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DivX and MP3 Developers Work Together on Watermarks
An Anonymous Coward writes: "The DivX and MP3 developers are working on digital watermarking techniques together... Ogg anyone?"
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We have Vorbis... Now we have to wait for Tarkin and hope it is as good as/better than DivX
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
I don' think its a bad idea to have a watermark as long it can achieve the following:
Integrity of source
Playback on any system
How the watermark can be useful is if it is treated like a serial number not a lockout device. Suppose I am a musician and I want to sell some MP3s. If I can uniquely mark all the songs I sell, I can track which user decided to violate fair use if I see that unique mark on a peer to peer network.
Don't convert your old MP3's (you'll only lose sound quality), but use Ogg for your new music.
but mp3's are just so entrenched it'll be tough to get the average user to convert.
I'm not so sure I'd agree. Remember when GIFs were all the rage? I thought no one would ever convert to JPGs because GIFs were so popular. Now, you hardly ever see them. I know, JPGs are better at compression, so maybe that's the reason.
Maybe a better comparison would be PNGs compared to GIFs or JPGs? I use PNGs all the time, but I don't have a feel for how popular they are in general.
I guess my point is that if there's a compelling reason, people will switch file formats in a heartbeat. For that matter, I know people who switch MS Word formats every few years or so. Oh, wait...
I have friends who work in the security industry and crack codes for a living. Every time a watermarking scheme is publically proposed, they laugh long and heartily. The simple fact of the matter is that a system designed to check for a watermark can easily be changed to invalidate the watermark. Watermarks are necessarily little bit-flipping programs that don't alter the outward appearance of the media they are attached to, so what makes record execs and PHBs so sure that they can't be removed?
The only watermark that can't be removed is the watermark that can't be detected. And that doesn't help the digital rights management fascists one bit. So why do they bother?
Well, they still think it's a "deterrent." Just like Macrovision is a "deterrent" when you can buy filters to block it for under $25 on eBay. Sooner or later, though, the world is going to have to learn that information wants to be free, that trying to restrict the flow of bits on the information superhighway is futile, and that selling simple numbers and calling it "property" is patently absurd. Mathematics is a part of nature, and nobody owns nature; the sooner our laws are brought into line with this simple truth, the better.
~wally
Do you want to live in a world where there's Draconian DRM or a world where there's DRM that makes casual piracy hard?
OK, there's the third, remote possibility that we'll end up in an another world in which "information wants to be free" rules, but the sorry, true fact is that whatever information wants, people want to own information and charge other people for it. Especially people with lots of money. And therefore power, and therefore clout to shape the world.
There's a growing body of opinion that holds the best way to keep us from getting draconian DRM is NOT to shrilly scream about free information/content and drop into a frenzy of distribution violations, but rather, to show how a mild solution can give us the best of "fair use" and "new economy" rules while not totally threatening the status quo (just enough to keep 'em on their toes).
In that light, digital watermarking for mp3 and divx is good. 5 letter acronyms introduced to congress are bad....
Tweet, tweet.
I don't know that it would apply, as DVD price fixing is constant in the US... It only changes outside the US, where US laws (theoretically) don't apply. After all, I can go to Mexico, get some Cuban cigars, smoke them, and not get arrested for violating the Cuba embargo when I re-cross the border into the US.
Don't get me wrong, I would like it if DVD region encoding when down the tubes, so I could get more foreign DVD's (anime, primarily). But, I just don't know if the argument applies.
There is a big difference, going from a 256 colour GIF (big (file) and ugly) to a millions of colours jpeg (small (file) and purdy) is a very big improvement.
Going from mp3 to ogg for most people is of no advantage.
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The watermark would only show which user you originally sold the copy to; it might have been sold secondhand, for example. Or simply stolen. And if users leave the files on their Windoze machines, then expect the next SirCam-like virus to target .mp3 instead of .doc.
How long will it be before the music industry claims that Ogg's Vorbis codec is a tool designed to circumvent copy protection by allowing users to encode audio in an unprotected format? You know it's going to happen sooner or later.
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
Excluded are open source software developers, researchers, and independent creators of content.
Despite the amusing conspiracy angle you've taken, I don't quite buy it. I think it's more likely that as a company starts off a new service, they are much more lax on restrictions because the user base is small enough that such restrictions aren't really needed. However, as the user base grows and grows, doing certain things become infeasible if you still want the service to function for everyone. Hence, gradually more and more restrictions are put in place, in order to preserve the best possible experience for all users. This same pattern is true of almost every type of service that has ever had to "grow" a userbase.
AOL isn't a very good example of this. AOL became popular because of marketing and ease of use--they still continue to attract new subscribers despite how hard it is for users to email warez to each other. Many web-based email sites better exemplify this scenario. One in particular started with no restrictions on inbox size or outgoing message size, for example. However as its userbase grew, restrictions were implemented so that a small few couldn't ruin the service for everyone.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
Not true at all, in the broader context. These sorts of marking schemes are almost invariably proposed in the context of hardware and software that will blindly enforce the marks -- without respect to public domain, First Sale, or Fair Use.
Ok where to begin (all AFAIK): /. then.
1. They still haven't got it that DivXNetworks didn't create DivX - they just grabbed the name to bring out DivX4 which has nothing to do with DivX;-) (the beginning of DivX as a codec a hacked m$ one).
2. The part of Fraunhofer which licensed DivX (Fraunhofer IGD) has nearly nothing to do with the one developing mp3 (Fraunhofer IIS) - Fraunhofer is a vast organization with over 50 different institutes
3. DivX was licensed by Fraunhofer IGD months ago for "streaming technologies and software development within research activities" (http://www.igd.fhg.de/actual_divx.html)
There was already a big discussion on
4. http://www.divx.com tells us that one of the goals for the future of the DivX-codec is to implement DRM - they do this for months, too.
Now, what's the "news" remaining in that article?
Oh yeah, Fraunhofer wants to use the DRM part of DivX too.
Wouldn't have thought they want to use that in streaming solutions.
Now that was informative!
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
People, people, people. We should really all be supporting this technology. This really is the answer that we want.
Let's make a few assumptions.
1. Someone can make a non-trivially breakable watermark technology. One that stands up to peer review without threats of legal ramifications.
2. Content providers can then use this watermarking technology on a reasonably fine scale - probably not individually watermarking every CD, but perhaps broken down into regions. Digital downloads could be individually watermarked, given enough CPUs.
What would this do? It gives the content providers ammunition and evidence to go after the big time copyright violators. Those that are burning CD's and turning around and charging money. Granted, a lot of these folks are probably overseas...
It allows us to use our digital media as we see fit. We can listen to it on our PCs. Download it to our Rios. It still allows us to swap digital media among friends. Content providers aren't going to go after the small fry, there's no return on investment.
This allows us to say to our congressmen, "Yes we care about and value copyrights. But we also value fair use."
This is a happy medium ground.
And being the crazy optimist that I am, this is the way I see things eventually settling down. The question is will it settle down in 1-2 years, or 10-20?
Exactly!
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the music industry trying to invent a good watermarking technology. As long as they fight illegal copies with technical means i am all for it.
The problem starts when they buy legislation instead of using technology to protect their stuff. My problem with mandatory DRM is *not* that I can no longer get britney spears songs for free, but that I am no longer allowed to own a general purpose computer.
Private property is the central institution of a free society (David Friedman)
They will not make the system used to check for watermarks an open one ... in fact in case you have not been paying attention thats what the CBDTPA is all about, they want to put black box hardware in everything to perform the checks. That doesnt preclude it from being hacked even without reverse engineering the black box (which they can make very hard) as last years debacle has shown ... but it does make the question about wether it can succeed a little less open and shut.
DiVX will just fade away the same as MPEG-4 due to it's too greedy nature. ;)
Much like Microsoft has faded away due to its greedy nature.
Greedyness has nothing to do with a product's death. If they can make more money and convince more people to use their solution rather than "better" Open Source products, then they will. In fact, a company that is more "greedy" is more likely to survive, since they'll have more money to push around.
Uh divxnetworks and divx.com don't have anything to do with the original divx project. Since the real divx is just a hack it wasn't coprighted or trademarked or any of that good stuff so naturaly some corporate pirates came in and hijacked the name and most morons are to idiotic and clueless to notice and actually fall for it. But then again this is slashdot, widely known for it's clueless and sheeplike userbase, so i'm not suprised.
Yes, there are all sorts of immoral and possibly illegal things hardware manufacturers can do by automatically scanning for watermarks, but the watermark itself is pretty much morally neutral.
I beg to differ. Given the purpose of electronic watermarking (locate illegal copies in the wild and be able to track it back to the specific customer who leaked it), imagine the consequences. The entertainment and software industries already calculate losses on a per-pirate-copy basis. A thousand illegal copies is a thousand lost sales and $price*1000 lost income.
If you leak a watermarked product, you're pretty much done for economically if they prosecute (which they have no reason not to, since it's the entire idea of the watermarking to start with). Try to tell their minion of lawyers that your copy was stolen, for an exercise in futility.
You'd damn better guard that watermarked product with your life, lock it in somewhere safe, never talk about it, cause you don't wanna deal with these guys if you "pirate" it by accident!
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
People would upgrade because people are ignorant (note ignorant, not stupid). For instance, look at how many people upgrade from aol 5.0 to 6.0 (without going into how bright using aol in the first place is), or grab a new icq that has only tacked on advertisements and bloat. People will upgrade because it's free and they really don't know if it's better but it has a higher number at the end so it must be good!
No the challenge here is letting someone know there's something with a higher number they can get free in the first place. In fact I challenge someone who provides freeware used by the bulk public to release the exact same program and change the version number. then let people know it's out there the same way they usually do. Most of the userbase would probably upgrade.