This brilliant Kuro5hin op-ed calls for the creations of a "copy optimized" DVD audio format specifically tailored for the needs of musicians who want to encourage the sharing of their works. Right now, all the DVD-audio formats in the pipeline are paying more attention to restricting copying than they are to audio fidelity, so what about the needs of the thousands of artists using open audio licensing?
This is such a good idea it makes me practically weep with joy. Not only do we need a standard for copy-optimized audio, we also need a standard for copy-optimized video formats, PVRs, ebooks, etc — man, this is exciting stuff!
What I envision is a disk format that is rigorously specified so that it will work reliably in the simplest embedded devices like car dashboard and home stereo players, but with completely unprotected Free Lossless Audio Codec files on them…
There needs to be a standard so that it's completely unambiguous just what one means when one says "Copy Optimized DVD Audio disc". It's that clear specification that will make embedded players and perfect peer-to-peer network copies possible. A disc containing such files could be popped into your home stereo DVD player and made to play, copy and share with no more user intervention than hitting a button…
But here's the key: each file will be named in a way that's optimized for file sharing, with artist, album, title and track number right in the filename, and with all the right metadata already embedded in the file when the album was mastered at the studio. To share Copy Optimized music you just direct your peer-to-peer filesharing application to your DVD drive so it will share what you're listening to, have your friends copy the tracks onto their computers' hard drives, or else burn them copies of the whole DVD.
But wait: there's more! The DVD disk itself will have a metadata file in its root directory that will specify the contents of the entire disk. My idea is that one could make a bit-for-bit reconstruction of the whole disk just by grabbing this one metadata file and then looking for the tracks on the file sharing networks. This file would be one or two kilobytes of XML that would have each track's metadata as well as its Secure Hash Algorithm checksum so it can be uniquely identified over the net.
