7 ms·

Given that white noise is random, a recorded copy of white noise is its own perfect watermark.

Guest42 5y ago
Does it depend on seeding that would eventually have tendencies for replication? Or could that be pushed out until practically forever?
- someguyorother 5y ago
  If the white noise is based on a random number generator, the pattern would restart after a full cycle. If the random number generator's period is 2^32 and you use one integer per sample, then at 44 kHz, you would have about a million seconds, or twelve days, before the RNG has gone through a full period. Most RNGs have periods much higher than this. xorshift128 has a period of 2^128-1 and the Mersenne Twister's period is 2^19937-1. So you could push it out until practically forever.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    So you could push it out until practically forever. But, there will still be repeated sections.
    - aranchelk 5y ago
      Knowing nothing of the YouTube algorithm, I’d still wager it’ll take you longer than the lifetime of the copyright to produce conflicting noise works.
dredmorbius 5y ago
Depends on how lossy the compression is. Your watermark becomes compression artefacts instead.
- cma 5y ago
  Most audio codecs by now use perceptual noise substitution, which potentially substitutes in identical noise (I think it just EQs it?).
  - DreamScatter 5y ago
    no, the mp3 codec actually deletes humanly inaudible portions of the frequency spectrum to reduce storage, this data isn't recoverd or replaced or referred when played back again, it's lost information. what is removed is based on human perception limits for audio
    - IshKebab 5y ago
      He is referring to modern codecs, not MP3. MP3 isn't widely used anymore. Modern codecs don't encode noise - they remove it during decoding and then add back artificial "comfort noise" when decoding, e.g. for film grain or background noise in voice calls.
      - orestarod 5y ago
        Got a source for the current usage of MP3?
        chrisseaton 5y ago
        What services do you know of that use MP3?
        dredmorbius 5y ago
        Virtually every podcast ever. YouTube itself seems to rely more on webm for audio. That seems to be a container for Opus or Vorbis formats. Vorbis and Opus themselves are lossy encoders (Ogg Vorbis).
        5y ago
ozim 5y ago
If you take 30 seconds of white noise and look for it in 2h long generated output I expect that you can find similar 30 seconds in whole 2h. Copyright algos are not looking at the whole video, they are searching for pieces of songs. Because if you use 30sec of someones song you have to pay up and youtube is enforcing that. Now if you will take another 2h video cut it into pieces and start searching for similar patterns in other 2h video I expect you will find some matching ones.
pierrec 5y ago
If you're comparing sample-for-sample, maybe. But that's not what is performed by music identification algorithms - it would be both slow (to the point of being unusable) and inaccurate (because of re-encoding, etc). Instead they rely on different kinds of dimensionality reduction that match the way we perceive music, so they only compare smaller amounts of data to get more perceptually relevant matches. The Shazam fingerprinting algorithm is the best known but there are others. So if you submit white noise to a copyright database, it could match different white noise recordings.
ageitgey 5y ago
Even if they were the case, this further shows how limited and dumb (i.e. not 'smart') YouTube's copyright voilation detection system is. You (probably) can't copyright white noise because US copyright requires authorship. So in the same way that you can't copyright a phonebook's alphabetical list of numbers, you can't copyright random numbers rendered as sound, unless you did something else unique to it to exert authorship. It's just not something protected by copyright law. So even copying someone else's exact white noise sample is probably just fine. The problem is that YouTube's system can only apply simple content matching rules and it counts any sufficiently long content match as a violation with no consideration of the work or context of use. Thats not how copyright law works. Copyright is a complicated system with all sorts of issues like fair use, derivative works, public domain, and works that don't qualify for protection. It's not a database query.

Does it depend on seeding that would eventually have tendencies for replication? Or could that be pushed out until practically forever?

someguyorother 5y ago
If the white noise is based on a random number generator, the pattern would restart after a full cycle. If the random number generator's period is 2^32 and you use one integer per sample, then at 44 kHz, you would have about a million seconds, or twelve days, before the RNG has gone through a full period. Most RNGs have periods much higher than this. xorshift128 has a period of 2^128-1 and the Mersenne Twister's period is 2^19937-1. So you could push it out until practically forever.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  So you could push it out until practically forever. But, there will still be repeated sections.
  - aranchelk 5y ago
    Knowing nothing of the YouTube algorithm, I’d still wager it’ll take you longer than the lifetime of the copyright to produce conflicting noise works.

dredmorbius 5y ago

Depends on how lossy the compression is. Your watermark becomes compression artefacts instead.

cma 5y ago
Most audio codecs by now use perceptual noise substitution, which potentially substitutes in identical noise (I think it just EQs it?).
- DreamScatter 5y ago
  no, the mp3 codec actually deletes humanly inaudible portions of the frequency spectrum to reduce storage, this data isn't recoverd or replaced or referred when played back again, it's lost information. what is removed is based on human perception limits for audio
  - IshKebab 5y ago
    He is referring to modern codecs, not MP3. MP3 isn't widely used anymore. Modern codecs don't encode noise - they remove it during decoding and then add back artificial "comfort noise" when decoding, e.g. for film grain or background noise in voice calls.
    - orestarod 5y ago
      Got a source for the current usage of MP3?
      - chrisseaton 5y ago
        What services do you know of that use MP3?
        dredmorbius 5y ago
        Virtually every podcast ever. YouTube itself seems to rely more on webm for audio. That seems to be a container for Opus or Vorbis formats. Vorbis and Opus themselves are lossy encoders (Ogg Vorbis).
        5y ago

ozim 5y ago

If you take 30 seconds of white noise and look for it in 2h long generated output I expect that you can find similar 30 seconds in whole 2h. Copyright algos are not looking at the whole video, they are searching for pieces of songs. Because if you use 30sec of someones song you have to pay up and youtube is enforcing that. Now if you will take another 2h video cut it into pieces and start searching for similar patterns in other 2h video I expect you will find some matching ones.

pierrec 5y ago

If you're comparing sample-for-sample, maybe. But that's not what is performed by music identification algorithms - it would be both slow (to the point of being unusable) and inaccurate (because of re-encoding, etc). Instead they rely on different kinds of dimensionality reduction that match the way we perceive music, so they only compare smaller amounts of data to get more perceptually relevant matches. The Shazam fingerprinting algorithm is the best known but there are others. So if you submit white noise to a copyright database, it could match different white noise recordings.

ageitgey 5y ago

Even if they were the case, this further shows how limited and dumb (i.e. not 'smart') YouTube's copyright voilation detection system is. You (probably) can't copyright white noise because US copyright requires authorship. So in the same way that you can't copyright a phonebook's alphabetical list of numbers, you can't copyright random numbers rendered as sound, unless you did something else unique to it to exert authorship. It's just not something protected by copyright law. So even copying someone else's exact white noise sample is probably just fine. The problem is that YouTube's system can only apply simple content matching rules and it counts any sufficiently long content match as a violation with no consideration of the work or context of use. Thats not how copyright law works. Copyright is a complicated system with all sorts of issues like fair use, derivative works, public domain, and works that don't qualify for protection. It's not a database query.