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Using Watermarks to Combat Piracy
TheEvilOverlord writes to tell us PC Advisor is reporting that researchers at the Fraunhofer Integrated Publication and Information Systems Institute have developed a new watermarking system to help track and combat piracy. From the article: "The system lets content providers, such as music studios, embed a watermark in their downloadable MP3 files. Watermark technology makes slight changes to data in sound and image files. For instance, the change could be a higher volume intensity in a tiny part of a song or a brighter colour in a minuscule part of a picture. Even the best-trained human eyes and ears, according to Kip, can't detect the change."
Its called re-encode it
It should go through. Coders in general are not required to be deterministic, so some pattern recognition would have to go into identifying the watermark.
This is already somewhat in use.
band releases early copies of an album to reviewers. if the album leaks, the people who sent out the advances can find out who leaked it.
Bury me in mashed potatoes.
You code media players to detect the watermark (which would have to be in a standardized format) and refuse to play anything that does not contain the watermark. Conversely, ripping programs will not rip anything containing the watermark, making it harder to copy the source. You wouldn't have to worry so much about removal programs, as programs that would "fake" the watermark, basically couterfeiting programs. Of course, those would pop up fifteen minutes later.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
That's a valid intput, but steganographers thought of that years ago already. Decent steganographic techniques include low-frequency information that can make them quite resilient to a fair deal of subsampling, recompressing, re-encoding and so on. The idea is not to make a "miniscule variation" but a very subtle variation over a large area. You can think of it like, the actual information is in the 'high bits' not the 'low bits'. Info in the 'low bits' is easily destroyed.
This was rolled out years ago, and plotzed with a mighty thud when it happened, due in no small part to the http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/sdmi/faq.html">wor k of Felten and his grad students at Princeton.
Basically, the Powers That Be came up with a very good watermarking system, but even the best system can be defeated by a very determined adversary -- especially since the watermarks can't be updated once the CDs are shipped.
Another problem that I've always had with these systems is the proof issue. If the RIAA tries to prosecute you for having watermarked files, they have to demonstrate the watermark. I can't imagine how they could show that without revealing exactly how the watermark is detected -- and once they do that, you should be off to the races.
Anyway -- this has been tried, and it has failed. The SDMI system was really quite sophisticated, and it failed almost immediately.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
this method doesnt really guarantee finding all the watermarks in case of both of the copies having the same watermark in addition to different ones. plus i think this watermarking technology wont be very popular since there is really no point in using it.. its not like having a copied watermarked mp3 is illegal and having the original mp3 is not.. the most important info is the artist who produced it and thats easy to tell just by listening to the track, all the other info like who released it and which vendor it went through is not hard to find out from the artist or the label..
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
3dbuzz.com does that on the maya training videos they sell, basically when you buy it, the copy that will be shipped to you gets encoded with a near invisible watermark with your name, address and phone number (or at least the credit card owner's name, address and phone number), and they're a much smaller operation than the ones this refers to, so I guess that with enough computer power watermaking a video on the fly would be not only posible, but practical as well. As parent said, though, how long the watermak will last is another matter.
Oops, I don't actually know all that much about steg., it was years ago that I was into it (and mostly for images) and I've forgotten a lot of it now, so I don't feel that mod was deserved ... but anyway, this looks like a fair starting point: http://www.jjtc.com/stegdoc/ ... there are quite a few different techniques, most of which are detectable though.
True, if you rip your own from CD. If you are purchasing online music though it will already be compressed ... some existing audio stego techniques are integrated into the compressors, e.g. mp3stego:
"The hiding process takes place at the heart of the Layer III encoding process namely in the inner_loop. The inner loop quantizes the input data and increases the quantiser step size until the quantized data can be coded with the available number of bits. Another loop checks that the distortions introduced by the quantization do not exceed the threshold defined by the psycho acoustic model."
I respectfully disagree.
Your problem is that you are accepting the recording industry's propaganda, i.e. "We oppose piracy because people will listen to pirated copies instead of buying CDs."
The *real* objection of the recording industry, and this goes double for clear-channel, is that P2P sidesteps their promotion monopolies and makes the music market harder to manage and control. Fragmentation of the market costs them their niche at the top of the foodchain.
The best example of this attitude was, a while back, movie industry executives noticed that some heavily promoted presumed-blockbuster (I forget which movie it was, The Island maybe) was getting far less than the guaranteed level of attendance given the advertising budget. Careful marketing research traced this phenomenon back to bad word of mouth, which was spreading faster than it had in the past, chiefly by cellphone.
The response of the movie industry was NOT "gee, we'd better stop making movies that even brain damaged 11 year-olds regard as intellectually insulting", but instead "is there any way we can make it illegal to badmouth our movies by text message? Libel law, maybe?" Fortunately, they concluded that was a non-starter.
That long tangent aside, look at clearchannel. Clearchannel's business model depends COMPLETELY on the willingness of the general public to agree-to-like whatever 30 songs they decide they want to play/promote in a single month. They also need to make sure that people keep listening to the radio and not to ipods. Alternate routes of distribution are just as much a threat to clearchannel as they are to the recording industry.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Though in this case if you have two versions of the file, one with a watermark and one without, why not just delete the watermarked version and copy the one without it?
steampunk web design
As far as the watermarking tools themselves, all the ones I'm aware of are proprietary (patented and/or trademarked.) They are certainly not open source. If you think about it, that's the only way watermarking software can ever be made practical. Watermarking is 100% "security through obscurity." Once an attacker is aware of a watermark, that watermark can be tampered with and/or destroyed. But GPL'd code is not obscure: it is transparent by fiat. So anyone attacking an open source watermarked document would either completely undo the mark or completely and perfectly obscure the meaning of the mark.
John
[Commercial music radio stations] also need to make sure that people keep listening to the radio and not to ipods.
In that case, they have the under-18 market sewn up, as students in public K-12 school systems in the United States are generally forbidden to bring an iPod or other electronic music player on the school bus without the express written consent of school administration.
Here's the old
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08
HD Trailers
Another good reason to watermark files is if you own the rights to music and want to sell it to someone else. Stock music companies sell music to production houses to create advertisements and promos. When these are broadcast there is a finite chance that the creator of the music can be paid royalties...but only if they can track down and inform ASCAP that the music was played.
Each year the publisher gets a stack of poor quality air tapes (cassettes, when I was doing it....probably CDs now). Some poor schlub had to sit down and listen to all the tapes (which represented, at least in the minds of ASCAP), a statistically accurate sampling of all the airplay in the region), hoping to hear one of the tracks you own.
The tapes were typically poor quality, the tracks were usually covered with voiceovers or other effects, and often edited as well. The payoff was that if you could prove a radio station had played your music you could potentially get a large royalty check.
Now, if you can automate the process, by burning a watermark into your music and scanning the tapes with your computer, you have a much better chance of finding your music and potentially making money.
still no sig