DSL Gateways to Fight Piracy by Marking Video

Stony Stevenson wrote with an article about home gateway devices being set up to identify video pirates. The article reads: "Home gateway manufacturer Thomson SA plans to incorporate video watermarking technology into future set-top boxes and other video devices. The watermarks, unique to each device, will make it possible for investigators to identify the source of pirated videos. By letting consumers know the watermarks are there, even if they can't see them, Thomson hopes to discourage piracy without putting up obstacles to activities widely considered fair use, such as copying video for use on another device in the home or while traveling to work."

Comments

Won't work with BitTorrent

[Emnar]

The .torrent file you use to start downloading a BitTorrent file has checksums for all chunks of the file. If a chunk is altered in transit, the BT clients receiving it will detect this and discard it (and intelligent trackers will eventually kick you out of the P2P cloud).

The only possible application for this is tagging files transferred as unencrypted streams, such as HTTP or FTP.