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The Telecommunications Act of 1996 loosened many long-established constraints on the ownership and operation of radio and television stations in the United States. The regulatory changes launched waves of mergers and acquisitions through the nation's broadcasting industry, consolidating what had been many regional companies into a few large conglomerates in just a few years. Backed by vice president Al Gore and the then chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), William Kennard, the changes were intended to make the broadcasting industry more responsive to the "free market."

There appears to be nothing more important to the music business today than controlling the distribution and use of digital content on the web and in the home. Proprietary schemes to prevent or control the use of audio files have become hot commodities and valuable assets for many companies. Liquid">http://www.liquidaudio.com">Liquid Audio recently announced that the US Patent Office has awarded the company a patent (#6,219,634) for its watermark technique used for distributing secure digital music files.

Record labels have found that CDs with built-in restriction technologies have not worked in all CD players, have been incompatiblehttp://www.stereophile.com/news/11341/">incompatible; with some computers, and have engendered considerable backlash from irate consumers. But why should that stop them?

As digitally recorded music moves through the recording and production chain, it can be handed off to a variety of studios, musicians, producers, record label executives, and mastering engineers. Sometimes this is done with a recordable CD or DVD, sometimes with a portable hard disk, and sometimes via a high-bandwidth Internet connection. Somewhere along the way, a good percentage of those files (some estimate up to 80%) get copied in an unauthorized manner and quickly end up on">http://www.stereophile.com/news/11585/">on the Internet or on the street as pirated CDs before any official discs are released.

For the 109th convention of the Audio">http://www.aes.org/">Audio Engineering Society, the main floor of the L.A. Convention Center was transformed into a bazaar of new tools for audio professionals—but the panel discussions upstairs were where the real action took place. On Friday, September 22—just an hour before researchers Dr. Stanley Lipshitz and John Vanderkooy of Ontario's University of Waterloo presented a paper offering a mathematical proof for the "imperfectability" of one-bit delta-sigma recording systems—Sony Corporation issued a clarification of the technical standards for its Direct Stream Digital technology, the basis of the Super Audio Compact Disc. DSD, it now appears, is a one-bit technique as it applies to consumer playback systems, but uses a multi-bit PCM quantizer [presumably within a delta-sigma converter negative-feedback loop; see an article on this subject in the forthcoming November issue of Stereophile—Ed.] at the recording and mastering ends of the business. (The Lipshitz/Vanderkooy paper is available as AES preprint #5188.)

Amid news that its watermark technology for DVD-Audio may have been compromisedhttp://www.stereophile.com/news/11026/">compromised;, Verancehttp://www.verance.com">Verance; nonetheless announced last week the launch of its "ConfirMedia" watermarking service. The company says that ConfirMedia will monitor and report the airplay of encoded commercials, music, and programs broadcast by television, cable and radio stations in the 100 top US markets and on the national feeds of major broadcast and cable television networks in the US.

Webcasters will pay a new royalty rate to the recording industry, as of April 3.