What REALLY happened

"You try to get good and rare stuff and work hard to get them. Sometimes you pay a lot of money to get it, and then? It's free on youtube because somebody leaked it.."

Consider that there's a pecking order, though. While you're pissy when this stuff gets leaked for free and the fans can hear it, the artists themselves are just as pissy that you guys have the stuff in the first place.

Brian May's version of His Latest Flame. Look up his post about that on his Soapbox, and tell me he's fine with the practice of trading stuff that the artist doesn't want you to hear.

All I'm getting at is that if the artists feelings don't matter to you guys, then don't expect your feelings to matter to us normal people.

[QUOTE]

[b]uef wrote: [/b] Out of interest what software was being used to embed the files with a 'personal watermark'? As this is neither a feature of facebook nor the common filehosts. Doubtless such software exists, but that smells like a red herring to me.

Source: IT expert and good spotter offibs on the net.[/QUOTE]

There were a couple of things that made me raise an eyebrow on this.  The announcement of it mid game after David said he was leaving rather than hitting David with it right away. The comments of brian's wig about being able to tell if it was Fuller by gauging if anything leaked among the things acquired after he left just seemed remarkably dumb given they'd just publicly announced the watermarking system. The fact that JSS first said somewhere that this was a indelible unalterable amazing super mark and then later chided David for being so dumb he didn't even remove it didn't quite tally either. And JSS talked about doing an audio analysis to prove the TMLWKY writing session leaked by David was from his mini disc which wouldn't seem necessary if you could prove it was downloaded from Fanthology with Fuller's mark.  But I just elected to accept it because it's a completely neutral piece of evidence whether it exists or it doesn't.  If it exists I don't think it matters for the reasons I've already outlined, and if it doesn't exist all that would mean is there was an irrational focus on convicting David, a fact already demonstrated by 14 pages of insisting that "I got if from another collector" meant David told him "I didn't download it from Fanthology".  

So in the absence of any hard evidence to the contrary I'm happy to accept the claim. The most likely thing to me was writing the mark to the metadata. They said they had an IT technician set up the hub, and I've used a PHP extension called getid3 to read and write metadata to mp3s in the past and I know it can write FLAC comments as well. It wouldn't be hard to do if the tech wrote custom scripts for the ftp transfers or modified some open source third party thing.That would be my guess, though an educated guess is still a guess.  Does conversion from FLAC to MP3 retain metadata? Does uploading to YouTube retain metadata?  No idea on either of those, but if somebody was really curious I suppose they could download the video and see what metadata is there.  I'm not remotely curious because as noted I don't think it matters.

I'm enjoying GratefulFan's post. Right or wrong, they are well constructed.

Thanks for saying so dysan. I write all this stuff and fling it into the void and all I can usually think is how bad I am at being succinct. So good to know from you that in this instance at least it's not completely torturous. :)

I'm going to say I find the claims about the watermark suspicious to say the least. I seriously doubt YouTube preserves any metadata present in the source file (and considering YouTube doesn't accept audio files at all so it would have to be converted to a video with the song as its audio tracks, I'd say any metadata would be lost there already), and any audio watermarks would be difficult to be heard because of how much YouTube compressses audio.
There'd be already audible audio loss when converting audio from the FLAC source to the video format that YouTube would access, add to it compression added by YouTube and I'd say any such embedded watermark would become impossible to analyze.

But as GF said, it's really irrelevent whethere the watermark in question exists or not or is analyzable or not. David could have gotten the audio from someone else as well as from Fanthology and then simply decided to upload his own Fanthology copy, probably because there was no different between the two that he could even care about. Now to state it's proven without a doubt that David only had his own downloaded copy from Fanthology because that particular copy was the one uploaded would require it to be proven beyond reasonable doubt that the only copy he ever had was the one downloaded by him directly from Fanthology.
However, that's far from proven beyond reasonable doubt.

Also, the allegations that David said he never downloaded the song from Fanthology while at the same time gave positive feedback about the song so therefore he lied about never having downloaded the song from Fanthology rest on shaky grounds too - they rely on an interpretation of "I got the song from another source" of also meaning "I never downloaded the song from Fanthology" which is however fallacious. It could just as well mean "I downloaded the song from another source as well as Fanthology".

But from what I see here is, Fanthology members decided David is guilty, collected evidence/interpretations that supports that hypothesis and downplayed all evidence/interpretations that doesn't.

Quite frankly, I've been myself where David is now - namely being accused based on fallacious logical jumps and refusal to acknowledge the "evidence" supporting the accusations might not be irrefutable. So I know how it feels and it's not pleasant.
And while I can understand how Fanthology feel about the leak (I run a community collecting Beta versions of old software and I've had people leaking private Builds from my site to other sites in the past with the sole intent of harming my community and it wasn't pleasant) but I'm just saying that they should first prove it beyond reasonable doubt that David only had his Fanthology copy before publicly accusing him.

Plaintiff = DRF who accused the group of wrongly accusing him.

Defendant = the group who had been accused of wrong accusing the plaintiff.

Somebody said earlier in this thread that a defendant does not need to submit proof.  Therefore DRF is the one who has  to submit proof.

I also do not know anything about  watermark security but I do not think anyone is going to teach me here.

This is a private "quarrel" which should not have been made public.  The person who created the issue just threw a flame here and disappear from the scene.  Let us not fall into a trap of ghost debate again because we are not in the picture and we should let the parties involved sort themselves out.

Plaintiff = the group who wrongly accused DRF.

Defendant = DRF who said the group wrongly accused him.

Saying the group wrongly accused him isn't an accusation. It's simply disputing their accusations against him.
So it's the original accusers that have to submit proof.

Also, a watermark as a means to distinguish the leaker is only reliable as long as it doesn't get distorted. And (re-)compression is the best way to distort it, thus making it very difficult to anaylze at best. But as GF and I have said, the watermark is really irrelevant here simply because noone is even disputing that the copy uploaded on YouTube was David's own Fanthology copy.

What we're disputing is the allegation that the copy on YouTube being David's own Fanthology copy proves he never got the song from anyone else. And so far I haven't seen any good evidence corroborating said claim.

What does David have to submit proof for? David never claimed that the copy he uploaded onto YouTuben wasn't his own Fanthology copy. All he said was he uploaded the song (without specifying which copy it was) because he got another copy from someone else (but never said it was the copy from someone else that he uploaded).
The guys from Fanthology have jumped to a conclusion and accused him of betrayal. To prove that, they'd need to prove David never got a second (and from what I gather, audibly identical) copy of the song. However, you can't prove a negative.

I do find it bad on David's part of not having informed Fanthology that external collectors were obtaining Fanthology material, but that's the only wrong thing he did.
The uploading, unless proven conclusively and beyond reasonable doubt that he never got another copy, is pretty much not wrong because as soon as he got a copy from a non-Fanthology source, Fanthology can no longer claim exclusivity or control to it.

And in my opinion, the guys at Fanthology know that very well but are just upset that they have one piece of exclusive material less in their collection.
Believe me, I've seen this kind of attitude a lot of times on the Beta scene for example, when someone else leaks a particular Build of Windows to the public and then all the people who had it in their private collections and used it for trading get pissed off at that and demand the Build being removed from the public.
I know it's frustrating when something from your collection becomes public but as long as it can't proven beyond reasonable doubt that it only existed in your collection, the best thing to do it just to get over it. And I'm talking from personal experience here.

>>This is a private "quarrel" which should not have been made public. The person who created the issue just threw a flame here and disappear from the scene. Let us not fall into a trap of ghost debate again because we are not in the picture and we should let the parties involved sort themselves out.<<
Well I'm fine with all that and I agree. I just don't like the public lynching that some people did against David simply based on their opinion that "JSS never lies". I know from personal experience just how bad it is to get lynched based on that kind of attitude. I've been lynched like that myself and believe me, it's NOT pleasant.
And from personal experience I can tell you that stopping the discussion and doing nothing about the lynching will cause it to grow worse and worse. It happend to me when I came from being verbally lynched by 2 people to being subject of Denial of Service attacks by a group of more than 10 people. And I certainly do not want David to face the same.
And if you think he doesn't risk that - please read this thread again. People already proposed to flag his account for copyright infringement as a vendetta for "his actions". And I think it's only a matter of time before some poor souls with no life that simply bought into Fanthology's allegations against David, will think of even worse way to "make David pay". So I think we should do our best to preven that from happening rather than doing nothing and then screaming in panic after shit has already hit the fan.

"So I think we should do our best to preven that from happening rather than doing nothing and then screaming in panic after shit has already hit the fan."

-1. I hope his channel tanks. I also hope that he starts a new one and this time sticks to uploading stuff that can't be purchased. He can also ditch the remixes - they're bloody awful.

It's pretty obvious who the collectors are in this thread and the one over in the announce section. Their language is almost "cultish" because they are part of the "special" group. Seriously some of you need to get your minds adjusted. That trading model fell apart years ago at the dawn of the Internet. Once you create "special" groups among yourselves you will forever run the risk that your collection will leak. Fanthology have only themselves to blame, not David.

[QUOTE] [b]uef wrote:[/b]
Out of interest what software was being used to embed the files with a 'personal watermark'? As this is neither a feature of facebook nor the common filehosts. Doubtless such software exists, but that smells like a red herring to me.
Source: IT expert and good spotter of fibs on the net.[/QUOTE]
Any little thing can be inserted to a song with any audio editor. If nobody has ever heard the song before, they won't know the difference. But the person who inserted the little tick, made the slight edit, or customized the fade-out will know the difference.

It is a very common practice, especially when letting numerous copies of a recording out. Make a small watermark on each version slightly different from the other, and if a copy circulates farther than it should have, you will know exactly who breached the trust.

It's like getting junk mail in your mailbox. If you change your middle initial on mail order forms or whatever it may be - one for each company you deal with - you'll know who's been spreading your information without your consent.

In fairness to the people who expressed doubt, JSS seemed to describe a process done by an IT tech which stamped a download id number on the file. He even identified David's number. Of course you'll have to count on my memory for that as the posts have all been wiped right out.

What you're describing seems really unlikely to be done on the fly through programming, but instead require a manual editing process that creates a duplicate set of files for each person before they are even downloaded. If so, all that work? Twelve people times how many files? All that paranoia? Sounds like a fun hobby.

Anyone watch the last episode of Game of Thrones? It's great. The dwarf tells a different lie to 3 people at court, and then when the gossip gets out he knows who's been ratting on him.

Sure it's a lot of work, and it makes you seem paranoid, but it really is an 'aha' moment of vindication when you trip up on someone like Fuller and find out what he's up to.

All of my experiences like that were by sheer accident - I've no experience with either file watermarks or lying dwarves - but it's a pretty rock solid way of catching out a bullshit artist.

Fuck me is this thread still going?

...it is now