Score:2)
It would be much easier if the RIAA just created a goddamn bounty rather than pose as an Anonymous Reader and try to coax us into developing it for free.
Only a matter of time before Facebook (Score:2)
It's only a matter of time before Facebook offers a music service which requires you to allow them to scan your harddrive and share it with your Facebook "friends".
Re:Delete it all (Score:5, Informative)
In the UK copyright law does not even allow recording TV shows to watch later, it is merely tolerated
This is incorrect.
s70, Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, entitled "Recording for the purposes of time-shifting", provides that:
The making in domestic premises for private and domestic use of a recording of a broadcast ... solely for the purpose of enabling it to be viewed or listened to at a more convenient time does not infringe any copyright in the broadcast ... or in any work included in it.