What is SDMI, and will it stop me listening to MP3 music?
To try and give a very simple, quick answer… The object of SDMI (Secure Digital Music Initiative) is to allow the “owners” of music, the copyright holders, to produce digital files which they can control, i.e. files which ideally cannot be passed on to anyone other than the person to whom they are originally supplied, and possibly which can only be used for a limited time or a limited number of plays. So there will be some mechanism built into the way the files are encoded which will either prevent a playable copy being made (difficult with a purely digital file), or will limit the file to playing on a particular machine. The problem with such schemes is they necessarily have to be based on encryption, and it’s virtually impossible to produce a scheme that allows you to distribute files economically whilst being uncrackable. The most secure of such schemes generally involve a hardware component as well as software encoding (e.g. compare to software protection using “dongles”… but t
