Anti-piracy message aims at scammers

Inventors claim that they can track pirates by burying anti-piracy warning in a song which is disintegrated on being abused.

A pair of New York inventors believe they can thwart music pirates by secretly burying an anti-piracy warning in a track, which is disinterred if the copyright has been abused,

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New Scientist

reports.

The warning, for instance, a voice from a record company boss, berating the user for piracy, exploits the fact that the tones of a musical instrument consist of a complex pattern of randomly-phased harmonics.

Inventors Mark Bocko and Zeljko Ignjatovic tweaked a few harmonics to shift out of the pattern and then used those shifts to convey a 20-kilobit speech message.

Their patented idea is to incorporate a software decoder in file-sharing applications which encourage mass copying and are the bane of the music industry today.

The decoder would detect the telltale phase shifts and convert them into the warning message, causing them to boom out through loudspeakers or headphones, the British weekly reports in next Saturday's issue.

For legitimate listeners, though, the digital shifts are so small that there is no difference at all in the perception of the music.

Previous attempts by researchers to bury anti-piracy signals in copyrighted music and films have run into counter-measures by hackers, who filter out the message, and also compatibility problems in players.