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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."
... 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.
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.
"Oh no... he found the
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.