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IBM, Sony and others agree on DVD watermaking
A slew of industry giants, IBM, Sony, Hitachi, NEC, and Pioneer have signed off on a plan to "watermark" digital content on DVDs. They have all agreed to a standard, which will be presented to the Copyright Protection Technical Working Group. The big boys, of course, want to "protect" their data-the thought is that this technology maybe used in digital broadcasts as well.
The article doesn't say much, but from what I gather this watermarking technology doesn't keep you from copying a disc, it just lets the orginal content holder prove that you copied it. See http://www.digimarc.com for information on image watermarking. As for the mention of encryption of the discs. That is already in place. It is just to prevent cooked reads from directly ripping the data from the disc (like done with CDs to make MP3s). That encryption has already been cracked.
DVD has Macrovision built into it. Well not exactly the disc, but the player. The disc says, "I'm copy protected", and the player generates the Macrovision encoding. (Yes, there are some old players that don't generate the encoding, and also some which that "feature" could be turned off. I'll leave it to you to find them.)
As for older VCRs still playing the tapes, that isn't how Macrovision works. In an overly simple overview , Macrovision is just a series of high intensity bursts encoded into the orginal tape. The bursts aren't in the visible part of the picture signal, but still in the signal. When bursts are sent into another VCR for recording, the VCR sees the burst and says, "Woo, that was too bright, I'll cut the signal strength recorded to the tape", so the picture goes dim at that point. This high power signal is repeated quickly to be really annoying. Some VCRs (they don't even have to be old) do not "properly" (according to JVC, the owner of the VHS spec) cut the signal strenght when given a Macrovision burst, and can flawlessly copy encoded tapes (Macrovision bursts and all).
If this protection has no teeth who cares. Companies like to feel secure with their data. So they put a watermark on to ease their minds let them.
It gets worse than that. The copy protection will be built into the hardware and won't be bypassable. You won't be able to even get to the so called raw data. Furthermore the new WIP law makes it illegal to bypass copy protection so no more of those ads with the "for experimental purposes only" disclaimers. Break copy protection and an asphead will come and turn you into speaker cable. (aspheads are from K.W.Jeter's novel Noir. Can't tell if Jeter is serious on his take on IP, the url referenced wasn't there)
This isn't about DVD-Video. DVD Video already is encrypted, try that trick with any disc other than porn or Criterion titles and watch the ATAPI errors fly by.
What's the point of putting a watermark into DVD's? Everyone already knows who made the movie. If you get a DVD of a Warner Bros. movie and make a pirate copy, everyone will still know it's a Warner Bros. movie. No one will care though, cause it won't interfere with their ability to make a copy. It seems rather pointess to me.
This stinks! I'm not sure what watermarking will do to the picture on DVD movies, but I know that in the audio industry, many (consumers, at least) are against watermarking Audio DVDs because even though it's not supposed to be audiable, many claim it is...
Digital watermarking, generically, is simply any technique for modifying an existing chunk of data in some fixed format to incorporate additional "out-of-band" information. Different methods trade off the type and degree of loss of original data, ease of recoverability of the watermark data, resilience to noise or other corruption, etc. Watermarking does not have a big role to play in preventing piracy in the sense of unauthorized duplication. As mentioned in the article, a watermark could be used to include the equivalent of SCMS information in a digital movie. However, watermarking can't provide any assistance to the enforcement of this kind of copy control; it's still completely dependent on a conformant copy mechanism. The watermark technique does have the advantage of being more difficult to change or remove than, say, conventional SCMS, so it becomes harder to produce a version of the data that is copyable by a conformant mechanism. That's a minor point.
The real importance of watermarking to media publishers is that it provides a means to establish ownership (copyright) of the data. Their media can be watermarked with an indelible signature that automatically and authoritatively identifies the data as originating with them. This does nothing to prevent copying, but gives the publisher a powerful tool for tracking the distribution of their data and identifying unauthorized republication. This applies not only to full-scale distribution, like MP3s on a trading site, but also to excerpts (think about sampling--this is HUGE for the music publishers). Watermarks are especially important in the second case, because 1) they make it easy to spot "thefts" that are far too tiny to be noticed otherwise (maybe you snipped a still from your DVD "Aliens" for a webpage background); 2) they can prove ownership in a dispute ("That's not a sample, I just played the same riff"). This is why publishers are excited about watermarking.
It seems that most people here haven't trafficed in video piracy. Yes, as mentioned before, watermarks work to track distribution, but the primary reason for watermarks in regards to copying video (analog, at any rate), is to produce court documents when they nail the guy in some hick town who is selling "Pete the Magic Dragon" at $15 a pop.
And yes, these people exist, and *individually* they sell many thousands of videos every year. I have no idea how many actual videos are copied in this manner, but my supplier* has racks of hundreds when he shows up at SF conventions, and sells out.
It's not so much to prevent copying (what does that M$ Hologram do?) as much as provide evidence. On early videos, you could see the information at the extreme top and bottom of the screen... I used to watch them on an amber Amdek monitor with an RCA jack that I also used for my Apple ][. I'm not sure where they are encoded now, but according to some friends who work at TV stations, VHS and network satillite feeds are both still invisibly stamped somehow.
* Which is where I got "Black Cauldron" a few years ago, "Song of the South", the extra long "NIN broken movie", and a VHS version of the Laserdisc "Rocky Horror Picture Show", all unavailable in the US at the time. If they were for sale, I'd get the real versions, and in the first and last case, I purchaced them when they did hit retail.
As long as it doesn't interfere with 1) my right to make a backup copy for archival purposes, and 2) picture quality, then whoop-de-doo.
That's a good point. I wonder how big a pain it would be to cook up some new firmware?
I don't understand how putting a watermark in with the data stops copying.
The watermark will be copied when a bitmap copy is done of the data, and if you want to get rid of it, just twiddle the lsb of the data as it is copied.
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This is good, folks. Watermarks cannot be enforced by DVD-ROM drives, only standalone DVD players. You'll still be able to copy DVDs as raw bits without anyone being the wiser. With DIVX, on the other hand, the data is encrypted and is useless without the appropriate key, which can only be obtained from the DIVX server. (Short of breaking the encryption algorithm which, while not impossible, is much more difficult than a raw binary disk-to-disk copy.)
dd if=/dev/dvdrom of=~/enemy_of_the_state.dvd
It'll take all of 30 minutes for some 16 year old geek to devise a crack.
I'm tired of hearing this stupid stories about great new copy protection systems. I've been hearing them for the last...12 years?. Piracy will exist forever.
As long as they don't interfere with fair-use copying, having the copyright information watermarked in and using it to prevent illegal copying sounds good. If they try to use it to prevent legal fair-use copying, that's another story.
I wonder what the result would be if, if they try to restrict legal copying, people just started denying the right to use their material to any entity that tried to restrict fair use of it's material.
See your DVD players get worthless, now that they won't handle the new watermarks.
Or see them quadrouple in value if watermarks are viewable, but not enforcible by the older generation.
Anybody care to wager?
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
I couldn't find much detail on this. It doesn't sound like the data is encrypted. If not, will it be enforced in hardware? How will a system know it's been copied "once?" Sounds like, as usual, the emperor has no clothes.
Jason Dufair
"Those who know don't have the words to tell
Jason Dufair
"Those who know don't have the words to tell
and the ones with the words don't know too w
I second that. A friend of mine is working on AAC encoding. He told me about watermarking that will still be present even with noise being twice the volume of the original watermarked signal.