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.

[0123456]

"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."

Watermarks provide very little security, since you can find them just by comparing a few copies of the same file. 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.

So they're both useless and harmful.

Re:I don't really care.

[Asmor]

No...

Let's take a sentence as an example:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

Now, let's watermark that sentence for a few different people.

j498fn894The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
j89g5m6-0The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
iebciemgtThe quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

By comparing each of those sentences, you see the first few characters are different in each, thus you can assume that's where the watermark is.

Re:I don't really care.

[spitzak]

In the real watermarking scheme, every single byte is changed. Basically the entire thing is covered with a huge watermark that is noise, with randomly and sparsely distributed blocks of the actual watermark. So finding identical bytes does not work.

Averaging would seem to work but supposedly the algorithims can survive quite a lot of coverage with random noise. If the watermarks are sparse enough, all that averaging will do is make a result that has *all* the watermarks of the originals. What they do need to do is avoid having huge numbers of different watermarks, as I doubt it will survive tens of thousands of different samples being averaged. This is probably a reason there will not be per-user watermarks.

Re:I don't really care.

[CrazedWalrus]

I would think it's possible to detect using two watermarked as well.

Think about this as a watermark:

1234JustShootMe567
1234CrazedWalrus567

1234567 doesn't identify anyone, and I've found and removed the portion of the code that differentiates you or me. If the watermark is tied to the user, then that part of it is necessarily different. This assumes that the file is not re-encoded for every user before adding the watermark. Doing so would be a major detriment to scalability, so I doubt that could be done.

Even if it is encrypted, it would have to be placed in an area of the music that isn't significant -- maybe a least-significant-bit of one channel or something -- or you'd hear it. If that's the case, then if you have two files from two different users, you can bitwise-or, zero-out, or otherwise destroy the information wherever the bits differ between the files. Since they're necessarily in an insignificant part of the signal, the music probably won't sound noticeably different.

I just think this sounds incredibly weak. If people can break encryption and decode entire streams, there are going to be ways to strip these watermarks -- probably the day the first song that contains it is released.

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.

[hedwards]

Then you're screwing up the music with noise and the people buying it would be better off just to download a copy ripped from CD. You're also loading up your servers with a huge amount of processing required to produce a different version of the entire file for each customer. Yes, but when they've been seriously worked on, the result isn't noticeable to anybody not comparing checksums.

The technique is based upon steganography, and it also works better in higher quality files than in the 126 bitrate junk. Nobody hears everything in a sound file once there is enough complexity, and the watermark parts go into the areas that people aren't able to really hear.

There's no reason why an end user, or anybody other than the person doing the watermarking needs to be able to find it. If you randomly intersperse the watermark through a large enough portion of the file, it becomes quite difficult to find and effectively remove without causing damage to the file.

The trick to it is to touch every single frame, but in random spots, and to do so with enough variety that you would need to compare a huge number of copies to have a shot at unwatermarking the file. Doing so will change the results of the checksums making it a pain to figure out where the signature actually belongs. Most of the changes don't even have to have anything to do with the watermark. The weakness then is comparing against a clean copy, and to be honest, anybody that has a clean copy and cares about the watermarking is just going to use the clean copy. And if there's enough variability, it's going to be a tough thing to strip out without causing other problems.

It's one of those things where unless you've allowed your copy to make it onto the net, nobody is going to be able to examin the file anyways. It is several steps above the current system in terms of convenience. One could probably screw it up by transcoding it, but that is similar to what ITMS allows presently, and it does lose quality as well.

Re:I don't really care.

[Reziac]

What happens to such a watermark if the file is significantly reprocessed?

Re:I don't really care.

[ameoba]

I think a better example might be like...

1. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog
2. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog
3. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog
4. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog
5. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog
6. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog

(view source if you don't see it)

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.

[Mark J Tilford]

Poor neglectd letter "s".

Re:I don't really care.

[ASBands]

Theoretically, the watermark should still be there, as the watermark is inaudible noise on the track. The goal of a good watermarking algorithm is to survive longer than the audio. You're not safe from detection by transcoding, as these guys have an algorithm (I'm sure many more do, as well) for the original audio track (off a CD) that can be "retrieved" at various bit rates. At the bottom, you can see a graph on the error rate of recovery, which doesn't really fall off until you get down to 64 kbps. Basically, to remove this watermark without knowing the key (which can be as large as needed), you would do more damage to the sound of the track than the background noise.

As long as a strong watermarking scheme is used, it will still be there, unless you screw up the sound. I don't think it will do anything for the RIAA, but it beats the hell out of DRM and root kits.

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

Subject to a Huge Failure

[mfh]

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.

Give and Take

[Joker1980]

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

Re:Give and Take

[ColdWetDog]

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

You might want to argue against watermarking technology if you'd had RTFA.

Digital audio watermarking involves the concealment of data within a discrete audio file. Applications for this technology are numerous. Intellectual property protection is currently the main driving force behind research in this area. To combat online music piracy, a digital watermark could be added to all recording prior to release, signifying not only the author of the work, but the user who has purchased a legitimate copy. Newer operating systems equipped with digital rights management software (DRM) will extract the watermark from audio files prior to playing them on the system. The DRM software will ensure that the user has paid for the song by comparing the watermark to the existing purchased licences on the system.

(emphasis mine)

TFA goes on to describe how this is a bit difficult in practice with current technology, but "they're working on it". Given the hit that classic DRM is taking in the PR space now, and given that the media company execs haven't all dropped acid and wandered back into the sixties, I think it's a safe bet that they're going to work on DRM II (New and improved, patent pending). You may return to wearing your tin foil hats now.

There's an easy tecnhical solution...

[spikenerd]

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.

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?

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).

Cinea v. Watermarking = Inconvenience v. Paranoia

[Franklin Brauner]

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.

Not Enough Credit

[raftpeople]

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

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.

Somebuddy square me away, please

[earlymon]

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.