Thursday, 02 May 2019
What is SDMI, and will it stop me listening to MP3 music?
The object of SDMI (Secure Digital Music Initiative) is to allow the «owners» of music, the copyright holders, to produce digital files which they can control, i.e. files which ideally cannot be passed on to anyone other than the person to whom they are originally supplied, and possibly which can only be used for a limited time or a limited number of plays. So there will be some mechanism built into the way the files are encoded which will either prevent a playable copy being made (difficult with a purely digital file), or will limit the file to playing on a particular machine. The problem with such schemes is they necessarily have to be based on encryption, and it’s virtually impossible to produce a scheme that allows you to distribute files economically whilst being uncrackable. The most secure of such schemes generally involve a hardware component as well as software encoding (e.g. compare to software protection using «dongles»… but the software itself is still vulnerab
le to cracking). So… SDMI might create a scenario where you had to buy a «dongle» of some sort, a piece of hardware that you somehow attached to your machine, and then you would pay to download music files, and they would only play with your «dongle», not for anyone else. They might also automatically become unplayable after 2 weeks (or any other amount of time), or after you played them 50 times, or whatever.
In any event, SDMI is an ongoing initiative of major music industry powers which hasn’t really produced results yet, and when it does produce results they will necessarily involve new file formats and will be distinct from MP3 files, per se (although some elements of MP3 encoding might still be included in the process – c.f. the MPX format which you have to use to load music files into the RCA Lyra player… that’s a form of proprietary encoding imposed on top of the original MP3 encoding, basically for the purpose of restricting ongoing copy flexibility, which is the kind of direction SDMI is heading).
I can certainly understand why the music industry wants SDMI, perhaps even feels that it *must* have it… but somehow, the more I talk about it, the less likely it seems to me that it will actually succeed. Ah well, we shall have to wait and see.
