[advocacy] DRM in OGG - A Proposal

[Beni Cherniavsky]

On 2002-11-08, Vance Roussin wrote:

> 1.Make aMD5 hash of only the vorbis part of the ogg stream including
> vorbis stream ID, and all tags.
> 2.Sign it with a free (as in speech) digital signature method, and insert
> it into the ogg as a separate stream.
>
> Programs could be made so that they will see the signature and warn the
> user that changing the tags or the vorbis stream in any way will invalidate
> the signature if the user tries to, but still allow him to do so and/or
> remove it if he wishes. And of course still play files that have no or
> invalid signatures. "Unofficial" players can still play all files without
> having to deal with or destroy the signature. New signatures can be added
> and removed as the users sees fit and will be separate from each other so
> that no matter how many differentsources sign the vorbis stream any of
> them can be removed without invalidating the others.
>

One of the abilities I would like to see in Draycott (Ogg's future true
metadata format, if it ever comes) is to aggregate many tag sets, each
signed by a different person (with varying levels of authentication, from
anonymous to simple tagger's name/email to complex cryptography...).

Properly implemented, it would allow co-existance of the official tags as
defined by the artist, custom tags set by the user to match his likings,
tags "approved" by peer review/voting on online databases like
MusicBrainz, etc...  Hopefully, in the long term, such features can bring
about a global rise in tag quality.


--
Beni Cherniavsky <cben at tx.technion.ac.il>

<p><p>--- >8 ----
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