encrypted id3 tags...possible?

[ehmjay]

hey all
i have a band and we want to release some mp3's of our music, and i was wondering is there a way to lock the ID3 tags so once we enter in all our information it cannot be changed. we dont want others changing the tags making claims that it is them or other people, we want to find a way so no-one can tamper with the files (mainly for copyright reasons) thanks a ton.

btw. if id3 wont work, is there any alternatives?

[m0e]

In my experience id3 tags can always be stripped from the mp3 file, after that you can create a new tag and insert any info you wish. As to other formats I'm not sure.

[baafie]

I'm afraid there is no way to do that. This is the nature of distributing via the internet - data can be freely copied, thus it can also be freely modified.

I would recommend putting your music on a website that clearly indicates that you are distributing your music freely, but you are not transferring redistributing rights and you attain full copyright and authoring ownership to the contents. If someone does attempt to steal your music, you will probably have enough evidence to sue the offender: testimonies of the authors and auditors who were there when the music was created.

[dylman]

Welcome to the RIAA's side of the digital music revolution. It doesn't matter how you encrypt your ID3 tags, or even if that's possible. I'll just burn a CD of your music and re-encode it to mp3 or Ogg or whatever, with whatever tags I wish. Yes, I'll lose some quality, but I don't care, it's free after all.

As a computer user, I have the God-given right to steal all the music I want. It's certainly not my fault if the artists don't get the recognition/pay they deserve for their work.


But seriously, good luck with your band, but I don't think what you're asking for is possible, or even realistic. If the billion-dollar record industry can't protect their IP, then what chance does an individual have?

[gaekwad2]

Watermarks

They're working on that idea for years now though and afaik haven't produced anything usable yet.

Fraunhofer recently resurrected that idea as a proposed alternative to drm which would let people copy their files as much as they want while enabling the copyright owner to trace them if they appear on p2p networks.

[ehmjay]

okay. thanks guys. i was just hoping we could do something. yes i do download music but i still give credit to those artists oh well. thanks again.

[MonKeyRum]

Possibly look into another form of Audio and not just .mp3 and the issue would be semi adverted. I say semi cause even if you stream over the net it can be captured by sound cards and then encoded to .mp3 by anyone with the know how.

As stated above there is no truely secure method for protecting songs right now.

[MonKeyRum]

Let's play raise the dead