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Audio Watermark Web Spider Starts Crawling
DippityDo writes "A new web tool is scanning the net for signs of copyright infringement. Digimarc's patented system searches video and audio files for special watermarks that would indicate they are not to be shared, then reports back to HQ with the results. It sounds kind of creepy, but has a long way to go before it makes a practical difference. 'For the system to work, players at multiple levels would need to get involved. Broadcasters would need to add identifying watermarks to their broadcast, in cooperation with copyright holders, and both parties would need to register their watermarks with the system. Then, in the event that a user capped a broadcast and uploaded it online, the scanner system would eventually find it and report its location online. Yet the system is not designed to hop on P2P networks or private file sharing hubs, but instead crawls public web sites in search of watermarked material.'"
A new web tool is scanning the net for signs of copyright infringement ... 'For the system to work, players at multiple levels would need to get involved. Broadcasters would need to add identifying watermarks to their broadcast, in cooperation with copyright holders, and both parties would need to register their watermarks with the system.
So, basically, their web tool is scanning for things that don't yet exist. Bully!
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Time to examine how this works, and how to block it from your website.
You are allowed to protect unwanted use and access of your copyrighted information, after all!
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Ahem
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
This isn't aimmed at the home use or small time crowd. It's ideal role is aimed at finding big name corporate offenders that have unlicensed PR crap on brochers, websites, or ads and making sure that the guy whose's content it is gets his cut. It's not worth it to go against small time folks. Think of professional photographers making sure their photos aren't run in mags or on the web without them getting their cut.
For the system to work, players at multiple levels would need to get involved. Broadcasters would need to add identifying watermarks to their broadcast, in cooperation with copyright holders, and both parties would need to register their watermarks with the system
For all you know they have been doing this for the past 10 years.
Blur the watermark and they are screwed.
Assuming the watermarks are public or traceable. If all you're doing is identifying the fact that it's copyrighted, you could have a thousand different watermarks. Their location at any of half a dozen places in the audio stream would indicate infringement. That means that the pirate needs to search for any of 6000 possible spots for the watermark, and remove it. If the watermarks don't try to distinguish some copies of the work from other copies of the work, you can't use a simple diff to root them out.
Why does everyone here want this not to work? Seems to me this could be the alternative to DRM. It doesn't interfere with fair use at all; it only detects when copyrighted works are made widely available.
If we want to dissuade the entertainment industry from using DRM, it seems incumbent upon us, as technologists, to propose alternatives that at least partially answer copyright owners' legitimate concerns. Seems to me this could be one of them.
Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!
Whoa. Deja Vu. Didnt they say that about HD-DVD and Vista's new security?
no you don't. simply find a way to obscure the watermark and place it everywhere. Digimarc's watermarking for Images can be thwarted incredibly easy. simply bi cubic resize the image down slightly smaller AFTER you rotate it 1 -5 degrees. Poof their watermark is no longer detectable as it has been munged hard all over the image.
I guarantee their audio and video watermark will be as easy to defeat, Digimarc is as innovative in technology as Macrovision.
And yes, that is a slam on them.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The problem isn't checking each spot for any of a given set of watermarks, it's identifying all the watermarks and all the spots they could be. You need to do a lot of work to build that database. You'd need tens of thousands of music files to even get started.