RIAA Unveils Tracking Methods (What are "Metatags" and "Hashes"?)

[dauterman]

Hi,

I'm writing to ask some technical stuff about identifying MP3s. There was a recent article on identification of MP3s. It is at:

<url>http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030827/ap_on_hi_te/downloading_music_2</URL>

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Music Industry Unveils Tracking Methods
Wed Aug 27, 5:09 PM ET
By TED BRIDIS, AP Technology Writer

WASHINGTON - The recording industry provided its most detailed glimpse to date Wednesday into some of the detective-style techniques it has employed as part of its secretive campaign to cripple music piracy over the Internet.

The disclosures were included in court papers filed against a Brooklyn woman fighting efforts to identify her for allegedly sharing nearly 1,000 songs over the Internet. The recording industry disputed her defense that songs on her family's computer were from compact discs she had legally purchased.

Using a surprisingly astute technical procedure, the Recording Industry Association of America examined song files on the woman's computer and traced their digital fingerprints back to the former Napster file-sharing service, which shut down in 2001 after a court ruled it violated copyright laws.

For example, the industry disclosed its use of a library of digital fingerprints, called "hashes," that it said can uniquely identify MP3 music files that had been traded on the Napster service as far back as May 2000. Examining hashes is commonly used by the FBI and other computer investigators in hacker cases.

By comparing the fingerprints of music files on a person's computer against its library, the RIAA believes it can determine in some cases whether someone recorded a song from a legally purchased CD or downloaded it from someone else over the Internet.

The recording industry also disclosed that it is examining so-called "metadata" tags, hidden snippets of information embedded within many MP3 music files. In this case, lawyers wrote, they found evidence that others — including one user who called himself "Atomic Playboy" — had recorded the music files and that some songs had been downloaded from known pirate Web sites.

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Is this not complete B.S.? I have heard of a "Metatag" in MP3s but have never heard of "Hash" in an MP3. Is hash some new kind of MP3 tag?

Now for the important question - HOW DO I CLEAN OUT THE HASH AND THE METATAGS FROM MY MP3S? Is there a hash and metatag "washer" program?

Sincerely,
dauterman

[FutureIverson]

Wow, that's a good article, i figure they probably will make a washer, but if they have these capitbilities... HOLY SHIT

[phalkon30]

I think you misunderstand what a metatag or hash is/are.

While I don't know all of what the metatag includes, I do know you need to have it. Without it, well, its not an mp3 anymore. I believe it contains info such as the ID3 info

A hash, well, every file can be hashed. Ever heard of Sig2dat? Any kind of a verified link site like share reactor also use hashes. A hash contains bits of code from the file. I'm really not sure how to explain this, but hashes basicly say "if a file has certain code at a certain point, it is the file being hashed"

Ok, so I'm tired, and that didn't make much sense, anybody help me out here?

[REDO]

After I read the same article, I was thinking of developing a program that will do exactly this.

http://www.zeropaid.com/bbs/showthread.php?s=&threadid=14118&highlight=program

I never got any feedback though. Im not sure if its even possible to remove it. Id have to read up on it.

EDIT - I posted at the same time as Phalkon30..... Then maybe a program can be written that clears out the information instead?

[aqlo]

a hash represents a pattern-search in the file, it's sort of like a fingerprint you can't change it without changing the file itself.

[serrebi101]

well in lite of this event, I decided to completely re do some of my i d3 tags, is there an easier way then actualley dong it by hand, I just spent an hour going through and doing this in winamp, is there a automatic way?

[DeadMan2003]

Someone needs to come up with a program that strips out all the fingerprinting and other hash/tags and replaces with something that is unique to you.

Of course you can still be said to be sharing stuff but at least your argument about it being from your own collection of CD's would holdup a bit better ;)

[method]

The problem with altering the hashes for each user is that multi-sourcing will be pointless.

I can write a program (and I'm sure hundreds of other coders could too) to take meta-tags out of media and replace them with something similar but slightly different from user to user.

If there's really a need for it... let me know and I'll get tappin' away.

EDIT: If just stripping the ID3 tags would work, I'll do that. (there's two different types of ID tagging in mp3s but it's not hard to cover both)

[eivioolla]

I'm quite sure the hash values are calculated over the pure data without the id3 tags aswell. Like you say, this would ruin multisourcing as programs can't find other sources when everyone has (slightly) different files.

[collideous]

Changing the ID3 tags on a lot of files at once is easy with tools like TagScanner (http://xdev.narod.ru/tagscan_e.htm) or Mp3tag (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/). Changing the ID3 tag changes the file, and therefore changes the hash. But then one could come up with a way to create a fingerprint of the mp3 (music) content only, and completely ignore the ID3 tag information. Want to be safe? Don't download, rip instead.

[jonnymnemonic]

In the case of MP3s what they mean are the ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags. Look with an ID3 editor through a bunch of MP3 files you have downloaded and in at least some cases you are likely to see 'ripped by so-and-so' in one of the fields, or something else similarly incriminating.

I wrote a utility some time agi to handle ID3 tags myself, and the very first thing I *always* do is strip all ID3 tags, then re-generate them fresh, without any of that extraneous information. Thus, all my MP3s are clean of such evidence. I may tweak that utility a little and add an unattended option to add a completely random string to one of the unused ID3 fields and run that on C:\ and D:\ (my hard drives), and every subdirectory, and do that like once every day or two, so my metadata will not only be unique, but always-changing.

Yes, it defeats multisourcing if anyone gets anything from me, but ah well, not like MP3 files are big anyway; multisourcing is far more useful for large files, like movies or album collections that have been rar'd or zipped. Of course, movies also have their own brand of metadata, but being ADSL, nobody gets those from me anyway. ;)

[SimbaK2K]

there are freeware id3 tag killers available, just go search on download.com, also there are programs to create new meta tags from data automatically. Easiest way is just to be careful what you share.