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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
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.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
When p2p groups apply simple scramble audio sequences that can't be heard. Better yet, when you burn a song onto a CD as an audio file, and then re-rip the song (as recently disclosed by Sony), then you get a clean copy.
But go ahead and spend billions on that idea of yours. I'm sure that people who want to thwart the tyranny will simply come up with a way to get this stuff for free.
What they really need to do is make some music that's worth paying for.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Most people are calling for some reasonable give and take, in that regard i cant really argue against watermarks.
Well, Bart, your uncle Arthur used to have a saying: "Shoot 'em all and let God sort 'em out."
Download it under two accounts, then average the waves together. The watermark will be ruined, and the sound quality will stay at least as good as before. Problem solved. Of course you'll have to pay twice, but if you're paying the right price, 2x0=0.
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.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
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.
Take two official copies, work out where differences are, remove said differences. Goodbye watermark
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
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.
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).
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
I'm an Academy member (AMPAS), and I can tell you that the only benefit of membership is that at year end they send you every movie made that year on DVD. It's quite nice. There's a mad December-January rush to cram in every possible film. I'd hate to lose my membership because the DVD I loaned to my friends were ripped and torrented all over Christendom. The Academy is now in the habit of unceremoniously kicking out members when it's found that they've contributed to the piracy of a film (many are pre-release). So I'm usually fairly cautious.
A couple of years ago, Cinea (a Technicolor company) sent out a free DVD player with a powerful DRM/encryption, and many of the movies that came out were suddenly playable only on that machine. This was a hassle, as I was on a job and traveling frequently, and consequently missed a number of smaller films before the January 12 nominating deadline (coincidentally, today). I also hated the ergonomics of that damned player -- the remote was impossible to use in darkened conditions. Anyhow, it was a hassle. And well over half of the movies sent to us were specially encoded to only play on my specific registered player. The other percentage of discs usually favored watermarking.
Cut to this year, suddenly everything is watermarking and there's not a Cinea encrypted disc to be seen. Cinea doesn't support their machine and I'm stuck with this crap player that I had my son beat it to death with a sledgehammer the other day, as I videotaped the ceremony. I'm throwing away all of the past Award seasons discs, which are useless to me now. From my perspective, I'm totally cool with watermarking. However, I frequently lend movies to my elderly mother -- and I'm always living in fear that one of her tennis friends is going to talk my mother into loaning the movie to her, thusly exposing the DVD to possibilities of piracy (who knows what goes on in the houses of my mother's tennis friends) -- risking the one benefit I have of being an Academy member.
So is this what we're reduced to? Living in fear and paranoia as if in a police state? Will Big Brother find my name/number attached to a rip online and bust my ass down to the basement? I don't, as an Academy member, believe that trading movies with your friends is piracy. As a kid we used to do it with VHS all the time. But, it's not lost on me that I lose residuals every time a movie doesn't get legitimately purchased. This is America however, I'll take the paranoia that comes with watermarking any day over the inconvenience of encryption tied to specific proprietary players.
When I was at university writing for the music section of the newspaper, we used to fairly regularly receive CDs from the likes of BMG (Tom McRae's "Just Like Blood" arrived like this in Jan of 2003, the earliest example I remember, but it may predate that) these had individual serial numbers and names, and claimed to be watermarked to us as individuals, lest we dare leak the music. I always assumed it could be defeated by a bit by bit comparison against the retail copy - presumably the difference would be the watermark, and I don't see why that wouldn't also be true here?
What would a "way around" the watermark do? Presumably it would allow you to share the music you bought without the possibility of it being traced back to you. However, unlike DRM, there is no way to be sure if you have removed every watermark. If today's watermarking techniques are successfully reverse engineered, the industry can introduce new techniques without breaking compatibility with CD players etc. And in any case, removing watermarks might degrade the quality of the recording. There might be more than one watermark in each file, and some watermarks might be present in multiple copies of the same recording in order to defeat a simple differencing attack.
Watermarking is a good idea, I say. In the end I want people to be able to make money from intellectual property, whether it is music, software, video, books, whatever. But information is easily copied, so there is a need to discourage piracy without inconveniencing paying customers. DRM doesn't meet that need, but maybe watermarking does.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
While I agree that people are going to break this, I don't think you are giving enough credit to the engineers and acedemics working on this problem. Read this linked article and you will see that it's far more complex than just bit twiddling (although clearly there will be differences in the bits ultimately).
http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:kNuSjbUY1iYJ:www.fxpal.com/publications/FXPAL-PR-03-212.pdf+watermarking+audio&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us
I developed a very basic spread spectrum frequency domain watermarking that can resist to reencoding and be very transparent spreading the bits of information across different frequencies. if you analyze the encoding, you can use the frequencies that the encoder gives more importance and store bits there for increased reenconding strength. or you can use less important frequencies to really hide the watermarking, and also assure that the audio wasn't reencoded or touched. the spread spectrum technology can assure that you distort the minimum amount possible each frequency. and by choosing random frequencies for each audio frame, based on a pseudo-random number generator, you can really hide the watermarking... using CDMA techniques , if you don't know what you are looking for, when comparing the watermarked audio with a clean sample, you will only recover some noise.
I'd love to see an inaudible/invisible water mark that can survive transcoding from MP3 to ogg, or from MPEG4 to MJPEG for example.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
And if your new iPod or Zune rejects corrupted watermarks?
No, that would make it easy to detect if you successfully removed the watermark (assumming the iPod/Zune will play a song without any watermark in it).
If the players only play correctly-watermarked data, that is equivalent to them only playing "signed" data. Well that is the RIAA wetdream, not only do you have working DRM, but you have also made it basically impossible for anybody other than "professionals" to produce content (since they will not have the license to sign their songs).
Just wondering. What about CDs and DVDs given as gifts? Certainly not the original purchaser sharing in that case. What about the rental market? What about the used CD and DVD market? Music and movies could be shared by lots of people who were not the original purchasers.
Assume a perfect watermarking system.
First transfer -- music is sold to someone else. Is the watermark ownership transferred?
A bit more complicated -- music is purchased in the US. Buyer travels to Canada. A Canadian copies the music (legally). Now, there are two (legal) copies; one in the US and one in Canada. The Canadian now travels to the US, and has her laptop (with the copy on it) checked. She is detained. What law was broken?
So of what use IS the watermark?
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
This is what is wrong with the law. I was listening to Radio 1 (the largest UK radio station, run by the BBC) the other day, and one presenter had made a compilation CD for other presenters. A mention was made of the legality of it and dismissed, because the legality of it is dumb. They were breaking the law, on the largest radio station in the UK. No one cares, save idiotic music lawyers. If you care about people making copies for friends, you are dumb too.
OK, I've followed this issue closely over the year, have R.lots.TFA - but now, unless I've been missing something, a whole new level of smoke-screening has been added to the subject.
In the referenced article, watermarking now has two attributes (not the only two, no anal please): 1) method exists from large player (in this case, Microsoft) to add digital info to a media file that cannot be circumvented; 2) this info can be used by media distributers to, for example, to give the music industry power to prove pirating or to trace the illegal move of media across the net (goes hand-in-glove with ISP filtering, so the article indirectly said that, whether it meant to or not).
Now, even though the article and everyone here is acknowledging the death of DRM and discussing watermarks - I think it's propaganda and a lot of people are buying.
How is the watermarking discussed here _NOT_ DRM?
Think about it. DRM was not an attempt to lock down media on a single platform (read on before shouting, please). DRM is an attempt to control pirating where the media industry wants to prove and control piracy and prosecute those sharing. Its first incarnation was lock-down on a per-platform basis, which from a business sense is pretty smart - saving money on lawyers and putting things on technology's backs. I think this is just the next incarnation, where they can still put the burden on the backs of others, but now give their lawyers - especially their I-told-you-so lawyers - the technical muscle to be much less embarrassed in court over digital forensic screw-ups.
And to me it seems like they're succeeding. I remember when the debate in the early days was a) how easy DRM would be to circumvent so no one would take it seriously, b) consumers wouldn't stand for it, c) there's nothing wrong with it if it were implemented properly, and d) _no one_ here condones pirates, it doesn't interfere with the digital stream too badly, so this may be an acceptable course of action if done right.
So. To me, this thread sounds like the exact same discussions, with s/DRM/watermark/g.
Somebuddy square me away, please. How is this not DRM Phase II and a propaganda victory for the dark media overlords? I don't get it.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
You work for the industry and are finding yourself screwed by the industry's own DRM and living in fear due to their tactics. The things is by lending your elderly mother those disks you're commiting piracy. If you weren't doing that you wouldn't be "living in fear". Are we really suppose to have any sympathy for you? You're part of the industry that's created the problem. You get advanced releases and are in a position of trust. You do the wrong thing with them. How about the poor schmuck that pays for every movie and can't return them when they discover a manufacturing fault or worse when the entire DVD collection starts to rot? How about the schmuck that does the right thing and doesn't copy their disk only to find they have to sit through 10 minutes of brainwashing anti piracy propaganda every time they watch their movie?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
He's violating the conditions of being given those disks - conditions which the industry imposes much more harshly on outsiders. Furthermore his worry is that his mother will lend out the disks against his wishes and therefore allow them to be copied which is piracy. Therefore he would be cut off for aiding the piracy. This is why he lives in fear.
The solution is simple. He's not meant to be lending out the disks to his mother, so he shouldn't do that. No paranoia or fear required. If he thinks these conditions aren't reasonable well then perhaps he ought to complain to the powers that be in the industry he's part of. After all if he's getting those disks its because his opinion counts in some way, not because the movie industry likes to give them away for charity. He's in a much better position to change the situation than an outsider.
So how about you stop your trolling long enough to get the mud out of your ears and the shit out of our brains, and perhaps learn some social skills so that you don't come across as an anal trolling git with the social skills of a hungry grizzly bear. Or more succinctly: Grow the fuck up.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer