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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."
Even the best-trained human eyes and ears, according to Kip, can't detect the change.
Who says anything about using human senses to detect the watermark? If these watermarks are embedded by machine, I'm sure it won't be long until Watermark Bob creates a "cleanser" program to detect anything unusual, and maybe even remove it.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
The system lets content providers, such as music studios, embed a watermark in their downloadable MP3 files
For whom was this intended again?
I'd be happy if there actually was plenty of music studios providing downloadable mp3's though.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
...and in order to defeat such a wonderful scheme, all you have to do is re-watermark the image/music/video.
I've yet to see a scheme that reliably survived that test unless it was specifically designed just for that test (like embedding high power signal in several random places), and upon detection, looking for that signal in those random places (hope is that 2nd watermarking didn't wipe out -some- signal data).
In any case, Watermarking doesn't work! Even Microsoft's researchers said so (damn, can't find link).
OK, so you tag downloads. Now what?
Assuming a "de-tag" program doesn't pop up an hour later, what do you do with this wonderful invention? Instead of passing around a "normal" mp3 of Metallica, they're now sharing a "watermarked" version that allegedly can't be discerned by mere humans. How does this help?
Cheers,
if the watermarks are imperceptible to humans, than what's to say that the matrices used by audio and video codecs won't remove them from the source because they're undetectible?
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.
so what about the majority of pirated music: the mp3s ripped from cd?
me and my thinkpad, sittin' in a tree, c-o-d-i-n-g...
"If, for instance, you purchase and download a CD, burn a copy and give it to a friend and that person puts it on a filesharing network, our system will trace that music back to you and, depending on the legal system of the country you're in, you could be [hit] with an expensive fine," Kip said.
... what gives?
How, exactly? Supposing I went out and purchased a music CD (a radical idea, I know) with cash, how could they possibly trace that particular CD back to me should it somehow be made widely available to download? I mean, I wouldn't have provided any personal information to the store during the purchase so
"How well will this stand up to a lower bitrate/encoding setting?"
About as well as my ears do, I'm guessing.
In other words, "Nothing to see/hear. Please move along?"
More seriously - although it could be stripped out (relatively) easily, you could embed watermarking data in the metadata segments of downloadable MP3s. I'd accept this as a tradeoff for music studios offering downloadable MP3 files: If some_hit_song_i_downloaded.mp3 shows up on a P2P network and contains metadata whose MD5 could only be generated by, say, hashing my credit card number with some_riaa_private_key, that'd be pretty reasonable grounds for RIAA to believe that I'm the schmuck who (a) paid for the right to download it from a RIAA-authorized source, and (b) uploaded it to a non-RIAA-authorized filesharing network.
Make it impractical for Joe Sixpack (who will be unaware of this type of watermarking, and who probably will be unaware of the existence of tools to strip it) to upload his files without risking fines/prosecution, and you can offer DRM-free MP3s to Joe Sixpack.
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.
I'm hoping these kinds of anti-piracy actions work, and work well.
Things like the DRM and DMCA were put into place to fight piracy, and wound up just hurting regular consumers while the pirates just snickered as they continued along their merry way.
With these kinds of things, regular users will still be able to do what they like with their own copy, be it back it up or transfer it to another medium for personal use. At the same time, it will allow those tracking piracy to find the source and press charges only against that person, and not the random multitude.
I'm sure the pirates will figure out some way to work around this (be it to randomly change the volume slightly throughout an entire MP3, or brightening/dithering an entire picture), as they have everything else, but if this kind of technology can prevail and advance, it will allow those of us legally using our own purchased goods to do so without worry, while punishing those who deserve it.
I hate to be the guy to come out and say it, but I don't really mind DRM as long as it doesn't interfere with my user experience. I paid for my songs on iTunes, and I've rarely encountered any DRM restrictions that affected me. I wish I could just give them all to friends who wanted them, but let's face it, that's pushing the limits of fair use. And if I do want to share it, there are easy workarounds.
This goes for downloaded files, not physical media. If I buy a CD, I want to be able to do whatever I want to it, which includes sharing with friends. I've never made a habit out of sharing files, even back in the Napster days (Sorry, but I was a leech). Most of my file sharing is between me and my friends, and while I admit that it certainly pushes the limits of legality, it's the only "responsible" way to do things.
This watermarking idea just reeks of being absolutely unnecessary. People just need to learn to be more "responsible" about how they rip off music. I hate the record labels as much as the next guy, but I'm willing to work within the confines of a happy medium, and do most of my sharing via less (or is it more?) traditional means.
I don't see anything wrong with sharing TV shows that are freely broadcast over the airwaves, however. For most things, however, if you don't own the copyright, it's usually not yours to distribute.
What's my point? I really don't know. Try this: Steal all you want, just don't get caught, and don't let them force more of these silly things on all of us.
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If **AA prosecutes the original buyer of illegally distributed watermarked copies, then pirate distributors will create malware to steal originals from unsuspecting copy owners. Computer owners that don't secure their machines will find that someone has surreptitiously copied their media files, sold or traded them on the open market and made the owner of the infected machine liable for criminal act.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Are they planning to
The first is basically worse than DRM, the second is essentially an aid to enforcing existing copyright laws. I suspect that if the Content Cartel would finally accept that their business models need to change and go for the second approach, most of us could accept it.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
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.
It's a nice thought, but I'm still not buying music online because it doesn't give a significant incentive. The cost of a full album is nearly identical to a real CD, and for that you get regular 128-bitrate encoded files. I'd rather pay a little more and get the full-quality, which I can then re-rip according to whether it's going on a portable or another CD afterward. I'd be more skeptical about data management than the shortcomings of the actual watermark. Will unlimited-music providers like Rhapsody generate a watermark for each file streamed? That'd be an insane amount of data to collect and track, and it'll only make a difference if my particular rip becomes one of Kazaa's top 100-most-common to matter.
It seems to me that the primary goal of watermarking system is simply to identify pirated content. Even if a pirate changes or removes a watermark, you can show that the mark was pirated or removed.
So, let's say you gave each legally sold copy of a song a unique randomly generated 64bit ID (that you record). The pirate could remove that ID. They might even put their own random ids in place of your id. The deal is, their IDs will not match those that you recorded, and you could make the the case that this is pirated music.
The thing that needs to happen is that publishers need to fight against the professional content copyright violators.
If done right, watermark technology would be sufficient to track and counter the extremely abusive copyright violations while allowing the use of open formats.
For that matter, I think "hidden" watermark technology is going in the wrong direction. The mark does not need to be hidden in the file. If you put a unique identifier on each thing downloaded. When you go to make the case that group A is pirating music you can either prove that there is a bunch of files with the same ID or with the wrong id. You don't even need to track back to the original buyer.
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.
So would independent recording artists be able to insert the watermark? If not, wouldn't that be grounds for an antitrust action? Or are they assuming that all possible songs are already copyrighted to a major multinational publisher, as hinted by this article and this article?
MP3's such a universally accepted format that i'd be able to purchase music online and be able to use it wherever i want - be it in the gym, on my ipod, on the tivo, and mac/pc/linux.
Watermarked MP3s would be a way that the music industry could say "look, we almost trust you!"
Real watermarks are for duplicating, not taking out. Absolutly nobody would want to take the watermark out of their 100 euro banknote. In an mp3 you would instead want to remove the mark.
Am I being anal? Well yeah but when it comes to security it is the only way to be. A banknote with the watermark removed just lost its value. A mp3 with its watermark has possibly just increased in value. It certainly has lost none.
So the type of attack they have to stand up against is totally different. A banknote watermark just has to be expensive to duplicate. Add enough expensive to duplicate elements to a banknote and you will make it unattractive to counterfitters. It is the reason you see so few attemps at counterfit cents. (Please do not post links to your favorite wooden nickel story okay?)
But all the 'counterfitter' has to do with the mp3 is to remove the watermark. Wich as others have already pointed out should not be too hard. This is totally different type of attack. Remember, the banknote is proud of its watermark and makes it very easy to 'see' it. It even forms a pretty picture to make it stand out more. The last thing you want in the mp3 version is for it to stand out. Adding a split second of mp3 codec that stands out shouting 'look at me I am a pretty watermark' is just asking for it to be edited out.
Oh well, will this work? Well only if they somehow manage to keep you from just removing the watermark. mis-Trusted computing anyone?
Funny thing, I own more LP's then any other medium. In fact as more and more anti copy protection is introduced, the less I own of it. LP (too many) -> CD (repectable) -> VHS (0 now but used have a okay collection) -> Mini disc (a couple)-> DVD (a few) -> iTunes (0)
Odd that.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This sTorY is unsUbstantiaTEd. MovE alonG. MOve aLoNG.
not to mention, will it be able to hold up in court when the MPAA explains "ok, now we know you can't see the difference, but this machine says there is one"
-- lol pwned
Don't buy any music, online or off, just pirate it all.. that way if any of your music finds its way to p2p, it isn't "your" music and the RIAA won't go after you, just whoever you got it from..
Also think about the situation where files all have their watermarks at the same position. If the watermark is an error correcting code, and the Hamming distance between the valid strings varies enough, you might even be able to find out which two copies were used to provide the "cleansed" copy.
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
Even so, the labels might adopt something like this. But it would be in addition to their current copy restriction schemes, rather than a replacement for them. Consumers still lose as they'll still have to wrangle with FairPlay, WMA, or whatever copy restriction scheme the labels want to use.
Penny - plain text accounting
to whoever put them on the internet, and then get medeival on them for breach of contract.
Well I'm sure that they would like to do this, in their fantasies. But in the real world it's a music producer vs. Clear Channel, not some individual D.J. And if Clear Channel decides that it is in their best interest that the music go out to the P2P file sharers before the record is released, then there isn't a whole lot that the record producer can do about it.
Clear Channel gets money from every music source except sales of disks and downloads. In other words, it is in their interest to have the 'product' on the file share networks; copyright laws be damned. They own the radio stations, the concert venues, the ticket companies, the artist management companies (in some cases), and the billboards.
Maybe someday the entertainment companies will complain about Clear Channel's cavalier approach to their 'intellectual property'. But don't hold your breath waiting for it to happen. Huge companies tend to avoid harrassing each other over relatively trival things like this unless one is trying to do a hostile takeover of another.
...how do they mark the water, and how do such marks on the water keep pirate ships from attacking honest merchant ships?
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.
Also it requires every purchaser of a copy to be a registered one, it requires the purchaser to be very careful not to have the copy stolen or lose it, and it might also lead a hacked watermark to accuse an innocent purchaser.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
This is not to prevent copying, just to help track down where copies come from. This may not be too useful in current environment, but as cinema turns to digital distribution and terrestial broadcasts of television and radio go digital, it would help piece together a case against suspected infringers. I'm not at all for this, but just explaining how it would be useful (and likely will be used) by content providers. By the way did you know that many laser printers already have such watermarking, to allow police to prove that a printout was made by a specific printer?
I read the article as "Using Watermarks to Combat Privacy."
Although, that would make sense.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
The article is a little short on technical specifics, but it's hard to imagine how a watermarking system would work with a lossy compression format.
If the watermark is applied to the file after compression to mp3, then it is very easily defeated by decompressing and recompressing with a non-watermarking encoder, of which many exist for mp3. The act of decompressing the file will obliterate whatever bits were flipped for watermarking purposes. If the hidden information is subtle enough, the lossy compressor will simply throw it out. If it's obvious enough to not be obliterated by lossy compression, then I can hear it in the file, and the product is inferior. The only option would be for the encoder to recognize the watermark and purposefully retain the data, and then we're tied to a specific piece of software just like DRM.
However, if the watermark was applied before the compression (i.e., directly to the wav file on the CD), then the act of compressing the file will change the watermarking somewhat, and matching the "fingerprints," as they are called in the article, would be statistical in nature, not exacting like a hash is. The fingerprint would have to be considered "close enough" to be a match.
Also, every single watermark would have to be unique in order to match it to a specific source, which means creating a Big Database (tm) of customer info, which is easily defeated by paying with cash. On the other hand, if the record companies weren't interested in identifying a specific source, but the presence of a watermarked file in an upload directory is sufficient, then that's no different than the existence of any other file in an upload directory which contains copyrighted material, which is what they've been going after for quite some time now.
And the point is...?
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
Watermarks do not have to be 100% security though obscurity... It seems to me that a proper system would use a private key of sorts to unencode the information, then the algorithm could be free (as in speech or BSD) and like SSL only they key would need be obscure. If you're using just a simple 256 bit key to decode the watermark, chances are it would be nigh detectable (assuming of course that the actual technology can survive recompression / reencoding).
The Geek in Black
I know my BCD's (when I'm Sober)
[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
The notable thing here is that all the companies are doing is transferring that trust-anxiety from them->you to you->your friends. Now you have to look every friend in the eye and say "Will this person not put me in jail?"
I think "big brother" was pretty appropriate, considering how much like Stalinist Russia and other oligarchies and tyrannies this sounds like. The particulars are different, but we arrive at a very similar reality--the 'governing body' (RIAA) is has vague but powerful means to dispose of troublemakers and the 'oppressed' have really no way of knowing when they are going to get 'the bullet in their head,' except to constantly profess their loyalty (by distrusting everyone and never even taking advantage of their legitimate uses).
In the end, it's hard to forget that it's not our friends that are the spies, it's the MP3 file itself. I don't know, but to me that makes that sort of 'gray oppression' quite a bit more dehumanizing.
Does this mean owning music files = owning guns ?
If someone steal the music files and upload, then the owner is responsible for the act? Maybe there also needs to be a DRM police site where we reported the mp3 stolen?
Doesn't this approach have similar consequences to 70 yr old grandma or 12 yr old kids whose files stolen but charged for distributing mp3? How about lost or stolen ipod?
Does it also mean we need to physically smack the old hard disk to bits and pieces so no one can 'steal' mp3?
If owning the mp3 is going to be so much hassle, I'd rather not buy them.