Some very bold statements there. However, quite frankly I don't believe it- especially the stuff you were saying about how a sampled AND modified snare hit can be watermarked.

A snare hit is a fraction of a second. Now once you've did some minor modifications to that hit (such as adding compression) the wave shape changes radically- they don't even need to be major changes in order to make massive changes to the visual appearance of the wave!

Now, in my own experience I have in the past tried to tweak samples in Soundforge and it wouldn't let me. Perhaps this was to do with some kind of watermark process- I don't know. However, this problem is easily solved when you de-check the "save non-audio" data function that's on screen every time you save a file.

If this watermarking thing even does exist then how come we've not heard of it? I mean, there are some pretty serious musicians at this forum and in the 2 years or so that I've been coming here I've never heard anyone mention it. Is it some kind of top secret thing that they only tell you about if you sell a million records or something?

Secondly, can you quote us an example of one single court case where these technologies were used to catch someone out?

Listen... for all I know this watermark technique COULD be possible (perhaps if you added a mega high frequency through all your music, like a dog whistle or something), but it's not a mainstream technology we're talking about here.

I've never heard of ANYONE being sued for stealing someone else's snare hit and I'm 100% sure that I never will hear of such a thing.

All the examples I've ever heard of where people have been sued for stealing samples have been REALLY blatant, like when Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby" stole from a Queen song, for example.

The bottom line is this...
If you can give me one single example in the history of music where a person has been sued for stealing a snare sample then I'll eat my hat!
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David