Masking Audio

Question

When music is publicly streamed on a website, most of the time they are just linking .mp3 files. Although that doesn't stop anyone from downloading it.

How would you prevent this?

I had a few ideas:

1. To have the music be in say directory, /tmp/name.mp3 but have it stream through /music/name.mp3.
2. Use a header to check and see if there is a referrer from a specific domain (music.com), if not redirect them? So if they try to listen to it directly, it won't have a referrer and will not stream the music.

Your thoughts?

Answer 1

jwz has written up a page describing the issues surrounding this (mostly legal, some technical) for his mixtape collection. See the "decipher the rules" link at the bottom. Here's a relevant quote:

This means that, for example, if there existed tools out in the world that made it trivial for you to download any streaming audio webcast anywhere, I wouldn't be allowed to tell you what those tools were. If they existed. And I'm not saying that they do.

Answer 2

You can't stop someone from saving the data stream you're sending. Once the bits hit their computer, you don't know what they're going to do with them. DRM raises the bar a bit, but not by much, since as soon as someone works out how to get around it, they just post a program on the Internet and everyone uses it.

Give up trying to stop people doing what the technology allows them to do, and instead use the advantages of the technology to give people what they want and hence make more money.