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 care either.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not supposed to share music I bought? Says who? If I buy an album I can lend it to my friend, I can even make him a copy, why shouldn't I be able to do the same with this? Actually I don't care about drm or watermarking either, I stopped buying music and films a long time ago.

Why should anyone give these rotten corporations more money when they're trying to screw us over every chance they get?

Something to think about.