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EMI Says ITMS DRM-Free Music Selling Well
An anonymous reader writes "'The initial results of DRM-free music are good' says Lauren Berkowitz, a senior vice president of EMI, at a music industry conference in New York. Berkowitz went on to say that the early results from iTunes indicate that DRM-free offerings may boost revenue from digital albums as well as individual songs."
Watermarking is not DRM. It's watermarking. DRM controls when and how you are allowed to use the content, and watermarking does not. It only provides a [potential] trail of culpability. If you are modded down, it will be at least half because you are simply wrong - although I have been hit hard by fanboys as well, Apple and otherwise. Right now it's the OSI fanboys modding me down for pointing out that Perens' claim to invent the idea of "open" source is false and that "open" meant something before he opened his mouth on the subject. I suspect you suffer for the same reason I do; some people mod me down any chance they get to make a plausible-looking negative moderation, simply because they recognize me and disapprove of that for which I stand.
Er, anyway, back on topic: Watermarking is, by definition, not DRM.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Let's not forget, they still encode e-mail addresses and names in these 'DRM free' tracks. I still consider that DRM.
You may not like it, but please don't confuse the issue by calling it DRM. It's metadata, even potentially useful metadata, that discourages copyright infringement while not in any way restricting fair use. You can copy those files to any device, or even transcode them into any other format, easily stripping all metadata in the process. Totally different than DRM, where you have to actually break encryption or suffer quality loss in order to do that.
If we're gonna love someone for providing DRM free tracks, remember Amazon is providing actual unencoded MP3s.
Except that they haven't opened their store yet. So don't go lauding them when you don't even know that they're not going to include the user id of the person who downloaded the song in the metadata.
> Er, anyway, back on topic: Watermarking is, by definition, not DRM.
And this isn't watermarking. Digital watermarking changes content to encode some kind of message. When you buy DRM-free tunes from iTunes, the actual content, the AAC stream, contains no watermark. If you buy the same DRM-free song from five different accounts, all the AAC streams will be bit-for-bit identical. All that's included is a tag, in plaintext, which contains your info. You can read it, you can edit it, you can remove it. Not DRM, not a watermark.
The tags added by the iTunes store make it easy for you to prove that you purchased the tracks, should you need to. If you don't need to, and you think having your name stored on your hard drive is somehow an infringement of your civil liberties, then just remove them. They're stored in standard MPEG-4 atoms, and there are a number of tools for editing them.
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That does not imply a unique value per file the way the term "Watermarking" does automatically.
Watermarking means no such thing.
Watermarks were used in drafts, demos, and other such things, partly to identify them as such and partly to prevent someone from stealing it. e.g. if you hired a design firm to create a poster for you they might send you a watermarked draft so that you could see the finished result, but if you decided not to pay for it, the poster was still useless because it had a giant watermark through the middle that said 'draft copy - property of design company'. Once you'd approved and paid, they'd send you an un-watermarked version for you to reproduce.
Watermwarks were also used in coporate letterhead, cheques, and other docuements to help prevent forgery and authenticate that they were genuine. For the most part this was just used to help foil attacks. The same way most banks.
Never to uniquely identify individual documents.
but I would still argue in the shift to the digital domain the meaning is more of uniqueness than ability to remove
Again not true. With the digital transition, the primary motivation for watermarks was, as before, to 'damage' files so that people could see images but not steal them due to the watermark. (or more precisely, they could steal the watermarked image, but because the mark was hard to remove it wasn't worth it, and you couldn't leave the mark on for obvious reasons.)
Watermarks have been used for a long time on sites hosting high res photos or other digital art to prevent people from just downloading the image and using it. In order to get an image with the WATERMARK removed, you had to pay for the picture. Because the watermarks were translucent and applied over of the picture they are relatively difficult to simply remove.
Only very recently has watermarking technology been applied like a serial number, to uniquely identifying documents or files.
** Quite Simply there is no 'automatic' association with unique identifiers and watermarks. **
Aha, but that is external to the device, visible and alterable (potentially) by the user. The iTunes mark is not.
The itunes meta tag is not part of the song data, although it is in the same file.
It is visible in the sense that *any* program that can view the meta tags can see it -- and iTunes software itself will show you this information if you tell it to show info about the song. And the itunes tag is EASILY removed and or altered which is the antithesis of a watermark.
The iTunes tag is as much a 'watermark', as putting your email address in the filename.
And a watermark is just as identifiable if a record of which marks were sent to who is kept.
This whole 'invisible digital watermark serial number thats hard to remove' thing is pretty new, and really isn't entirely in keeping with the historical meaning or use of watermarks. Moreover, the apple meta tag is really none of those things. Its not invisible, not hard to remove.
If you didn't like the analagy of the laptop serial number because it was visible and alterable. Consider that at least half a dozen parts inside the laptop are also serialized. And that even if you scratch off the laptop serial number, if someone found the laptop they could not only infer what that number was, but potentially also who bought it.
Point is: laptops aren't 'watermarked' despite having serial numbers. And neither are iTunes files.