Fire Alarm Companies

Let 's say, just for analog' s sake, you had a defense contractor that supplied weapons and ammunition to the Earth 's army. Let 's say that army to war with the evil pod people from the planet Dah-Rull. And let 's say that this defense contractor, named Universal ammo group, the good guys with the new ball rounds, that she promised to completely obliterate the Dah-Rull pod people and make everyone on earth comes back happy.

Now, let 's say that if the Earth' s army confronted the enemy and fired their weapons ... the balls instead of shooting, just blown up, where the terms of the Earth 's infantry with them. As a result, the pod people were free to take over the world. You 'd be pretty upset, wouldn' t you? If you re 'a pod person, I mean?

But that 's about how effective Universal Music Group' s latest attempt by the watermark. You can use the fascinating exchange on the bulletin board of Hydrogenaudio.com, but here 's the skinny. A client of Passionato, a Web site for audiophiles brings high-quality recordings of classical music, notices that he is always an odd purring noise on his FLAC file by Tchaikovsky 's 5 Symphony, which he got from Passionato (the file was advertised as a loss-free), a sound that wasn 't on the act, which he received directly from UMG. It 's some back and forth between board members about some helpful technical problems that might have been the problem, but eventually, after multiple users and test files are similar, they come to the conclusion that it must be watermarked. It culminates with a show and someone from Passionato indicating that the file was received from faithfully what UMG supplies the translated website, which means that any sound artifacts would be the result of UMG 's file and not a technical problem, the from printing or file extension have switches. Basically, UMG is distributed watermark files by their partners. Files which may be advertised as a loss-free recordings for audiophiles.

A few things became clear in the exchange board:

Firstly, nice try, UMG, but that isn 't going to achieve what you want. You 're a committed group of audiophiles are talking about. There were all sorts of suggestions for nixing the watermarks of pirated an un-watermarked file (under consideration are that it has not bought into what actually lossless format) to do, cut and paste remixes of the file clean by one they cut the artifact . Either way, it can be abolished.

Secondly these are your damn customers ! Seriously, as ridiculous as I was opening analogy, this is just stupid. Your watermark is just annoying paying customers. Now they must, in addition to ... You know ... give you money , To go and figure out a way to fix what you screwed up for them. And that 's going on, so they buy from you in the future? And it did what exactly to the files not to keep pirated copies elsewhere?

I think 't, I have this to say an established company, but: UMG, customers are only human. Stop screwing with people and sell the product as advertised, or you 'll find you' ll have no more left to piss off customers.

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