Slashdot Mirror
Nielsen To Offer Web Copyright Protection System
J053 writes "The Nielsen company, along with Digimarc, are planning to offer their digital watermarking technology to web content providers. According to Information Week, the system will provide 'a way to quickly discover unauthorized content on sites. To do that, the system would leverage Nielsen's existing watermark technology, which is used on more than 95% of TV programming distributed today. The watermarks are used by the meters installed in people's home to identify the programs they watch.'"
Fair use isn't just about the length of the work. It's also about the context in which it is used. If your suggestion was implemented, anyone could add a clip and then add nonsense or a blank screen to the bulk of the video to fool the filter.
It's probably a bit trickier than rewriting some tags or metadata that is padding the file. If the watermark is made to personally identify the user it was sold to you could get two different copies from two different users and figure out what is different. The difference is the watermark. After that it's up to some ingenious coder to figure out the best way to remove or render the watermark unidentifiable. Probably as simple as merging/averaging the two.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Just make sure you know what companies are owned by the media corporations:
http://www.thenation.com/special/bigten.html
You wouldn't want to purchase your "fat internet pipe" from the very same corporation that used to provide you with television.
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
Spread-spectrum frequency domain watermarking is the most desirable "solution" that the studios can implement right now. The algorithms are designed so that the watermark is not detectible by humans watching the video (or listening to the audio) but any leaked copies can be traced back to their source. This way, if I buy a DVD (or Blu-ray or whatever) I can continue to use various tools to copy it to my hard drive, make a copy for my friends (as long as I trust them not to put it on the Internet), etc. but the guys at the theatres that are releasing 0-day telecines of new movies can be caught and fired/blacklisted from the industry/whatever. I don't really see a disadvantage to this, other than the supply of videos on the torrent sites drying up somewhat. Plus if this kind of thing becomes widespread it should be interesting to see the tools that are written to strip the watermarks!
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
TFA is more about identifying the content as copyrighted so that they can offer takedown notices- not to identify the source. The idea is to utilize the same system they have to generate the ratings data- just identify each program by the watermark, making it easy to filter by the watermark. In no way does this imply there'd be a new watermark for each viewer.
Additionally, TFA says that if there's no watermark, they'd generate a digital signature and compare that. So strip the watermark, and it'll take a tad more CPU to see if it's copyrighted.
The only REAL defense we have is to *cleanse* the big database of patterns and watermarks that they'll have.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex