Watermarking to Replace DRM?

An anonymous reader writes "News.com has an article on the announcement of Microsoft and Universal to introduce watermarking technology into audio files. The technology could serve several purposes including tracking file sharing statistics and inserting advertisements into audio tracks. The article goes on to suggest that watermarking could possibly replace DRM in the near future."

Comments

Won't help

[saibot834]

People will find ways to remove those watermarks. The only impact will be on the people who still buy the stuff; those who share it online won't have any problems.

Re:Won't help

[digitig]

Exactly. They've been trying to watermark audio media for as long as I can remember. Either it doesn't affect the audio, in which case whatever reads the audio can re-write it without the watermark, or it does affect audio, in which case, well, it affects audio.

Re:Won't help

[nyctopterus]

... and the impact on those that buy the stuff? Pretty minimal I'd say, if they aren't planning to share it. Watermarking is so much better than DRM.

Re:Won't help

[baadger]

This is true, the only way to make a watermark that can't be removed easily from video for example is to imprint a visible watermark directly onto your video frames, anything subtle such as using Steganography probably isn't going to make it through a re-encode due to the lossy nature. The same I would imagine will apply to audio.

Re:Won't help

[daeg]

Actually, some forms of water marking can survive some reprocessing. However, I am not aware of any watermarking techniques that can survive multiple passes. Even more dangerous yet to watermarking is combining two or more files. For instance, if your friend bought the same track as you did, new software could digitally combine the two files, filtering out any differences. Some bits would probably remain from the watermark, for example, if time 0:01 through 0:02 had the recording artist's name embedded, it would be identical between both tracks. The software could even take a more aggressive approach and simply drop frames or drop partial seconds of audio to remove suspicious data altogether.

Watermarking isn't good in my view, even compared to DRM. There will still be legal restrictions on what you can do. You won't be legally allowed to do ANYTHING to the file except play it. You could even be legally responsible if a virus happened to alter the file.

This won't affect pirates. It won't affect file sharers. It only hurts the consumer and hurts everyone in the long run.

Re:Won't help

[Opportunist]

But doesn't that pretty much give everyone what he wants?

DRM has also never been a tool to eliminate filesharing. I guess in the meantime even the RIAA has understood that. It's a tool to reduce it. Just like copy protection on software is. If someone wants to crack it, he will. But Joe Average won't.

I think watermarks would give everyone what they want. You can actually buy content without fearing that it won't work in your application. The RIAA gets the limitation of sharing because the watermarked stuff could be traced. And well, if you can remove DRM you can remove watermarks.

It's actually win-win all over.

Re:Won't help

[larien]

I agree. The main reason I don't buy MP3s from iTunes or whatever is that I play them in more than just my iPod, sometimes xmms, winamp or my Squeezebox, none of which support DRM. I'd live with a watermark that basically says "if you share this, we know who you are and where you live", because I don't plan to share it.

Obviously, the information watermarked needs to be limited to an identifier rather than encoding the name in for privacy, but if they know that the MP3 with the watermark 19584202984512903 was sold to me, they can track it back if they find it on P2P without exposing my personal information.

Re:Won't help

[dc29A]

It will be difficult to remove watermarks without destroying the original content.. watermarks are very advanced these days...

Its VERY easy to remove watermarks, no matter how sophisticated. Don't believe me? Take two or more originals, uncompress the format, compare the difference, null the offending part, and re-encode.

This cat-mouse game will continue until the end of time. I don't think it's that easy. Mp3 is already lossy, once decompressed and re-encoded to compare with a watermarked version, it will lose quality and the binary information will be different so comparing won't be easy at all.

Even if you have the original CD, and you rip the track from it, encode it into the exact Mp3 format (same bitrate and all) as the watermarked one, what guarantees that iTunes used the same disc to encode it? What guarantees that iTunes rip the same exact way as you? Nothing, so the Mp3 file will be different even if encoded with same parameters.

Re:Won't help

[Firehed]

Absolutely. The people ripping and uploading are doing it with pre-release CDs, not with their latest iTunes that they burned and ripped. I'll buy music if I can play it wherever I like, and watermarking doesn't stop me from doing that. It conceptually deters piracy since your name is attached, but doesn't lock things down to prevent it and stop people from legitimately using their purchases. Everyone has a valid reason to worry about DRM; only people who are doing things that (theoretically) harm profits by uploading might worry about the watermarking.

Re:Won't help

[Zero_DgZ]

The MP3 is already different from the original CD track by definition. It's lossy compression. Those of us who aren't FLAC monkeys (dear god, I've been waiting to use that turn of phrase for about three years) tend not to be bothered so much if there's a slight change in the "true" audio data as long as it still sounds good - or at least tolerably so. Any tiny generational change imparted by removing the watermark is unlikely to faze most media pirates. These are people who rip out or recompress the music and movie files in games so they can fit them into Usenet posts, vise MP3's down to 92 kbps so they can share them en masse on Limewire, compress the hell out of dual layer DVD movies with DivX so they'll fit on a single CD-R, and so forth.

Re:Won't help

[ion]

there might be other reasons for why the files differs.

Suppose that you have multiple watermarks, some are identical from files to files, some specify the server they comes from, others the buyer, and some the music company?

And finally, not being a watermark expert... there might exist water mark technology that can survive such behaviour.

Still, if it was you who bought the file, i would very much dare you to prove that even after you did what you describe that after that, there are NO watermarks left.

Re:Won't help

[kimvette]

Watermarking isn't good in my view, even compared to DRM. There will still be legal restrictions on what you can do. You won't be legally allowed to do ANYTHING to the file except play it. You could even be legally responsible if a virus happened to alter the file.

Legal uses include fair use and right of first sale. You still have the right to sell it to someone else when you are done with it and no longer wish to possess it, and you have the right to give it away. In both cases you must destroy all copies. You can make mix CDs and derivative works (parodies, samples. etc.) just like you legally can with other media. Don't let the RIAA members brainwash you into believing your rights have somehow lessened or evaporated.

Re:Won't help

[ion]

to my knowledge watermarks in sounds files works by making some places of the sound slightly different such that the ear/brain will not think that sounds wrong, but also such that a reencoding will not trash the watermark.

I believe that the music industry are capable of spending a lot of money on developing a sufficient good watermark technology, also one that will survive multiple reencoding attempts.

Also, suppose that they give each buyer a sufficiently unique number, and then they put this number into alot of sound files all encoded differently. Suppose you try to trash the watermark. That might succed for some parts of the watermark, but since you most likely share all your music, then enough data might have survived for them being able to stick all the watermark parts together from all the files and making it say "digitig"

Re:Won't help

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

The question "Are there still watermarks in the file" isn't an important one, since they're not doing the job of DRM. DRM keeps you from playing the track, watermarking keeps you from.. doing nothing? Unless you have to use a special watermark-reading player to play the file, and if that's the case how is this different from DRM?

Re:Won't help

[Frenchman113]

Stupid HTML formatting.

Your post is so wrong, I don't even know where to start.
First off, if MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 (mp3) was state-of-the-art 16 years ago, that means it's 16 years old already. Back then, MPEG-1 Video was also "state-of-the-art" but you don't see anyone using that these days.

Second, "mp3 is a non-proprietary codec". Well, guess what, so are Vorbis (which also happens to be FREE), and MPEG-2/4 AAC (which, unlike mp3, does not have a license fee to be able to play). Seeing as these give better quality than mp3, there's no reason that people wouldn't have switched other than the fact that *Joe Sixpack can't tell the difference between 32 kbit/s mp3 and the original*.

Third, the FLAC *programming API* changed, FLAC 1.0 files can still be decoded using FLAC 1.2.

Re:Won't help

[JimDaGeek]

I don't see how this helps much from a legal perspective. Say you have 1 GB of watermarked MP3 files on your portable audio player. It gets lost/stolen. Someone uploads most of those audio songs that you legally paid for. What happens now? You get sued, pay big fines, have a criminal case brought against you and possibly do jail time?

I don't see a jury convicting a peer because their player was lost/stolen. Heck, anyone could just say their player was lost/stolen, the perfect defense next to the Chewbacca defense.

Re:Won't help

[nine-times]

What if pirates get ahold of multiple MP3s? Why bother? Pirates can hijack the ships that carry CDs across the sea and rip the CDs themselves, making MP3s that don't contain watermarks.

Yeah, there's a joke in there, but I have a serious point. It's likely that someone with a lot of technical knowledge will be able to remove watermarks, it's also true that a person with a lot of technical knowledge will be able to bypass DRM. Someone who's serious about distributing copyrighted material will be able to find a loophole somewhere, and the only realistic purpose of a DRM scheme or watermarking scheme is to discourage casual sharing.

Even though people will find a way to remove this watermarking, most people won't bother to figure out how to do it. It might succeed at discouraging casual file sharing without impeding customers from using the content they've purchased.

A nice idea, but short-lived?

[Hanners1979]

This certainly sounds like a preferable solution to any kind of Draconian DRM scheme, but my bet is that it'll be circumvented so trivially that content providers will soon shun it and go back to the bad old days of DRM. I hope I'm just being cynical though.

Re:A nice idea, but short-lived?

[Aladrin]

DRM obviously doesn't work, is expensive, and loses customers.

Even if this doesn't prevent piracy (which it's not designed to do, if you RTFA) it doesn't piss off customers and probably isn't very expensive at all, since the file format doesn't change, doesn't require special software or codecs on the users' end, and is generally painless to everyone.

The article talks about this only being used to track where a file came from originally, and not watermarking them individually. Personally, I think it would be almost trivial to watermark each individual file with the buyer's information. AllOfMP3.com used to transcode the files to several formats and bitrates on their server and STILL sold the songs for like $.10 each. If this takes off, it WILL be used to watermark the buyer's info into it.

Personally, I don't have a problem with that. I don't have any problem with buying music I listen to, so long as it's a reasonable price and not crippled. And I don't have any problem with each song being watermarked with my info, so long as it doesn't allow someone to impersonate me. (No credit card numbers, social security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, etc. Name and/or customer ID at their store is acceptable only.) They will, of course, go too far at some point.

Re:A nice idea, but short-lived?

[Hanners1979]

TFA seems to suggest that re-encoding the file won't remove the watermark, but I don't see how they can guarantee that if it's part of the audio data. At the very least, I would imagine the re-encoding process would 'damage' the watermark to some extent.

Re:A nice idea, but short-lived?

[Opportunist]

Actually it would be interesting what loses you more sales: Crippling your songs in a way that a good deal of your customers will cease to do business with you because they either simply cannot use your content at all because your DRMified version of the song does not play in their player, or the "weak" watermarks that allow easy transcoding to remove it.

Personally, I'd say the first. If someone's a "heavy P2P user", he doesn't care about either. Someone WILL have removed that DRM or watermark for him. No matter how tough, no matter how good, DRM has always been broken and will always be broken.

So what's left? The market for the Joe Average users who do not know how to circumvent DRM or watermarks, and who do not know about P2P. And those people will buy, as long as it works in their players.

Still doesn't deal with Reselling

[Cryophallion]

If I buy a cd, I can resell it, and that is legal (if not, then the RIAA should be going after all the cd stores). What if I sell the music that is watermarked? Or are they making that illegal now based on their terms of use?

This is the same problem that came up with Apple adding the user info to the files.

I love how the digital world has actually been effectively taking our rights away as they narrow the terms and conditions of using the things you buy (could only install Vista twice until there was an uproar about it, if you download the music instead of buying a cd, you can't sell it to a friend....).

Tired of advertising

[PsychoSlashDot]

Maybe I'm the only one, but I've reached a saturation point regarding advertising. It now makes me react strongly negatively. I fully expect any day now companies will start tattooing adverts on the inside of babies' eyelids.

We live in a world of massive information-availability. A consumer who wishes to consume is equipped to find the "best" product for the job, and often will. Brand-recognition is a weakening force and it's high time we stop polluting our senses with invasive advertising.

A double-edged sword...

[Max Romantschuk]

The good news: Watermarking does not restrict the freedom of personal use and transferring from one device to another. If this could make online music shopping truly feasible I'd prefer it over DRM. I want to do whatever I like with the media I buy.

But the question is how the media companies will use this newfound power... I support the idea of companies having the option to trace leaks, but this could make it possible to determine exactly who shared the 500 000 copies present of Band X's single Y on P2P network Z. Ensue more lawsuits?

Sounds better

[LinuxEagle]

DRM: Limited in who can run it. (see BBC iplayer for an example of an OS dependent implantation). Must have the right hardware, software, ect.
Watermarks: Anyone can run it.
Whether it can be hacked around or otherwise... time will tell, but from a accessibility standpoint, at least its looking like anybody can at least play it. That has to count for something. If I have to accept restrictions, this is better then what we had before.

Ideas!!

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Easily removed if passively embedded into the file.
2. People will complain if the "watermark" is placed into the audio stream and causes any sort of even momentary distortion in the playback, even at high frequencies.

Re:Ideas!!

[Belacgod]

2: No they won't. If they don't complain about the quality of MP3 relative to uncompressed, and can't tell the difference between the different bitrates, they won't complain about something more subtle. I know some people on here can and do the above, but those are a small minority in the world at large.

Re:Ideas!!

[Corwn of Amber]

I might be in a small minority because I can discern a difference between a 128kbps MP3 and an original recording, but I'm in a fuckin'huge majority of people who get very angry when they hear ads in songs, or when songs are incompletely ripped, or when they pop, click and hiss (as if CDParanoia code had not been ported to Windows years ago.)

Watermarking audio? What for, anyway? Transcode once, lose watermark. Re-burn and re-rip, lose watermark. Transmission error, lose watermark. (Watermark in the sense that it can be batch-calculated on massive quantities of files. OF COURSE an human will recognize it.)

Re:Ideas!!

[JimDaGeek]

2. I don't think any slight quality loss would be that big to most people since they put up with the very outdated and inferior MP3 format. What would bother me is how the article headed said about placing advertisement in the audio. The would be real bad IMO. You are listing to your favorite song and then in pops some annoying voice about buying the amazing mop as seen on TV, just $9.99 (+ $15.99 S/H+).

Re:Ideas!!

[Sandbags]

For example, can you tell the difference between regular FM, High Definition FM, and FM with embedded PTY signals? I can't. taking a 128 bit signal down to say 126 bit (or 256 to 250) is not enough of a difference to distinguish, even for high end gear and computer analysis. People argue about the difference between 160 and 192 and unless you have really high end gear, only a fraction of people can tell, and usually only when listening to music that highlights the weaknesses of one of the lesser frequency. a watermark (a few Kbits our of a 5MB song) is subtle enough that you won't be able to tell.

Still a reason not to buy

[Christian Engstrom]

Congratulations, record companies, for coming up with yet another reason not to buy your products. To a consumer that is toying with the idea of buying a song rather than downloading it for free, watermarking could potentially be an even larger disincentive than DRM.

• DRM: If you buy this song, you run the risk that you won't be able to play it on the hardware that you have now or will have in the future. Total risk exposure: 99 cent
• Watermarking: If you buy this song, you run the risk that it somehow ends up on the filesharing networks with your name written all over it, and you get sued to smithereens by the RIAA. Total risk exposure: a gazillion dollars

Why would consumers find this so much more attractive?

Re:Still a reason not to buy

[revengebomber]

And how, exactly, can you prove to a judge that John Smith actually distributed that file which reads "John Smith"?

Re:Still a reason not to buy

[nyctopterus]

Well, say you took you computer to be repaired, and the files were swiped. Your entire collection could end up out there. They'd need other evidence.

Watermarking pretends people have control.

[Futurepower(R)]

Also, watermarking pretends that people have control over their files. Millions of people whose computers that are controlled remotely in botnets don't.

There are numerous other ways files are moved around. If you take your computer in for repair, it is possible the repair person will copy any files he or she wants.

Water marking proves what?

[nurb432]

That you can track down the original owner who the files were stolen from?

not saying that DRM is the answer either, but you cant run around blaming the people that leased the file in question for it being 'released'.

Re:Great idea if properly implemented...it won't b

[kimvette]

Unfortunately it will be used to connect specific downloads to individuals allowing the RIAA to target their lawsuits more accurately. It will still be as impossible to prove in court but will drive an even deeper wedge between the RIAA and reality.

Quite correct. If you buy Hillary Duff's latest single today, and are sick of it in two weeks, and decide to sell that MP3 to someone who isn't yet sick to death of hearing about her crap, and then that buyer uploads it to all the P2P networks (I'm still trying to figure out who the hell is buying her crap in the first place but bear with me) the RIAA would go after you. They'd insist that in addition to not having Fair Use, you do not have the Right of First Sale. It SHOULD be simple to squelch their argument but unfortunately they have deep pockets with which to buy the courts.

But: that is where watermarking can be harmful. If you buy an MP3 and resell it legally (destroying all copies you have) you're LEGALLY in the clear, or if you purchase it as a gift (and again, destroying all copies you have) the "evidence" would point back at you, but the evidence really isn't proof of ANYTHING in this case. It's like a crime having happened in a subway with no witnesses, and you get charged because your fingerprints happen to be on one of the handrails. That fingerprint is simply evidence that you were there sometime in the past, not that you had anything to do with the incident.

Re:Will Help

[h4rm0ny]

Watermarking is quite frankly fantastic. If these companies are moving to watermarking instead of DRM then more power to their balance books! I'm not interested in downloading music or movies. I want to buy them. DRM stops me doing that and from getting the product that I want. Watermarking doesn't stop me from doing anything I'm legitimately allowed to do so if it satisfies their requirements to go and catch people who do make illegitimate copies, then I would very much like them to use Watermarking. Hopefully it will lead to more products that I can buy online.