I recently found a post from ''Really slow motion trailer music'' company owner:

''
Agus González-Lancharro
I’m hoping for a million likes and gazillion of shares of this post, it’s for the benefit of everybody involved:

I just want to make a friendly reminder to all trailer/library composers following some recent events. I have been contacted few times by Sample developers pointing me out to some specific composers that use illegally obtained sample libraries for the production of their library and trailer tracks. Well, it is somehow understandable (still illegal and definitely not recommending this to anyone) when you are starting out as a composer, you are broke and yet you have to keep up with high quality standard sounds. Once you start making cash you should, with no excuse whatsoever, stop stealing. First of all, because in case you were not told, stealing is a bad thing. Secondly, you can get sued twice: by the sample developer and by the publisher. That could swipe out your music career and certainly destroy totally your financial situation. I would not risk it when you make several dozens of bucks per year... Or just hundreds. Not worth it.
Maybe another day I talk about composers writing same cues or very VERY similar cues for different publishers. This happens, it’s not legal and it also has dangerous consequences for those who do, like double sue again.''

My question is, asking for a friend, are they legally allowed to to detect ip adress downloaded pirate thing or can they detect their library in your track and have proof ?

 

how should that work at all ?

 

Don't know. I guess they are just scaring people around. But i am not sure are they legally allowed to detect your IP adrress or something and locate you in case they sue you and use that as a proof.

 

It's possible if you're using one sample in a quiet part of your track, or a specific sample pack.
In my own tracks, that I send to different people for promo, I tent to add a watermark in the track for each individual that I send.
This way, if I see the track online, I can check from was it came from.

 

But you add it after all mix and master proccess ?

My question was about sample libraries.

 

Yes adding watermarks to songs is possible but how shoudl that work for sample libraries.
eq there is a watermark in a sample and tehn you create a song with it and mix it up with other sounds are effects will teh watermark still be there ?

 

I guess not!

 

Only ignorant fools use watermarked samples that usually come with some sort of sound alteration/degradation when compared to the original. And ignorant fools are hardly the case of serious composers. Other than that, once you "edited" a sample (with no watermark!) within an original composition, mix it etc., nobody can tell if you bought that or not. I strongly doubt you 've been contacted by anyone...

Errr, "high quality" sounds come from "high quality" skills not the latest libraries. There is nothing to keep up to apart from the latest evolutions in music tech perhaps and that is free information. Sound quality is strongly related to 1) sound design, a process where you start with a very simple, basic sound and make it something worth listening to and 2) mixing/editing skills.

Hope dies last dude. Don't say i didn't tell you so

Well yeah sure.. this is not me speaking either, it's my friend's opinion

 

Best answer!

 

So they will scan your whole track with a spectrum analyzer to see if they could find their own watermarks signs in it? If that's right, then I understand that companies could find out if a specific track have used their libraries or not. But then how can they tell or know if it's bought or not after it aswell?

By the way there is also no way to remove these watermarks, isn't it? Or maybe it is, but then probably the audio file will be ruined. So adding watermarks seems like a good protection method I think.

 

Only the servers you are connecting to can log your IP address and other data. So if you're uploading a song to SoundCloud for example, only SoundCloud has this data. Depending on local law they could be forced to expose it however. I never heard something like this in the audio/music world though...

Yes, it depends on how the watermarking is implemented, but it's possible.

The hardest part would be to link the (alleged illegally used) audio to a legal person. If the sample company has your identity, they could just ask you for a proof of purchase and then again depending on local law sue you if you don't have it. But this has nothing to do with watermarking. Watermarking could help with identifying the original user who shared the library in this case. Of course, each sample would need to have a unique watermark for each user and this would be not too easy to do (it's much easier with effects and instruments, where you can use the license to create the watermark while generating the audio signal). Xvid has something like this for video, called AutoGraph. It's invisible and survives transcoding or basic editing too.

Watermarking is not a musical but a scientific/engineering topic. There's a great book on the theory on this (with some Matlab examples). It's completely possible to do everything you asked about. The question is whether someone is doing it actually. And with sample libraries I don't think so.

 

In the digital domain watermarking is possible with impunity. It's only (meta)data. On the analog end of affairs, or post-conversion, it is a different story. Although watermarking a finished product, a "track", using sonic information is basically easy and often possible without noticable deterioration of the work, this will not apply to individual samples, which, after decoding, should not carry a sonic stamp or be rendered useless altogether.

 

Has anybody here actually known of or even heard about a specific musician who has ever been nabbed by the authorities because of a watermarked sample library, plug or VI? I'm not saying digital watermarking doesn't happen -- it definitely happens to anything you buy off of iTunes or other digital distributors -- but I don't think it happens with software or sample libraries. It wouldn't be practical to imbue up to several thousand samples with the unique waveform (which, by the way, is actually embedded in the sample's or audio track's waveform and can be transferred to and from analog, meaning, you could theoretically record a sample to cassette tape, record it back into a DAW and mix it down to an .mp3 without getting rid of it ... at least, according to the companies promoting digital watermarking as a security measure) and then, scour every amateur and professional audio release on the Internet, CD, vinyl, Youtube, streaming video platform and streaming/radio audio broadcast for evidence of a stolen sample from a $399 library that may be difficult or impossible to prosecute. I get the distinct impression that claiming your sample library is watermarked is a software company's version of putting up ADT stickers and signs around your house but not really subscribing to ADT.

 

Last edited: Aug 1, 2018

download demo and try you self

https://audiowatermarking.info/products_comparison.php

 

What I've noticed with iTunes is they embed your user ID in the metadata so if you happen to share your iTunes downloads on PirateBay they can easily find you. I wasn't aware they were also watermarking the audio.

 

So I wonder if this director at Really Slo Mo is admitting they are knowingly licensing infringing materials

 

First of all, watermarking IS NOT used to prevent using libraries illegally. It is there to prevent piracy as it is embedding your personal info into library files. That means if some library appears on torrenting site developers download it, check the watermark and they immediately know who uploaded it in a first place. That's what watermark IS for.

The thing you are asking about is something else and has nothing to do with watermark. Companies (I work for several big sample library developers as a beta tester) have people that scouts youtube/stock music market/other developer's libraries for illegal use of their library/samples. On a monthly basis these companies are dealing with either composers illegally using their libraries (if you are earning minimal to no profit they don't care) or other companies stealing and repacking their samples (they do care and it is pretty often that big company brings down a smaller company).

If you are a sample library developer you know your library and its sound back and forth so you can very easily say that this or that track uses your samples. Then it is just a matter of seconds to check whether the composer has a license or not. Several times I was approached by sample library developers on AudioJungle just because they couldn't verify (I don't post my music there under my real name) whether I own a license to a sample library or not.

So this is happening and it is happening more often than you think. But as I said in the beginning, if you are earning minimal to no profit nobody cares (unless you live in US)