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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[flynt]

here's another fascinating article about this sort of "digital watermarking". Ogg is looking more impressive too, but mp3's are just so entrenched it'll be tough to get the average user to convert.

Re:Ogg = Beta, MP3 = VHS

[david duncan scott]

But isn't Beta the one that evolved into a professional standard, while VHS has stayed the same lo-res crap it was from the beginning?

Digital rights management won't work this way....

[lucifuge31337]

...there will ALWAYS be a way around it until we have big brother inside of all of our equipment. So don't be concerned about any of this.

Start getting concerned when all video card manufacturers are forced to include rights management firmware, and when you can't get a PC DVD-ROM without (more) intrusive/limiting firmware.

Not surprising...

[JoeShmoe]

Step 1) Create a system or product that, while having some legitmate use, also enables a much more popular illegal use.

Step 2) Gain a huge user base while fretting and pretending to "study solutions" to the illegal use.

Step 3) Once your system or product has become a leader in the marketplace, throw a switch and make the illegal use much harder.

Hey, it worked for countless companies throughout the ages. I mean, when did AOL enable the features that prevented users from e-mailing warez to each other, before or after they became the number one ISP in the US? So, it's not surprising that DivX and Frau. would be following the pattern like everyone else.

- JoeShmoe

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Re:Not surprising...

[JoeShmoe]

No, AOL is a perfect example. Back in 1991 they were a very small bulletin board service that was dwarfed by online giants such as Compuseve, Prodigy, GEnie and the like. The people who joined at this point were almost entirely joining to play Neverwinter Nights. In all other categories of online services, AOL stunk across the board (I think PC World gave them the lowest score of all online services when it was first reviewed).

However, for broke teenagers, there was one reason to use AOL...it was free. Thanks to the easy availablity of sign-up disks, anyone could get online. All you had to do was sign up, fill in bogus payment information, and enjoy a month or more of free service. This went on for years. There were even tools written to automate the account generation process. From 1991 to about 1996 there was absolutely no authentication of payment information before activating an account. AOL would simply let the account run and then after a couple of months of sending "your payment information is invalid" messages it would finally close the account.

Each of these AOL accounts had five screennames. Each of these five screennames could have 550 e-mails stored on AOL servers. Each of these 550 e-mails could have up to 10MB in attachments. So here's how it worked. Someone would get online to their local warez BBS and download the latest warez release. That person would then repack the release into 10MB pieces and send them to himself via AOL (uploading the files to AOL). From there he would forward the e-mails to everyone else, essentially e-mailing gigabytes of warez to you with a single click. This also went on for years. AOL warez groups were flourishing right up until around 1996.

Surely this couldn't have escaped AOL's knowledge. In these days, you were lucky if an ISP let you keep 10MB on a server and here AOL was giving you basically 2.5GB of online storage. As long as you kept forwarding to fresh accounts before your old ones expired, you had access to all the programs you could ever want. But they had to be kept somewhere...and AOL had to pay for that storage not...to mention all those countless modems and dial-in access minutes.

So why would an ISP allow such rampant abuse of their account and mail system? Well from 1991 to 1996 something else was happening...AOL was growing. On the books, they went from about 100,000 members to 1,000,000 members in about two years. They surpassed Compuserve a couple years later. I seriously doubt that at any time during this era that more than a 1/3 of the accounts on AOL were actually valid paying customers (besides all the fraudulently generated accounts, there were boatloads of AOL4Free Macintosh customers). But on paper, I'm sure it looked good to investors to see how the membership was growing. And I'm sure it looked really good when they had more members than any other ISP.

Most telling to me is the fact that right around 1996 when they were working on getting, IIRC, their sixth millionth customer...AOL suddenly implemented a raft of policies that killed the AOL warez community. First, they started actually trying to verify payment on what was entered during sign-up. That did away with the fake generators...now you actually had to have stolen credit cards to get online (much harder to come by). Two, they started deleting files after they had been downloaded a certain number of times (people estimated it to be about between 250 and 500 times) or the account that uploaded it was cancelled. Last, they started blocking the private rooms where people met to trade mail forwarding with each other. These things happened boom, boom, boom within months of each other.

But by then, AOL was the number one ISP, and if I remember correctly, this was right around the time they moved to flat rate unlimited access so they could no longer afford to have a huge population of floating freeloaders when they didn't even have the capacity to support all of their legitamately paying customers.

So, call me a conspiracy theorist if you must, but to this day I belive that AOL turned a blind eye to piracy to enjoy the rapid growth that it encouraged, and then once they had grown as much as they good, they easily were able to disable the piracy. So do I think it took a major corporation six years to notice the problem (despite the BSA and others constantly launching tirades about AOL warez scene) and figure out a way to stop pirates (despite e-mails where techies suggest inplementing call-backs during the sign-up process to counter theft and their bosses responding it might scare off legit customers)? Or do I think they didn't really want to stop the problem until the potential risk for getting caught was suddenly higher than the potential gains from it?

- JoeShmoe

.

Now everybody repeat after me...

[Jucius Maximus]

...we're not gonna crack it until AFTER the industry has fully adopted it!

No more screw-ups (as in early cracks) like last time.

DiVX is Falling Behind the Times

[LuxuryYacht]

DiVX is a very close variant of MPEG-4 and no longer has its source open. H.26L is open and already provides for 1.5 x better compression than DiVX. XViD is also about 10% faster and is open source and nearly all GPL at this point.

DiVX will just fade away the same as MPEG-4 due to it's too greedy nature.

Re:Digital rights management won't work this way..

[jsproul]

You're right, but video card manufacturers are already including DRM firmware - it's called DVI. DVI creates a secure link between the PC and the display to prevent digital copying of decoded streams (e.g. DVD).

BTW, I'm surprised no one has yet challenged the DVD regional licensing scheme under US antitrust law. The Sherman Act makes such geographic price discrimination illegal.

Why I'm not using OGG

[Pope Slackman]

There's really only one reason: hardware support.
I can take my MP3s virtually anywhere and be able to play them, whether it's a computer, a CD player a flash player or something else, it's almost universally supported on digital audio gadgets.
I like Ogg, I'd say at the [high] bitrates I encode at it's as good if not better than MP3, but it just doesn't have the hardware support to make encoding for it worth my while, it's more time-effective for me just to rip to MP3 directly.

C-X C-S

Ogg violates DMCA???

[xee]

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.

Re:Ogg violates DMCA???

[Microlith]

It does not circumvent anything. It does not break/bypass any method of (in)effectively restricting access.

It is simply an unprotected format.

Now, should the SSSCA pass (CPFDFJKFJSKD or whatever), it will be illegal because it won't have any protections built in.

... and the problem is what exactly?

[Guppy06]

I look at the headline. I look at it again. I see the word "watermark." I don't see copy-protection, I don't see crippling CD-RW or DVD+RW drives, I don't see the MPAA and RIAA going on a lawsuit spree, I just see "watermark."

A watermark is just that: A watermark. A way of determining the integrity of the watermarked object that is prohibitively difficult to duplicate. It doesn't prevent duplication per se, it just causes the ducplicate to proclaim that its a duplicate through the absence of that watermark.

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. In fact, I can think of many good things that can be done with such a tool. If the RIAA ever got their thumbs out of their asses and realized they should be selling media instead of mediums, a watermark would give those consumers that care about such things a way of finding out if what they have is genuine.