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Probably not an outright lie, but Gizmodo is clearly trying to twist the facts. Why else would they omit a link to the video?

Perhaps if you read the article for comprehension instead of word occurence -- "Gizmodo has opted to not publish the video itself in order to maintain source anonymity" -- you would have your answer. Not everyone is eager to be the next Reality Winner thanks to video watermarking.

Amazon admits that the video exists.

Then where is it?

Nope. Not required. When the video's original source admits that it exists, ShanghaiBill's ability to view that video is not required to confirm that it exists.

They want to cherry pick, and they don't want you to see the cherries that weren't picked.

Penalty - moving the goalposts. 15 yards from the spot of the foul.

No, it is impossible if professional solutions are used.

I am almost sure there must be cheaper, open source solutions too. The famous "Digimarc" technology is used since 1996
https://www.digimarc.com/solutions/images_pro.asp#ensure

It is in Photoshop too. There is no way they won't be warned with address information to contact.

What Playboy does is, watermarking AND hiring companies to spider web for their jpegs. They get alerted and if it is high end enough, they sue them.

The only thing I won't suggest is, using digital watermarking or any kind of hidden data/embedded in political blogs. That immediately raises eyebrows on some "big" machines :)

I mean, this guy is braindead for calling for tech support to use his stolen goods - but at least through his stupidity & security measures they caught him. If I was an ass, I could easily crank off what I wanted to without anyone being the wiser.

He was also stupid enough to use try to mess with a state using Digimarc on the licenses.
http://www.digimarc.com/govt/edl.asp

Creating a valid digimarc that matches the other data on the document is not easy without the license.

In my spare time, I sometimes take photos for a non-profit. Most of them aren't anything anyone would want to pirate, but there have been times where my camera was the only one in the room for a speech by one VIP or another, and that's a different story. They use the watermarking plugin from Digimarc, which I imagine isn't terribly cheap, but they've got it watching the web for illicit copies of thousands of photos...

Of course if you poke around a lot you'll learn more about printing and photography than you ever wanted to know :-)

Somebody already thought of that: DigiMarc. Quoth the web page: This program detects a digital watermark in a printed piece, and routes the user to a web page.

I beta tested software that does something like that called Digimarc Mediabridge where you could hold up a watermarked magazine article to your webcam and the software would send you to a URL with more information on it. Wired and Popular Mechanics both used the technology for a while. It now is pretty much dead as far as I can see.

In addition to Cuecats, this also seems similar to Digimarc's Mediabridge
in which you point a webcam at an ad in a magazine (they put a special symbol on the ads that work) and the software redirects your browser to the company's website.

all else being equal, the only attraction a DRM device could have over a non-DRM device is that there is no new content for the non-DRM device. And as I have explained, this is far from a trivial thing to accomplish.

I can, for instance, circumvent your hypothetical protections with hypothetical exploits: a motherboard tap anywhere inside the DA should be sufficient to recover bit-perfect digital data from your device.

• That doesn't circumvent the protections: If you publish your bit perfect digital data, then the key to your DRM box gets pulled and your publishing days are over (until your buy another computer). Yeah, a few movies got opened in the process, but it hit you in the wallet hard, and you won't be warezing any new movies - the number of people ripping movies and putting them on a P2P system will dry up real qick. If you don't publish your bit perfect digital data, then the DRM has done its job :).
  
  
• The motherboard doesn't have to be tamper proof, they can use one of those monitors that take an encrypted signal. I will admit however that in the end this bit is still breakable, and probably always will be. The real security of this hypothetical system lies more in being able to pull keys on demand than obfuscation.
  

This is ignoring the biggest problem in your plan, which is real-time encrypted digital video delivery to a mass-market audience. I would optimistically guess we are at least a decade away from this capability. Remember, we're talking about the last mile problem now. Let alone the expense.

I am not aware of any evidence presented in a respectable setting that watermarks can be used in the way you describe. I would appreciate correction on that point if I am wrong, but remember, marks can be tiny, but they won't survive recompression. They can be big and redundant, but then they will be easy to spot and remove. Not that it matters. Watermarks won't even be useful for tracking down pirates, who if enforcement is aggressive will simply steal equipment/keys the way bank robbers steal cars.

I recieved a Cue Cat quite unexpectedly, from Wired Magazine one day, and never considered hooking it up to my computer, because I like to read my magazines away from my computer.

However, I did use the nifty patch cord that came with the Cue Cat , to go from my computer sound card to my stereo system, so now I can enjoy my MP3's through my quality speakers.

I wonder if some of you are aware of Digimarc?

Quite some time before the Cue Cat marketing blitz, Digimarc gave away a bunch of Intel CMOS cams, if one agreed to test their "Digimarc MediaBridge" technology for a year.

My girlfriend and I signed up, and got our cams, and each month went to their web site and answered questions about our use of their tech.

Before the year was up, the emails stopped coming, and I haven't heard from them for a long time now. Although they still seem to be in business.

I think their idea was a much better one than the Cue Cat, because it used the cam to "see" links embedded into images (a digital watermark of sorts), and the links were quite invisible.

I discovered two drawbacks to this technology, the obvious being, one needs to be reading their magazine next to their computer. And the other was the lighting needed to be strong, and even, for the links to function at all.

When I'm working at my computer the light level varies all the time, and the MediaBridge needed consistant lighting conditions. This I feel, isn't a "real world" tool for those reasons, good idea though.

If you took a great deal of your time to create yet ANOTHER Natalie Portman collage...would you really want that "sucked up" by someone's search engine or image archive? I mean, what's fair about that???

No credit for all that hard work...for shame, for shame... you might want to check out Digimarc, though

-PONA-

I work for Digimarc in the MediaBridge division. Digimarc MediaBridge tech provides watermarks for connecting printed media to the web, or if you prefer, launching and interacting with local applications. I know some folks here have already tried the product, but version 2.0 is out now, and it works quite a bit better. The download is free at http://www.digimarc.com/mediabridge. Does anybody know what applications Xerox has planned for their technology? It has been out for a while now, but I haven't seen any applications for it. This is an honest question, although I admit bias in favor of my employer. I read about the dataglyphs in a white paper that was at least a year old, but I was not sure what they were going for. Is it primarily anti-counterfeiting?

There's a shoe maker we're working with (can't say for sure here, but they're really, really big) that is embedding Digimarc ids right into the graphics on the clothing. Labels, hang tags, even the back of watches are currently embedded. Kinda cool, in a way. Hold the item up to a camera (or any reader, if it's RF or visual barcode) and boom, you're at the website with info, support, whatever about that item. So, there are some advantages.

Jason

...at least in the graphics world. Digimarc (http://www.digimarc.com/) watermarking has been included in Adobe Photoshop since version 4 (maybe earlier?). The watermark can be applied to the image with minimal loss to image quality, and is very difficult to remove without seriously damaging the quality of the image.

I've wondered when music companies would start doing this to their recordings. Had Napster been able to tell the difference between freely-distributed music and illegally copied music, I'm sure they would have been much better at covering their ass. I think this is a Good Thing, and it should have been the responsibility of the record companies to come up with a similar scheme long ago. *Everyone* else in the world is expected to identify their copyrighted material as such. Why shouldn't they be?

Digimarc check it out

Does anybody here have any experience with their SDK and/or demos? Are there any other companies doing similar things?

BTW, Digimarc and Wired are giving away free USB webcams (does not include shipping/handling) at http://www.digimarc.com/household.

This is technology that Adobe licensed from Digimarc.. One of Digimarc's services they offer is you pay them some money and they report any use of your image they found on the web. By keeping an eye on my logs, I've noticed their crawlers perusing my server several times. Though all of the images on my site are mine (MINE MINE MINE!), I still don't like this idea.

I wonder what sorts of transformations these technologys are impervious to.. Since they're looking for on the web for watermarked graphics, presumably colour reduction (gif) and/or jpeg compression artifacts don't disrupt things. Will a slight blur or rotation? Can you embed an extractable watermark on white noise?

I think, although a short GPL-like tagline to add at the end of a block of text would suit most needs, there are a lot of instances where the copier(s) would simply remove the tagline and claim that you copied from them. This is the same case with images that are published online. To copyright or protect images from dissemination without copyright notice, companies use a variety of techniques. Many images include the copyright information or source url on the image itself, but depending on the complexity, anyone with experience and a nice image editor can remove this without any perceptible quality loss. So the latest attempts have been to include algorithms which are unique enough to identify but simple enough not to degrade the image, and encode copyright data within the image, a technique known as steganography. Digimarc offers just such image watermarking, though it leads to degradation in quality and a great deal of artifacting (the girl on the front page looks like she has skin cancer!). Anyway, to copyright text online, it would be a great deal more difficult, because, unlike images, the source is the same as the output (image source->decompressions->display; text source->display). To come full circle, a friend of mine wrote an excellent research paper detailing lexical steganography and his implementation of it. It's available here.