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

Re:I don't really care.

[init100]

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.

On the other hand, how could watermarks be used to track unauthorized distribution of the content if all watermarks are the same?