"Encryption" / Access restrictions for music

[Master-Athmos]

I've put this in the dev forum because this is going to be more of a question than a feature request:

I have the impression that when you go ahead and buy music for your game you get some troubles with Spring's current mod / game system. That's because I saw quite some resellers who were a bit fussy when it's about games and so you e.g. had to buy a pretty expensive license or they immediately tell you to contact them when using stuff in games. Some of them offer some nice non-commercial licenses though which seem to be valid for games too so there are some realistic possibilities to use such music without spending immense amounts of money...

The problem is though that this most certainly will get tricky when you tell them you're just going to zip whatever music you have and rename the file ending. I don't think they'll let you just spread zipped versions of their products...

So would there be a way to "encrypt" music in a reasonable way? I guess any kinds of passwords would be futile as you'd have to put them somewhere in your modfile. When restricting things to music in the first place would there e.g. be the possibility to add some strange stuff to a file's header which the engine filters out so it'll playback things just fine but standard applications will give you errors...

Any ideas on this topic?

[Tobi]

Generally pointless because if Spring can open the file, it means it is possible to modify Spring to write out the data in a proper file, and since Spring is free/open source software, anyone with C++ knowlegde can do this.

Of course if such publisher doesn't care it is trivial to get at their data with some C++ code or hex editing of spring.exe, but doesn't like if you can get at their data by just renaming some .sdz file, then I guess someone could make an option that adds some pointless encryption with password embedded in the Spring executable or the game archive...
(would really be code existing just to make publisher happy, it wouldn't have a real purpose at all...)

[Master-Athmos]

Well let's face it: There is NO way to secure anything and this isn't about totally making sure no one will use your files. Of course anyone would be able to look up the source code and find out how the "encryption" or whatever is applied works and then codes something to bypass that and "extracts" the music. There will be no way to do anything about that...

There is a huge difference though between just using your standard compression programm to open all the files and browsing through thousands of lines of code to get to the right point and even then it needs someone who knows C++ and not just someone who knows where to click in his Windows software...

So with any kind of access restrictions the files won't be "safe" but you've increased the "barrier" you have to overcome to get the files by a lot which makes them inaccessible for like 99% of the standard users and I think that is an appropiate amount of "security"...

[Regret]

RIAA / MPAA in spring?

[AF]

Its bull to talk about satisfying the needs of a music publisher when we flout Atari IP on a daily basis and have no intention of doing anything about it save make long discussions.

[Master-Athmos]

Spring <> TA mods

So plz keep the TA IP thing out of this topic...

[AF]

Thank you for taking one part of my point and using it to utterly disregard the entire point.

You need to sort out a working mechanism for doing generic archive encryption or locking, such a system would only work if people actually listened and took notice when I say that we need to package installers for each game rather than bandying about sdz files all the time.

A custom engine executable with a unique game specific password locking the archives would be fine because that executable is unique to that game anyway if it was pushed out in an installer, (and if its a commercial game or contains commercial content, then this is a given )

[Master-Athmos]

Thank you for taking one part of my point and using it to utterly disregard the entire point.

Actually the "music copyright protection is futile as we break copyrights with TA anyway" point was your only one you explicitly came up with. There's no self-evident logical connection from what you wrote in your first post and what you wrote now so please be more specific in the first place and don't let us guess your conclusions next time...

Doing seperate executables of Spring for each game each delivering a special password sounds like a clean and probably even more safe solution. Still I wouldn't impose this system on everything using Spring but just make it an option you may use or not...

[Auswaschbar]

You still have to publish the sources, which include the password.

[Master-Athmos]

So the license allows no exceptions for like just typing in some "nonsense" in a string that gets used as password? No way to make this happen without having to release the original source?

[AF]

or we can do something similar to AIs, AIs do not have to be GPL compatible as excepted by SJ

[zerver]

Only free music belongs in Spring, and there's plenty of it.

[Regret]

edit:delete me

[lurker]

You can do all you want to secure it with a password you put in seperately, sure, and anyone that wants the music is going to extract it. If this makes publishers happy, so be it, I guess. But I doubt nobody capable would feel like sharing their new exe.

[moriarty]

DRM doesn't work because fundamentally you have to give the user the (encrpytion) key to access the locked (encrypted) content. It's even worse when the key is in an open-source product (i.e. spring).

[Argh]

1. Decompressing an archive for music files that are locked at game start seems like a massive waste of players' time.

The only way to provide a fairly complete solution would be to have a unique key buried in the main mod file, that would let Spring unlock all the other archives (i.e., a LZMA / zip password).

2. That would discourage the simplest form of piracy, but wouldn't lock the Spring engine or prevent the contents from being copied wholly and still work.

3. Even if the decompressed archive was then inaccessible to normal file access from the OS at that point, other than read-only, it wouldn't prevent very easy hacking in the longer term.

While I basically agree with AF that whole-game distributions make more sense in the longer term, I think that this is a side-issue at best. Content security is fairly hard to attain with any engine, and we've all seen or even installed / played hacked versions of games, so we know that even the closed-source giant corporations haven't found any silver bullets for this.

If it was some minor attempt at denial / obfuscation, that'll stop anybody who's not leet enough they'd walk right through more serious attempts at security anyhow, so why waste time on heftier solutions?

[Pxtl]

When the one guy who's making money off of Spring is telling you that copy-protection is futile, you know it's a lost cause.

[Argh]

Meh. I don't like copy-protection, as a customer, and I don't think it stops people from copying games, as a business-person.

I think other than maybe doing a "surface treatment" of this issue, to provide people with a fig leaf if they're interested in licensing stuff where they'll be at risk should they be demonstrably not obeying the EULA on the materials they're using... it's utterly pointless, and would remain so even if the engine was closed-source.

Go look at most major games these days. I can get you Fallout 3's music tracks without missing a beat. Freelancer's MP3's weren't even obfuscated. Warcraft III's music just requires third-party unpacking tools. Etc. It's pointless for stuff like this, and if you make it really effective, it's probably going to cause more aggravation for game designers than it's really worth.

[zwzsg]

Whatever you do to encrypt your music, I have the ultimate decipher:


This amazing device, when put next to my loudspeakers, will record ANYTHING, no matter how advanced the encryption algorithm you use, no matter how many kilobytes your digital secure key is, ... Not even unpublished military grade cipher will stop it!

Oh, and the killer thing, it that's it's available in any supermarket, and so easy to operate that even my step-mom who's never touched a computer in her life could manage to record your music with it!

[zerver]

will record ANYTHING, no matter how advanced encryption algorithm you use

watch out, riaa will hunt you down and seize your miracle device