Digital Watermarks to Replace DRM

palegray.net noted a wired story about an industry trend towards watermarking and away from DRM. It says "With all of the Big Four record labels now jettisoning digital rights management, music fans have every reason to rejoice. But consumer advocates are singing a note of caution, as the music industry experiments with digital-watermarking technology as a DRM substitute. Watermarking offers copyright protection by letting a company track music that finds its way to illegal peer-to-peer networks. At its most precise, a watermark could encode a unique serial number that a music company could match to the original purchaser. So far, though, labels say they won't do that: Warner and EMI have not embraced watermarking at all, while Sony's and Universal's DRM-free lineups contain "anonymous" watermarks that won't trace to an individual." Here is a Technical discussion on AudioBox and PSU.edu's Abstract Index

Comments

I don't really care.

[JustShootMe]

DRM is a Bad Thing, IMO. It restricts your choice and prevents you from playing the media you bought in the way you want to.

But watermarking? Eh. I don't care. You're supposed to not be sharing music you bought, and unless someone actually breaks in and steals it, there's really no legitimate reason to find music that you bought out on the net somewhere.

That's a big "unless", though. Are we coming to the point where we're going to have to file police reports when you get hacked so that you won't be liable for the distribution of stolen music? What about liability insurance for watermarked music?

Something to think about.

Re:I don't really care.

[ceoyoyo]

It doesn't matter WHAT you do, you can still FIND the watermark just by comparing a few copies of the song. Once you've found it, you can scramble it. You can't recover the original, unwatermarked version, but you can mess up the watermark.

Sophisticated watermarking techniques protect the watermark IF there is only one, ie all copies have the same watermark. Then you can't compare multiple, differently watermarked copies and so you can't find the watermark. It makes it much harder to mess up when you don't know where it is.

Re:I don't really care.

[DrEldarion]

Watermarks tied to users offer the RIAA an easy way to frame anyone, since they can create a watermarked copy of any file with your details and release it on the Internet. How is this insightful? Doesn't this seem incredibly paranoid to anyone else? Is it only modded up because it's anti-RIAA? It's completely ridiculous to think that they have it out for certain people and would "frame" them.

The RIAA, as much as they're (rightfully) demonized here, is acting defensively, not offensively. People are sharing the RIAA's copyrighted material, and they are taking legal action against those people. They'd use watermarks to track the sources of the released files. This allows for them to more accurately identify who are the people actually illegally distributing the files, so they don't end up going after everyone from four-year-old children to grandmothers who don't own computers. Isn't more accuracy a good thing?

Re:I don't really care.

[Xesdeeni]

I've always assumed that the watermark was a low frequency thing, so that it wouldn't be filtered out by format conversion. For example, if it were done to video, it could be a slight brightening and darkening of the video over a few seconds at a very, very low frequency (say 1 Hz). That way ripping a DVD, throwing out every other field and scaling it, and converting it to DivX wouldn't destroy the data. Such a system would require a large number of frames to encode enough bits to give a unique identifier, but it seems like it would survive.

But it just occurred to me that simply combining two different watermarked copies, perhaps switching every GOP (to use MPEG as an example) would create a third set of data that didn't make sense when decoded.

But I my just be (probably am) oversimplifying.

Xesdeeni

Give and Take

[Joker1980]

Most people are calling for some reasonable give and take, in that regard i cant really argue against watermarks.

Tracking Flow of Watermarks

[NetSettler]

Are we talking per-customer watermarks? (The article didn't seem to say.) Aside from the usual privacy implications, that would have its own problems, since it would allow for unbounded downstream prosecution of anyone who ever let even one copy go free, including through malware. It would make it quite a liability to even buy such stuff.

Trust

[Nerdfest]

I'm not necessarily against watermarking, but:

... while Sony's and Universal's DRM-free lineups contain "anonymous" watermarks that won't trace to an individual

So we trust Sony now, do we? Why does that not seem like a good idea? Not that Universal is likely to be more trustworthy, but they're more of an unknown than Sony.

Re:Watermarks

[Anonymous Coward]

that's a typically reactionary response- how does a watermark make a produce defective? it's not interfering with my playback or use of the digital file. it doesn't prevent me from making a million copies of the file for my computers, ipod, thumbdrive, etc. it's information that's only useful if i do something illegal. this is like putting your name on your luggage.

Re:I don't care either.

[palegray.net]

I was with right up to the point you said "I can even make him a copy". No, you cannot legally make him a copy, unless you obtain permission from the publisher of the album (i.e., record label, artist, etc). I could make a CD of nothing but my wife snoring, and I own the copyright to it; you'd run a risk of getting sued for copyright infringement if you distributed copies to your friends (God only knows why you'd want to, but then again, some modern music isn't much better than my wife snoring).

Re:There's an easy tecnhical solution...

[cliffski]

This is a solution to what problem exactly?
The proposed solution is DRM-free high quality tracks, where *if* you leak it onto a file-sharing site, then you can be traced. How is this a bad thing?
You seem to think this is a problem, but I can only see this being a problem from the POV of pirates, and people determined to leech music for free.

You would have a reasonable argument to suggest that the law needs some safeguards, and that the record companies should not throw the book at someone who stupidly emailed a song to a friend, who then must have leaked it, but assuming the record companies only target the hardcore who upload entire albums, or are traced to p2p music on multiple occasions, what exactly is bad and wrong about this?
DRM-free music was supposedly what slashdot readers want? Or was it just 'free' music all along, and the DRM thing was just a way to claim justification for piracy while it lasted?

People complained that they pirated because the music had DRM, and the DRM is going. People complained the music was too expensive, and itunes led to way lower prices. Now what is the excuse?

Re:Transcoding

[xaxa]

Has anyone considered temporal watermarking?

Everyone is suggesting multiple transcodings to remove unheard information i.e. the watermark. Tiny differences in not what, but when, would be harder to remove.

Re:Watermarking won't stop piracy.

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

there's no way you could take a watermarked .wav file, compress it to Mp3, decompress it and expect to see any reasonable part of the original watermark left There is more than one way to skin a cat. What you are talking about is frequency-domain watermarking. But consider the possibility of time-domain watermarking - where certain 'events' in the recording are shifted in relation to each other by a few milliseconds. That kind of watermarking *will* survive even extreme amounts of lossy recompression.