What Would You Pay for Used Digital Access Rights?

The United States Supreme Court has ruled 6-3 to uphold your right to resell legally-purchased physical goods contaning copyrighted elements, even if the copyright holder objects. Meanwhile, a U.S. District Court judge ruled to block your right to resell legally-purchased digital downloads containing copyrighted elements. Where does this lead?

If companies cannot limit consumer ownership rights to physical goods, that may just hasten their transition to all-digital delivery. But courts are fickle, and future rulings could extend re-sale rights to digital downloads. Better for companies to keep digital goods in the cloud and sell access to them.

The major players are taking steps to make non-exclusive rights to access cloud-based digital goods feel like ownership. Since the November 2012 announcement in that the Supreme Court would hear the Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons case, both Apple and Amazon have received patents indicating they are working on technology to permit buyers of e-books and cloud-based music files to resell these products. Don't be fooled into thinking this will give you full ownership rights.

Physical media — books, LPs and the like — are scarce objects. No matter how many are made, the number is finite, the individual objects are unique, and are subject to wear, damage and loss over time. The ones that survive retain value according to their condition. And you are free to re-sell them to a willing buyer.

Digital media files — information stored in bits-only form — are infinite objects. There is no limit on the number of people who can simultaneous possess the information, each copy is identical, and does not degrade over time. The value of infinite objects is in the information transfer; the objects themselves have no retained value. But you should be free to re-sell them as long as you actually transfer possession to a buyer; the value of the transaction is based on its convenience.

Cloud-based digital media files are shared objects. Only one copy need exist because possession is retained by the owner (Apple, Amazon) who can sell an infinite number of individual rights to access the file. Amazon's rumored system for selling your "used" Kindle titles merely turns off your access to the book(s) and enables access for someone else. There is no transfer, making it impossible to place a value on the transaction. Why are "used" digital access rights worth any more or less than the original rights?

Furthermore, Amazon has announced Coins, a virtual currency obtained via credit card which will be used by Kindle Fire owners to purchase games, apps, content, and in-app purchases on their tablets. Expect any transaction in the virtual secondary market to be denominated in virtual currency, which amounts to "store credit" issued to the seller. (We all know how coupons convince us to spend more money.) Hard currency enters these walled-off digital ecosystems, but it never comes out.

Ownership of music still trumps access in the cloud when audio fidelity and freedom of choice are considered. All my weightless digital library files play identically, whether the material was originally sourced on vinyl, CD, or legally-purchased download. That same homogeneity should extend to selling any or all of the files, or donating the library after I'm gone. Stand up for First Sale protection everywhere.


             Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #55            

Title: The Big Band Sessions

Artist: Anita O'Day
Genre: Jazz
Year: 1979

The Big Band Sessions (2-LP, Verve VE-2-2534) is a re-packaging of five Anita O'Day titles: Anita O-Day Swings Cole Porter with Billy May (V-2118), Anita O'Day and Billy May Swing Cole Porter (V-2141), Trav'lin' Light (V2157), Cool Heat (V-8312) and All the Sad Young Men (V-8442). I recently purchased it at an estate sale for $2 and made a high-res digital transfer with tracks organized according to original title and album sequence. (Yes, you can do that.) If First Sale Doctrine is not universally applied, how many copyright holders' permissions (euphemism for payments) would be necessary to sell this digital re-packaging — one, five, six? Any number greater than zero is too many.

© 2013 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.

He Who Sleeps in Continual Noise is Wakened by Silence

In The Devil's Dictionary, "a collection of dark and bitter definitions for common terms," Ambrose Bierce (1842-c1914) offers this:

Noise, n. A stench in the ear. Undomesticated music. The chief product and authenticating sign of civilization.

[Image: Casey Kotas, Aural Repellant.]

One of the pleasures of ephemeralizing old physical media to weightless digital form is the opportunity to transcend the condition of the source material. Almost always this involves removing noise. There are two fundamental kinds of noise; each requires a unique approach to remove it.

1. Surface Noise. Surface noise is caused by artifacts that audibly impede the progress of a turntable needle across vinyl. It is typically characterized as either "clicks and pops" (caused by damage, dust, static) or "surface crackle" (caused by degradation over time leaving groove surfaces less than perfectly smooth). Where surface noise occurs, it replaces the sound that would otherwise have been recorded at that instant.

If modeled as a series of obstructions, surface noise can be removed algorithmically using a combination
of recognizer and replacement strategy. Recognizers generally look for sharp discontinuities of a specific duration in an otherwise continuous sound wave to identify noise candidates for removal. However, if you remove an obstruction, there is no sound behind it. Therefore, replacement strategies either stitch together the two sides of the wave on either side of an obstruction, or interpolate a new waveform over the duration of an obstruction.

While there are many software products to address unwanted surface noise in a recording, none are perfect and can benefit from case-by-case user adjustment of their controls to produce the desired result. Said the author of one popular tool, "it is almost impossible to get 100% accuracy with zero false positives." As a result, sometimes you are forced to remove manually obstructions that eluded algorithmic processing.

2. Audio Noise. On the other hand, audio noise is an interference signal that mixes with and degrades desired sound. It is usually characterized by its frequency spectrum, either narrowband (focused) or broadband (wide). Audio noise can be effectively removed if you know two things: a) exactly what the noise sounds like in isolation; and b) precisely where it occurs. Uncertainty along either axis has a negative effect on the result; attempting to use noise removal techniques on uncertain inputs essentially takes out random sound, further degrading the desired signal.

At the risk of over-simplifying a complex process, audio noise removal is a two step process after dividing the frequency spectrum into thousands of individual bands. First, measure the sound level of just the noise in each of the bands, creating the so-called noise floor. Next, measure the sound level of the recording (including noise) in each of the bands. If the level is greater than or equal to the noise floor, subtract off the noise floor. This has the effect of silencing bands that are just noise and reducing the noise in the remaining bands.

It has been said that 90% of success is showing up. 90% of removing noise is knowing what kind of noise it is. In both cases, the other 10% is knowing what to do. Here are two cases studies.

  

            Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #33            

Artist: Anita O'Day

Title: This is Anita
Genre: Jazz
Year: 1955



Consider this audio sample from a direct recording of an LP from the 1950s. There is a "scraping" sound (origin unknown) in one section. Because of its several-second duration, the unwanted sound could not be addressed as surface noise. But because there was no isolated example of just the unwanted sound, it could not be removed as audio noise. In consultation with an audio expert, a mathematical model of the scraping as audio noise was created, but it really wasn't a close enough match to effect removal. Listen to the result. Ultimately, I was not able to use this track.

            Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #34            

Artist: Perry Como

Title: Where You're Concerned
Genre: Easy Listening
Year: 1978



On the other hand, consider this audio sample from a homemade cassette recording of an LP with noticeable wear and tear. Using a combination of techniques, three layers of audio grime could be removed: clicks and pops, surface crackle (both surface noise), and tape hiss (broadband audio noise). Listen to the result. The entire recording was generally in this degraded condition, and I was very happy to be able to restore it to the point it could be included in my Mom's iPod library.

© 2012 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.