Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
So if the watermarks are public, they can be identified and scrubbed before posting?
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.
I have a Web Newspaper rolled up, waiting on it.
"No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms." -- Thomas Jefferson
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.
Because, yeah, I store all my potential copyright-infringing materials on my public web server.
Check out the cave on the east side of lake Hylia. Strange and wonderful things live in it.
A better way. Put a bunch of legitimate sound clips out on the internet, but change it to have the watermark. Make sure your files get spread all over the place. A lot of false positives would render this useless.
And on a more sick note, you could find the "I am browsing gay porn" wav file and modify it. Can you imagine the poor schmuck who has to go review each report to see if it is true?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
As this thing crawls the web, suppose it encounters a page on my web site that has links to 50,000 music files. Except they are actually all the same file, a legitimate file which is dynamically served up by the web server when the spider requests it. So there's no storage space issue on my end, but now the spider has to process 50,000 files. That's going to take a damn long time. Maybe I can bog it down so badly that it can't get any real work done.
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!
This probably involves watermarks that are hidden in the masked part of the spectrum, i.e. in the same way MP3 and similar codecs work. You can't easily remove those without distorting the audio considerably, unless you would know exactly what kind of watermark it is and how to remove it. Of course you can just 'blur' the entire audio clip, but people aren't used to listening to "cassette-tape-that-has-been-lying-in-the-sun-for- too-long" kind of audio anymore.
Does it respect robots.txt?
Does it run on Linux?
Miss Information meet... Miss Information.
Nowhere does it say youtube will be watermarking all content. For this to work that's the OPPOSITE of what needs to happen - but if all the content providers embrace some sort of standard watermark then it will be trivial for youtube to SCAN your "original" content and see whether or not it is ACTUALLY YOUR CONTENT. How will they know? Because YOUR content will either contain YOUR watermark or it will contain no watermark at all.
And youtube allows you to "retract" anything you say anytime you want. You can make your content private if you like, restrict it to select "friends," or take it back completely.
It is about copyright and who controls and distributes under that copyright, but youtube isn't slashdot. It isn't even itunes, where their business model is built around watermarking everything and charging for individual access to it.
And for the other geniuseseses who think you can simply "blur it out," RTFA on digimarc. Duh, if it were so simple to "blur it out" then it would be pretty damn useless, now wouldn't it? Some websites have been watermarking their images for years now and contracting with companies who DO crawl p2p services and usenet looking for infringers, and while it aint 100% effective it has been pretty damn effective at stopping people from sharing their shit. This isn't a watermark like on paper, it's a DIGITAL watermark - it's "visible" (or audible) but only in the sense it adds noise to the picture or sound and degrades its quality; you can "blur" it but that won't completely obliterate the embedded information as it is essentially an encrypted piece of copyright information steganographically embedded into the media.
I hate the way this stuff degrades the quality, but most dfon't even notice it. I know this because I've worked with some of these sites and I seemed to be one of the very few who ever had any complaint about it. I've shared marked and unmarked content hundreds of times and very few people seem able to tell the difference... so, without knowing what to look for in the file source, how will you even know what content to "blur" and what not to blur?
if this were adopted widely, it seems the biggest problem would be - ironically - with "original" content composed from fairly used bits and pieces of other works. If you just rip and post a part of a movie or tv show you're going to be pissing off only one content creator - but what if you make an original montage from ten different pieces of protected media? The watermarks would all still be there, you'd potentially be getting takedown notices and/or lawsuit papers from ten different content owners.
The technology is useful. But what's really needed (still) is meaningful regulation of terms and fair public use policy enforcement.
All that Digimarc does (for any media including stills, music and video) is introduce "noise" into the bit stream. This noise has to be at a level or interval that it is not perceptable by humans.
They simply introduce a bit pattern or, more often, a delta pattern (change in bits by some delta) which is less detectable. This pattern usually contains a recognition pattern and some encrypted data.
Certain bit patterns can be used in pictures and video so that as long as you capture the video out put at nearly any viewable scale you can recover this signature. This includes video taping a TV or monitor playing a Digimarc protected image etc. This is how they can figure out who leaked early copies of major movies to the black market even once the movie has been copied to various media a number of times.
Anyhow what you do to beat Digimarc's technology is to introduce "noise" over their "noise" in such away as to render theirs useless. One of the simplest ways to attempt this is to downgrade the quality. Still depending on the pattern used they may be able to detect it.
Another thing to remember is that their spider is limited by latency. Therefore they cannot commit a lot of time to the analysis of all files. Therefore I would have to imagine one wouldn't have to worry about using a heavy duty algorithm to erase the signature.
I think enough people on here are smart enough that they will be able to google for Digimarc's pattens and old articles to get a pretty good idea of what they do and then obfuscate their own signature. You don't need to worry about cracking encryption or anything that hard to get around their scheme. It's not a particularly strong approach.
Nice theory, but in reality the watermark will be copyrighted so they will sue you for copyright infringement anyway. :)
I dont read
Whoa. Deja Vu. Didnt they say that about HD-DVD and Vista's new security?
No wait... I think I've got it... Isn't it called a "computer"?
The sad thing about this episode is that digital watermarks could be a wonderful tool, used by artists and their customers to guarantee a given work's authorship. Instead, it's used to punish the very people who make it possible for the artists to survive: their listeners.
I work in an academic environment, and I can't think of a single person in my life who has not violated a copyright or user agreement. If your job is to teach, it's almost inevitable. If you're an enthusiast or fan of a particular artist, it becomes a statistical certainty that you've broken the "law" regarding intellectual property.
I contacted Digimarc once because I wanted to find out about ways to add an identifying mark to a digital file that would let a user know that the file was the authentic work of a particular artist. Not to prevent copying, mind you, because the files in question were meant to be shared. I just wanted the users to be able to know with some certainty that what they were hearing was actually produced by who they expected.
The reply I got from Digimarc (I still have the email) was that they weren't interested in such uses of their product, and anyway "it's priced out of reach of the individual artist or production company". Real sweethearts.
In the last few days there have been lots of stories about people and corporations who make their money off the backs off creative folks. There are those who provide a real service (like the guy who delivers pizza to the recording studio, or the woman who fixes my digital mixing console) and there are those who live to suck the life out of what should be a source of joy for both the artist and the user. Like I've said before, parasites need to live, too. But what really galls me is when they act like they're really doing something of value to anyone but themselves and their accountants.
Seriously, to paraphrase Jesus or Steve Albini (it's one of those religious dudes, I forget which): "It's easier to drive a Range Rover through the butthole of a camel than for a label executive or booking agent to enter the kingdom of heaven."
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.