Startup Tries Watermarking Instead of DRM

Loosehead Prop writes "A U.K. startup called Streamburst has a novel idea: selling downloadable video with watermarks instead of DRM. The system works by adding a 5-second intro to each download that shows the name of the person who bought the movie along with something like a watermark: 'it's not technically a watermark in the usual sense of that term, but the encoding process does strip out a unique series of bits from the file. The missing information is a minuscule portion of the overall file that does not affect video quality, according to Bjarnason, but does allow the company to discover who purchased a particular file.' The goal is to 'make people accountable for their actions without artificially restricting those actions.'"

Comments

Re:re-encode the movie

[nblender]

The bits they change are subtle and don't affect the overall plot of the movie. So, for example, everyone who downloads a copy of the movie gets Lindsey Lohan replaced with another actor (say, Danny Devito) in every scene in which she appears. This change, while sublime, is preserved through re-encoding.

Quite clever, really.