Well, why not pay a proxy "researcher" to edit his page according to his "accurate data"? It would have been cheaper than paying his lawyers, or the alleged $5K bribe. Though if he's really nuts, the process would have been as meaningful as the results, especially if it could have crippled Wikipedia and established some new liability for it and equivalent sites.
On the other hand, Wales' editing it either for a bribe or blackmailed by a lawsuit is counterproductive either way.
The CVR says 3x3500Hz + 1x6500Hz. Maybe it needs double what I estimated, for Nyquist sampling. Of course, VBR and compression would reduce the bandwidth.
Even at 10x the cost, $1200 extra per transcontinental flight (for which the fuel costs $400 per passenger) isn't very much. And the rates I quoted were for individual retail, not volume like all air traffic.
These are nickel and dime arguments. The benefit of realtime telemetry can be valued at $millions per obviated expedition to recover the boxes, and if it's analyzed in realtime for incipient faults, $billions in avoided crashes. I'd think the insurance corps alone would want to fund it.
Not offhand. But I'm not tracking the industry. The planes that go down at sea probably lose their boxes more frequently. If the WTC boxes are the only ones not found (though somehow the lead hijacker's paper passport was found in the rubble), that points to something more serious than "just" average plane crashes, that's probably worth $billions just to avoid in that one case.
But lost boxes are just the extreme case Just "partially corrupt" is a cost. But mainly the delay in finding them, and the cost of the time spent looking, is expensive. In dollars, in suffering. And, if realtime telemetry can be used to detect problems that can be averted before they go critical, then there's a whole new application even more valuable than the accounting job that's currently worth so much, but so little is spent to recover its full value.
I agree. It looks like they're finally upgrading from magnetic plastic tape (like audio cassettes) to Flash, after recently making the jump from wire recorders (1940s technology).
I think the airlines and FAA are too busy covering up huge profits and waste, while the aircraft manufacturers just follow those leads. Technology for crash recovery would emphasize the crashes, which they always hate to acknowledge.
Interestingly, ACARS is supposedly to be replaced by the Aeronautical Telecommunications Network (ATN). That's probably the platform that could do what I'm describing. Despite all the squawking by these Slashdot "experts" about how it's impossible or too expensive, and the FAA upgrading to something the ATN will seemingly soon obsolete. Which probably means the FAA is insisting on the upgrade now, to ensure the current vendors can peddle their ancient crap well into this century, though the rest of the platform has moved well beyond it.
I don't think there'd be any problems if Merkey just paid a "researcher" to rewrite it for what it cost just one hour of his team of lawyers to sue, to say nothing of the claimed $5K bribe.
The data cost would be at most a couple hundred dollars per flight.
The cost of even a few extra hours - or days, sometimes - of dozens of searchers in remote locations for each of 2 black boxes really outweighs that. Some boxes are never found, like those from the 2 planes that hit the WTC on 9/11/2001. The extra cost of that investigation, less insightful without the actual data, is probably more than all the data would have cost since then, even in simple accountable costs.
And then there's the advantage that realtime telemetry data could be analyzed to detect problems before they go critical. Lives could be saved, to say nothing of the price of a new plane and the recovery/investigation of each lost one.
It's just not that expensive to deploy telemetry for recovery and prevention. The costs of failure are huge. You can see that the risk analysis favors the telemetry. But somehow, people don't even bother to think it through, as you just demonstrated.
The boxes are often not found for hours or days, and do indeed sometimes get lost forever (especially at sea, as you mention). Those hours and days of searching, often in remote locations, are expensive. The delay is painful for survivors and their families, as well as possible but unknown risks that often ground that entire model of aircraft for the duration.
A midocean plane doesn't need a ground station, and the existing satellite networks are adequate and cheap. Even if they weren't, expanding them would be a good investment, even just considering the cost savings from skipping long searches for lost black boxes.
This isn't some all or nothing scenaria, where the world changes from to good because the black box data is available in realtime. But it is a substantial improvement. And right now the FAA is demanding an upgrade that is a tiny tweak, relatively, from a 1970 tech to a 1980 tech.
Except I didn't say to stop using the onboard recorders. Just to start using something better in addition.
After a decade or so I expect the transmitters will also evolve to be just as reliable. Or we can just keep using the recorders, too, which we probably should anyway.
How does 3x1750Kbps + 3.25Kbps = 8.5Kbps overwhelm anything? BGAN terminals offer 300-400Kbps up, $5K per terminal. $5-10:MB is $19.13-38.25 per hour for voice, to a maximum of $1800:h full continuous bandwidth for 6h transcontinental. That's $114.72-229.44 transcontinental, $363.28-726.56 19h semicircumglobal, max $5.4-10.8K-17.1K/34.2K if they somehow use the full 400Kbps at $5:MB-10:MB for 6 or 19h respectively.
Even if they harden the terminals, that's not going to cost more than $20-30K, if that. Another $20K max to interface it to the fly by wire bus and mics. Transcontinental flights consume that much money's worth of fuel shuttling 210 people NY to LA once.
And that's the most expensive, high quality connections, at small scale consumption rates. I'm sure the airlines could negotiate bulk rates. Or the global industry and governments could buy the defunct Iridium network still hanging around up there, or finally fund Teledesic (or equivalent) now that there's enough traffic to justify the investment. As anchor tenants for a satellite network, they'd have extra capacity to sell as generic networking for all kinds of remote telemetry at sea, at isolated land sites, and in space.
Or they can concentrate on nickel and dimeing us with taxes for searching our shoes, then spend precious hours and days searching for black boxes. FWIW, the black boxes from the 2 9/11/2001 WTC planes "were never found". Maybe there is a competing interest more valuable than reliable telemetry.
You forgot to back up anything you just said, which is almost entirely obviously wrong. Though you did sign it "Anonymous Coward", which is shorthand for IANSAI: "I Am Not Saying Anything Important"
What privacy issues prevent the voice data from being scrambled for transmission, and being deleted when the flight is deemed successful?
And AFAICT, current recorders just record something like 7.5MB:h, which is something like 2.5KBps. There is an entire satellite phone system up, to say nothing of all the other satellite networks available. Why is it necessary to keep the 1980s tech, when we have 2008 tech that would be so much better? Why, when we're upgrading the whole system as the story we're discussion reports, aren't we doing it right?
Sure, that's good for the recorder and a few extra seconds at the end. But radio telemetry would reduce the search for the black box to something done while the analysts get right to work on all the data they've already got, without risk of loss.
Moreover, most of the events examined in the current recorders happen before the aircraft loses integrity or actually crashes. All that data would be available immediately. It would even be available in realtime, so early warnings could be found sometimes before they became critical, and emergency crews mobilized at the earliest possible moment.
So yes, it is elementary, and much more useful that the current systems.
There's already a satellite network, that handles data. The data doesn't need to be "high speed". The recorders don't record that much data.
I didn't say to get rid of the boxes. I said to keep them. But I said to add some technology that already exists, is already used for telemetry out of harsh environments. And that don't go down with the ship (or at least don't take all their data with them before being read when they go).
Yes, but that attitude is stupid when lives and $billions are at stake.
Satellite phones are already decades-old tech. Something specific has to be holding them back. Or the aviation industry and the government that controls it are as immensely stupid at everything as they always appear to be.
Why don't these black boxes stream their data live to satellites during the entire trip? Why is the technology limited to making a recording crash-proof?
They should keep the crash-proof boxes, for events that stop the streaing before the recorder stops. But why should they have to always wait to investigate the data until after a little box, that could have been itself destroyed in the massive crash, be found amidst all the debris, scattered sometimes across dozens of miles of often inaccessible terrain? If the data is streamed live, they might also find the box sooner, if the box has a GPS that continues streaming after the box has landed somewhere.
This seems elementary. Why not do it already, now that both air flight and radio have been with us for over a century?
No, AC, all you have to do is look at the simple display of basic logic, and you can infer any "Conservative" conspiracies you want. Since there are so many real "Conservative" conspiracies, you'd probably be right.
Any article about Jeff on Wikipedia that relates events around Novell, SCO, and other stuff in 2005 would be a liability problem. I am not the slightest bit surprised that Wales had to re-write it. I don't think this has to be connected to a donation.
Actually, not a legal liability problem, except perhaps for the person who wrote an article that lied about Merkey (or somehow created other liability like violating some contract, breaching some trade secret, etc). Wikipedia is not liable for what it publishes in its site when that content is written by someone else (like practically all its content), because it doesn't moderate it. Though it could be a "frivolous lawsuit target" problem for Wikipedia, as you were. Did you stop doing what you were doing that ticked Merkey off?
OTOH, by rewriting the article, Wales became responsible for what he wrote. If he used an account that has any privileges that people not on the Wikipedia editorial staff don't have, then he was making Wikipedia responsible for what he wrote. And since he was thereby moderating the Merkey article, he was thereby making Wikipedia responsible for the article.
Now, it's by no means clear that a court would have found that editing out article parts that Merkey complained about would make Wales/Wikipedia liable for what had been deleted. Though just the act of moderating content for any other reason than something like "clear and present danger" (or technical problems) could indeed be argued that "Wikipedia does moderate, it is therefore responsible for all content". Not necessarily a winning argument, but in fact Wales' editing likely created liability that didn't exist until he edited that article.
Now, it's all moot because Wales dropped his complaint. And perhaps he dropped his complaint because Wales made those changes. But Wales did probably increase his liability (from practically zero) by doing it. And he might have even produced evidence that "Wikipedia moderates content", which could make Wikipedia liable for all content. Including later complaints by Merkey. Including if someone else changed it back to the old version. But also including any other person who wants to complain, who could now hold Wikipedia liable for all content, because it does moderate.
Again, not a clear case. But not quite a frivolous one. Therefore increasing the risk by the action, if only in the longer term. But a serious change.
The real question is why didn't Merkey just edit it himself - that's what Wikipedia is for. Conversely, why didn't Wales have someone outside the Wikipedia org edit it, so the liability would be harder to prove.
And of course the ultimate question is whether Merkey did indeed pay Wales $5000 to make the change. If there's real evidence of that, things become clearer, but not better. Probably including Wikipedia's liability for all its content, to say nothing of its credibility.
I said "investigate", not "prosecute". The evidence of your watermark in the wild isn't enough to conclude that you were party to illegal copying. In fact, the recent ruling that just exposing your storage to the public on the Internet doesn't make you liable for copying means that many legitimate downloaders aren't liable even when it's copied. But transaction records can show that the person who downloaded it didn't have the right to do it.
The watermarks can't be so easily detected or removed. The simple way to hide them is to use the download ID itself as the index into the data, then brute forcing it from the relatively short (secret) list of IDs (GUIDs from a very large, but sparsely and randomly populated namespace). Or a secret number from a very short list that's the key to which bit the watermark starts in. The watermarks then run a pseudorandom walk through a small percentage of the low bits of the entire file, indistinguishable from inherent noise. Watermark contains the download ID, and thereby the identity of the original downloader. That cheap and fairly simple watermarking is not going to get cracked or discarded without reducing the quality of the recording.
And I said that eventually these publishers would see that overall limiting the copying is a losing game, compared to what I described. But since they're not there yet, they could at least admit we're all well past DRM, even if we're not to completely unencumbered - or eventually, even publisher-assisted - freely copied content.
I dunno, the biggest victims of book piracy, like _Harry Potter_'s publishers, attract the equivalent of "sell-out" crowds the first day the book is released. They could charge for access, especially if the author is actually there. They also have a lot more revenue from cross-licensing the book, including to TV, movies, collectible objects, even just marketing other products. All of which increases in value by an increased market familiarity, which the bootlegged copies all build without any cost at all.
Smaller circulation books don't really suffer much from piracy. And this is audiobook piracy. The audiobook consumer is certainly a good target market for more products, even if they're just other audiobooks. The more people in that market, which again is grown at no cost to the legitimate publisher by pirated copies, the more other audiobooks can be sold to them, even if less than 100% legitimate copies. Especially popular would be subscriptions, which are harder for pirates to deliver (and each new issue gives a new chance to get caught), but cheaper and easier for legit publishers.
And I said how watermarking alone can protect. Publishing is a game of statistics. A smaller share than 100% of a bigger pie is worth it.
Physical book publishing is in trouble. But that's an entirely different problem that has nothing to do with DRM.
Yes, the criminal who stole your notebook can use your property to do damage without your being liable. Why is that a problem? Catching the physical thief should be even easier than catching a virtual pirate.
And if you sell your watermarked music, it should be trivial to notify the watermark registry that you've deleted your copies in the transfer, and have them transfer the watermark to the buyer, who would confirm it. If the copies show up, the buyer has to prove that you didn't delete yours, contrary to what they confirmed, and that you illegally copied your old ones, or they're as liable as you would have been.
Seems to me that the watermark makes the transfer of the content enough like transfer of physical property that finally using these property laws and enforcement techniques can be justified, because they'll work.
The coca and sugar (and probably more) in Coca-Cola comes from South America (and plenty of other ex-colonies). If you think plantation slavery ended in 1865, you don't know the history of postcolonial agriculture.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, why not pay a proxy "researcher" to edit his page according to his "accurate data"? It would have been cheaper than paying his lawyers, or the alleged $5K bribe. Though if he's really nuts, the process would have been as meaningful as the results, especially if it could have crippled Wikipedia and established some new liability for it and equivalent sites.
On the other hand, Wales' editing it either for a bribe or blackmailed by a lawsuit is counterproductive either way.
The CVR says 3x3500Hz + 1x6500Hz. Maybe it needs double what I estimated, for Nyquist sampling. Of course, VBR and compression would reduce the bandwidth.
Even at 10x the cost, $1200 extra per transcontinental flight (for which the fuel costs $400 per passenger) isn't very much. And the rates I quoted were for individual retail, not volume like all air traffic.
These are nickel and dime arguments. The benefit of realtime telemetry can be valued at $millions per obviated expedition to recover the boxes, and if it's analyzed in realtime for incipient faults, $billions in avoided crashes. I'd think the insurance corps alone would want to fund it.
Not offhand. But I'm not tracking the industry. The planes that go down at sea probably lose their boxes more frequently. If the WTC boxes are the only ones not found (though somehow the lead hijacker's paper passport was found in the rubble), that points to something more serious than "just" average plane crashes, that's probably worth $billions just to avoid in that one case.
But lost boxes are just the extreme case Just "partially corrupt" is a cost. But mainly the delay in finding them, and the cost of the time spent looking, is expensive. In dollars, in suffering. And, if realtime telemetry can be used to detect problems that can be averted before they go critical, then there's a whole new application even more valuable than the accounting job that's currently worth so much, but so little is spent to recover its full value.
I agree. It looks like they're finally upgrading from magnetic plastic tape (like audio cassettes) to Flash, after recently making the jump from wire recorders (1940s technology).
I think the airlines and FAA are too busy covering up huge profits and waste, while the aircraft manufacturers just follow those leads. Technology for crash recovery would emphasize the crashes, which they always hate to acknowledge.
Interestingly, ACARS is supposedly to be replaced by the Aeronautical Telecommunications Network (ATN). That's probably the platform that could do what I'm describing. Despite all the squawking by these Slashdot "experts" about how it's impossible or too expensive, and the FAA upgrading to something the ATN will seemingly soon obsolete. Which probably means the FAA is insisting on the upgrade now, to ensure the current vendors can peddle their ancient crap well into this century, though the rest of the platform has moved well beyond it.
I don't think there'd be any problems if Merkey just paid a "researcher" to rewrite it for what it cost just one hour of his team of lawyers to sue, to say nothing of the claimed $5K bribe.
The data cost would be at most a couple hundred dollars per flight.
The cost of even a few extra hours - or days, sometimes - of dozens of searchers in remote locations for each of 2 black boxes really outweighs that. Some boxes are never found, like those from the 2 planes that hit the WTC on 9/11/2001. The extra cost of that investigation, less insightful without the actual data, is probably more than all the data would have cost since then, even in simple accountable costs.
And then there's the advantage that realtime telemetry data could be analyzed to detect problems before they go critical. Lives could be saved, to say nothing of the price of a new plane and the recovery/investigation of each lost one.
It's just not that expensive to deploy telemetry for recovery and prevention. The costs of failure are huge. You can see that the risk analysis favors the telemetry. But somehow, people don't even bother to think it through, as you just demonstrated.
The boxes are often not found for hours or days, and do indeed sometimes get lost forever (especially at sea, as you mention). Those hours and days of searching, often in remote locations, are expensive. The delay is painful for survivors and their families, as well as possible but unknown risks that often ground that entire model of aircraft for the duration.
A midocean plane doesn't need a ground station, and the existing satellite networks are adequate and cheap. Even if they weren't, expanding them would be a good investment, even just considering the cost savings from skipping long searches for lost black boxes.
This isn't some all or nothing scenaria, where the world changes from to good because the black box data is available in realtime. But it is a substantial improvement. And right now the FAA is demanding an upgrade that is a tiny tweak, relatively, from a 1970 tech to a 1980 tech.
Except I didn't say to stop using the onboard recorders. Just to start using something better in addition.
After a decade or so I expect the transmitters will also evolve to be just as reliable. Or we can just keep using the recorders, too, which we probably should anyway.
How does 3x1750Kbps + 3.25Kbps = 8.5Kbps overwhelm anything? BGAN terminals offer 300-400Kbps up, $5K per terminal. $5-10:MB is $19.13-38.25 per hour for voice, to a maximum of $1800:h full continuous bandwidth for 6h transcontinental. That's $114.72-229.44 transcontinental, $363.28-726.56 19h semicircumglobal, max $5.4-10.8K-17.1K/34.2K if they somehow use the full 400Kbps at $5:MB-10:MB for 6 or 19h respectively.
Even if they harden the terminals, that's not going to cost more than $20-30K, if that. Another $20K max to interface it to the fly by wire bus and mics. Transcontinental flights consume that much money's worth of fuel shuttling 210 people NY to LA once.
And that's the most expensive, high quality connections, at small scale consumption rates. I'm sure the airlines could negotiate bulk rates. Or the global industry and governments could buy the defunct Iridium network still hanging around up there, or finally fund Teledesic (or equivalent) now that there's enough traffic to justify the investment. As anchor tenants for a satellite network, they'd have extra capacity to sell as generic networking for all kinds of remote telemetry at sea, at isolated land sites, and in space.
Or they can concentrate on nickel and dimeing us with taxes for searching our shoes, then spend precious hours and days searching for black boxes. FWIW, the black boxes from the 2 9/11/2001 WTC planes "were never found". Maybe there is a competing interest more valuable than reliable telemetry.
You forgot to back up anything you just said, which is almost entirely obviously wrong. Though you did sign it "Anonymous Coward", which is shorthand for IANSAI: "I Am Not Saying Anything Important"
There are several networks that satellite phones use.
What privacy issues prevent the voice data from being scrambled for transmission, and being deleted when the flight is deemed successful?
And AFAICT, current recorders just record something like 7.5MB:h, which is something like 2.5KBps. There is an entire satellite phone system up, to say nothing of all the other satellite networks available. Why is it necessary to keep the 1980s tech, when we have 2008 tech that would be so much better? Why, when we're upgrading the whole system as the story we're discussion reports, aren't we doing it right?
Sure, that's good for the recorder and a few extra seconds at the end. But radio telemetry would reduce the search for the black box to something done while the analysts get right to work on all the data they've already got, without risk of loss.
Planes already have had onboard phones in constant connection with the ground. The amount of data we're talking about (10 megabytes per hour is only 2.7KBps, and actual FDRs capture something like 7.5MB:h) is trivial to transmit over such a phone connection. It can of course be buffered for when there are indeed interruptions, all of which is backed up in the local physical recording like before, like I said. But the actual cost of a 5h, or even a 19h phonecall, even at $2:min (so up to $2280) is trivial compared to the other costs of the flight, like fuel, crew salary, even insurance. And of course saving the cost of waiting days to start getting the data after a crash would pay for all the flights recorded without incident in between.
Moreover, most of the events examined in the current recorders happen before the aircraft loses integrity or actually crashes. All that data would be available immediately. It would even be available in realtime, so early warnings could be found sometimes before they became critical, and emergency crews mobilized at the earliest possible moment.
So yes, it is elementary, and much more useful that the current systems.
There's already a satellite network, that handles data. The data doesn't need to be "high speed". The recorders don't record that much data.
I didn't say to get rid of the boxes. I said to keep them. But I said to add some technology that already exists, is already used for telemetry out of harsh environments. And that don't go down with the ship (or at least don't take all their data with them before being read when they go).
BTW, "aspect ratios"? Huh?
Yes, but that attitude is stupid when lives and $billions are at stake.
Satellite phones are already decades-old tech. Something specific has to be holding them back. Or the aviation industry and the government that controls it are as immensely stupid at everything as they always appear to be.
Why don't these black boxes stream their data live to satellites during the entire trip? Why is the technology limited to making a recording crash-proof?
They should keep the crash-proof boxes, for events that stop the streaing before the recorder stops. But why should they have to always wait to investigate the data until after a little box, that could have been itself destroyed in the massive crash, be found amidst all the debris, scattered sometimes across dozens of miles of often inaccessible terrain? If the data is streamed live, they might also find the box sooner, if the box has a GPS that continues streaming after the box has landed somewhere.
This seems elementary. Why not do it already, now that both air flight and radio have been with us for over a century?
No, AC, all you have to do is look at the simple display of basic logic, and you can infer any "Conservative" conspiracies you want. Since there are so many real "Conservative" conspiracies, you'd probably be right.
Actually, not a legal liability problem, except perhaps for the person who wrote an article that lied about Merkey (or somehow created other liability like violating some contract, breaching some trade secret, etc). Wikipedia is not liable for what it publishes in its site when that content is written by someone else (like practically all its content), because it doesn't moderate it. Though it could be a "frivolous lawsuit target" problem for Wikipedia, as you were. Did you stop doing what you were doing that ticked Merkey off?
OTOH, by rewriting the article, Wales became responsible for what he wrote. If he used an account that has any privileges that people not on the Wikipedia editorial staff don't have, then he was making Wikipedia responsible for what he wrote. And since he was thereby moderating the Merkey article, he was thereby making Wikipedia responsible for the article.
Now, it's by no means clear that a court would have found that editing out article parts that Merkey complained about would make Wales/Wikipedia liable for what had been deleted. Though just the act of moderating content for any other reason than something like "clear and present danger" (or technical problems) could indeed be argued that "Wikipedia does moderate, it is therefore responsible for all content". Not necessarily a winning argument, but in fact Wales' editing likely created liability that didn't exist until he edited that article.
Now, it's all moot because Wales dropped his complaint. And perhaps he dropped his complaint because Wales made those changes. But Wales did probably increase his liability (from practically zero) by doing it. And he might have even produced evidence that "Wikipedia moderates content", which could make Wikipedia liable for all content. Including later complaints by Merkey. Including if someone else changed it back to the old version. But also including any other person who wants to complain, who could now hold Wikipedia liable for all content, because it does moderate.
Again, not a clear case. But not quite a frivolous one. Therefore increasing the risk by the action, if only in the longer term. But a serious change.
The real question is why didn't Merkey just edit it himself - that's what Wikipedia is for. Conversely, why didn't Wales have someone outside the Wikipedia org edit it, so the liability would be harder to prove.
And of course the ultimate question is whether Merkey did indeed pay Wales $5000 to make the change. If there's real evidence of that, things become clearer, but not better. Probably including Wikipedia's liability for all its content, to say nothing of its credibility.
Your mom was right. And I dropped out of college, and retired in 2000 an Internet zillionaire. (true story)
I said "investigate", not "prosecute". The evidence of your watermark in the wild isn't enough to conclude that you were party to illegal copying. In fact, the recent ruling that just exposing your storage to the public on the Internet doesn't make you liable for copying means that many legitimate downloaders aren't liable even when it's copied. But transaction records can show that the person who downloaded it didn't have the right to do it.
The watermarks can't be so easily detected or removed. The simple way to hide them is to use the download ID itself as the index into the data, then brute forcing it from the relatively short (secret) list of IDs (GUIDs from a very large, but sparsely and randomly populated namespace). Or a secret number from a very short list that's the key to which bit the watermark starts in. The watermarks then run a pseudorandom walk through a small percentage of the low bits of the entire file, indistinguishable from inherent noise. Watermark contains the download ID, and thereby the identity of the original downloader. That cheap and fairly simple watermarking is not going to get cracked or discarded without reducing the quality of the recording.
And I said that eventually these publishers would see that overall limiting the copying is a losing game, compared to what I described. But since they're not there yet, they could at least admit we're all well past DRM, even if we're not to completely unencumbered - or eventually, even publisher-assisted - freely copied content.
I dunno, the biggest victims of book piracy, like _Harry Potter_'s publishers, attract the equivalent of "sell-out" crowds the first day the book is released. They could charge for access, especially if the author is actually there. They also have a lot more revenue from cross-licensing the book, including to TV, movies, collectible objects, even just marketing other products. All of which increases in value by an increased market familiarity, which the bootlegged copies all build without any cost at all.
Smaller circulation books don't really suffer much from piracy. And this is audiobook piracy. The audiobook consumer is certainly a good target market for more products, even if they're just other audiobooks. The more people in that market, which again is grown at no cost to the legitimate publisher by pirated copies, the more other audiobooks can be sold to them, even if less than 100% legitimate copies. Especially popular would be subscriptions, which are harder for pirates to deliver (and each new issue gives a new chance to get caught), but cheaper and easier for legit publishers.
And I said how watermarking alone can protect. Publishing is a game of statistics. A smaller share than 100% of a bigger pie is worth it.
Physical book publishing is in trouble. But that's an entirely different problem that has nothing to do with DRM.
Yes, the criminal who stole your notebook can use your property to do damage without your being liable. Why is that a problem? Catching the physical thief should be even easier than catching a virtual pirate.
And if you sell your watermarked music, it should be trivial to notify the watermark registry that you've deleted your copies in the transfer, and have them transfer the watermark to the buyer, who would confirm it. If the copies show up, the buyer has to prove that you didn't delete yours, contrary to what they confirmed, and that you illegally copied your old ones, or they're as liable as you would have been.
Seems to me that the watermark makes the transfer of the content enough like transfer of physical property that finally using these property laws and enforcement techniques can be justified, because they'll work.
The coca and sugar (and probably more) in Coca-Cola comes from South America (and plenty of other ex-colonies). If you think plantation slavery ended in 1865, you don't know the history of postcolonial agriculture.