All purchases would require ID. ID's are not only easy forged, but legitmate IDs can be purchased through corrupt government employees. So you create a barrier to purchasing the product (I need an ID to buy a $9 CD?), plus its not reliable. IDs can be faked or stolen. Just because it says Joe Smith, does not mean its Joe Smith.
This seems to be primarily designed for digital downloads where the customer is known.
IDing would require a national/international register.
No it wouldn't. Assume the person is who they say they are. If someone fakes their ID, not only have the committed copyright infringement, they've also committed fraud.
What if the purchase was a gift? So I buy some media for my Niece, with my name attached to it, and she then gives it to her friend, who then puts it online. Guess who gets the call from the RIAA, and has to pay the expense of proving their innocence. (Which creates an incentive to remove these watermarks, and possibly even a business to do this)
Then you tell the RIAA where to go. You're no longer the owner, the RIAA doesn't know whether you're the owner. You have a watertight case. And the fact that it's not possible for the RIAA to track ownership of the file is none of your concern.
As others have pointed out, what about theft? If my digital media is stolen, again the burden rests with me to prove my innocence. Also, now some of my personal information is in the hands of a thief! Yikes! Sounds like a really good reason to remove the watermark!
Your "personal information" would probably just be a unique ID of a piece of media you've purchased.
How do you know you can trust the watermark? Is it cryptographically secure? Could someone change the watermark to incriminate their neighbor? If its cryptographically strong, then it needs more bits, which makes it even easier to find and remove.
They would need to know what media had been purchased by you and what the watermark for that media is. If they have that access the cryptographic security isn't going to help you.
Will the watermark survive removal from simple lossy compression? Probably not. If its not supposed to effect the medium in such a way as to be perceptible by a human, then it will probably get lost in compression
Can you be totally certain that simple compression will remove the watermark? All they care about is there's enough doubt to stop you from distributing it.
Rosetta stone attack) If you have an unwatermarked file, you can use a rosetta stone attack. This happened with the ill fated SDMI approach from the 90s.
Why would you need to remove the watermark if you have an original?
Oracle attack: If the attacker has access to an Oracle (a device/program for detecting the watermark), he/she can fiddle with the file with impunity to find the watermark, and again remove/obscure/modify it.
How do you know how many watermarks there are on a given file? Can you be sure you've got them all?
Lossy compression attack: Just use lossy compression, it will probably destroy the watermark.
Some watermarks work by phase adjustment. This is not perceptible but offers no benefit to compression.
But all this aims to do is to make it so it's not worth anyone's while to make free copies avaialble online. Are you really going to go to the effort of analysing the watermarking system and removing it just to help a load of internet freeloaders?
Well, okay. I made the mistake of assuming that the term "pitch" for a sports field made sense in the US. But an American football field and a soccer field are about the same size and accurate enough for indicating size to most people of a certain nation. But you raise a good point. With national specific items, I agree with you. The size of a quarter is something that is known to all Americans, but not really a good indicator outside. But is 10cm really a useful size? I'm sure most Americans and most British people over the age of 50 aren't going to have any idea. Most Europens will probably struggle with 4 inches. I'm sure more people have seen a grapefruit than regularly use either of those measurements. And when someone talks about 1kg, I tend to think how heavy a 1kg bag of sugar is to get some idea of the weight we're talking about.
As for turning it through 90 degrees - no. I couldn't picture that. Without looking up measurements, what size building would you say is the same sort of size?
It does depend. Something like "The size of a football pitch" is fine for indicating area. We all know roughly what that looks like. But all too often we see silly examples. Like that 747 example. Is that good? I've never tried stopping a 747 in mid flight. What sort of thickness would you need to lift a person or tow a car? I've seen climbing ropes and towing ropes so I have a frame of reference. And It's bad when there are too many. I've never seen 4200 garbage trucks.
I remember reading that a particular hangar was "As tall as an olympic swimming pool on its end". This irritated me for two reasons.
I've never seen an olympic swimming pool on its end.
Fair enough. I was just suggesting a way in which one could possibly circumvent the watermarking. Your criticisms are perfectly valid; my idea does depend entirely on exactly how the watermarking and the encoder work. Certainly I wouldn't imagine anyone, apart from a few curious geeks would buy a second copy to disable the watermark. I certainly wouldn't put my faith in a third party application that claims to remove the watermark, because the company could change their watermark mechanism at any time.
VCRs tend not to. VHS recorders do have an automatic gain control, which I believe is now a mandatory part of copy protection, but Betamax recorders didn't have this.
My idea is that you just need access to two copies with different watermarks. Find out where they differ and you should be able to speculate on the other places you might find watermarks. Even if you can't get anywhere by speculation, stripping the files down to components, and randomly selecting from both copies should at least confuse things sufficiently.
I don't see the watermark, in and of itself, as sufficient to prove anything in court.
No. It probably isn't. And I think most people are probably happier that way. There will presumably always be ways for the content to leak out that there is no reasonable way the purchaser could protect against. So give them the benefit of the doubt, and perhaps warn them that this has happened and they really ought to look into securing their system. But if someone seems to be regularly getting hacked, or losing their backups or whatever, then the sellers know who they are and can cancel their account, or if they seem to be losing a supsiciously large number of files, investigate further, or look for legal remedies or whatever seems reasonable.
It would be reasonably easy to do that sort of thing. But it's just as easy to circumvent DRM. It's a lot of work to go to just to give something away.
3D graphics are a lot more mature than a few years ago. Each revision of D3D has been a smaller improvement than the previous edition, and the cards have had a sufficiently wide range of capabilities that developers have primarly targetted more speed rather than more features. The new features that are available are quite nice, but a lot more specialised, and I'd imagine many games simply aren't going to use them.
Targetting DX10 simply isn't going to give a substantial enough improvement for most people to justify upgrading to Vista.
But at day one, Direct3D was absolutely terrible. It worked a lot more like the low level driver interface than an actual 3D API. Later versions improved on this quite dramatically.
Now, it is generally agreed that distribution of information is generally desirable. Copyright is based on a view that giving creators control of their creation is generally desirable. You may disagree with these, but that's somethign of a radical viewpoint. I'm going from what is pretty much prevailing wisdom.
Not much has changed in copyright media for the past 50 years. There are more media types available, but the entire production and distribution of a DVD or a piece of software is not fundamentally different from the production and distribution of a novel or a vinyl record. Likewise, a satellite transmission, is not fundamentally different from a longwave audio broadcast.
What has changed more recently is ease of copying. But video and audio data have been easily copyable for decades. Copyright law has presumably dealt with this adequately. We still have a large industry based on copyrighted works so we canpresume that this has been dealt with adequately.
So the only substantial change has been that it's now a lot easier to distribute information, and a lot easier to store it
I can send a movie file to hundreds of people with easily purchased consumer equipment. By my earlier arguments this is a good thing - "distribution of information is generally desirable". It's also a bad thing "giving creators control of their creation is generally desirable".
So what the law needs to do is find a balance. The law is already taking into account the control aspect. Everything that is likely to need to be protected already is. But there are a lot of restrictions on distribution and archiving. One might argue too many. Countless works have been lost because preserving a copy has been seen as not financially viable for the owners and illegal for others. Copyright holders are hoarding information that is no longer seen as saleable, and could be shared freely at no loss to anyone. Society would become richer as a result. The law needs to be changed to account for this. Screw your right to share Pirates of the Caribbean on bittorrent. That's not important. What is important is making more information available to the world.
I, for one, have recordings of several silent movies that were so old to fall into the public domain.
Quite a few talkies became PD properties as well. Before 1978 (I think) the term was 28 years with optional extension. So many films from 1950 or before were not renewed and became public domain. By the 1930's cinema had become a fairly major media force so there's a decent amount of material.
It's hard to find an impoverished country that has fat internet pipes.
Not if you have $1 billion to spend. Spend half of it on your island ($500 million is still above the GDP of a lot of poorer countries), and the other half on your connections. The nation you're investing in is unlikely to object to getting a fast internet connection.
So, my grassroots lobbying is ok as long as nobody is paying attention? And if I do post something which gathers a political following, suddenly I've got papers to fill out?
No. The law is drafted so that certain types of lobbying need to be registered. There are a number of exceptions. In case these exceptions might still cause undue problems for small blog operators, there's a catch-all for these.
Wheras your extensive research, which you will no doubt supply in a follow-up to this comment, shows clearly that placing no limits on copying is better.
Nope. All I have is my own dogma. I'm not making decisions. I have the right to unsubstantiated opinion. If I was making decisions about applying DRM, I'd make sure they were the right decision.
For all I know, they might be right. Maybe DRM does increase sales. But they're just assuming this is the case. Few other industries reduce utility to increase sales. Aircraft manufacturers could sell twice as many planes if they made them smaller. Truck makers would logically sell more units if they lobbied the government to reduce the permitted load on roads.
I think they insist on DRM simply because they're convinced that limitting the number of people who can watch something is better. But they haven't researched. They just take it as a self evident truth. It's become more of a religion than a business strategy.
I was under the impression that pal VCRS were made to handle NTSC by slowing down from 30 FPS to 25,
Mine just outputs at 30FPS (or 60 fields per second). Most European TVs seem to be able to handle PAL60 at least. In fact, most reasonable quality ones can handle an NTSC signal. Not sure if there's a difference between these formats if we use RGB.
None of them do a simple speed-up. This would be extremely noticable. The only speed up is the 4% needed to go from Film's 24fps to PAL's 25fps. My previous DVD player did convert but not very well. I think it just dumped every 6th frame. It was visibly jerky. I'm sure some do a reverse 3:2 pulldown, but it's not really needed.
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I might well go to the expense of buying a Playstation 3, just to demonstrate that I have an alternative.
And to demonstrate I have an alternative, I'll go for the cheaper option of not buying anything:)
All purchases would require ID. ID's are not only easy forged, but legitmate IDs can be purchased through corrupt government employees. So you create a barrier to purchasing the product (I need an ID to buy a $9 CD?), plus its not reliable. IDs can be faked or stolen. Just because it says Joe Smith, does not mean its Joe Smith.
This seems to be primarily designed for digital downloads where the customer is known.
IDing would require a national/international register.
No it wouldn't. Assume the person is who they say they are. If someone fakes their ID, not only have the committed copyright infringement, they've also committed fraud.
What if the purchase was a gift? So I buy some media for my Niece, with my name attached to it, and she then gives it to her friend, who then puts it online. Guess who gets the call from the RIAA, and has to pay the expense of proving their innocence. (Which creates an incentive to remove these watermarks, and possibly even a business to do this)
Then you tell the RIAA where to go. You're no longer the owner, the RIAA doesn't know whether you're the owner. You have a watertight case. And the fact that it's not possible for the RIAA to track ownership of the file is none of your concern.
As others have pointed out, what about theft? If my digital media is stolen, again the burden rests with me to prove my innocence. Also, now some of my personal information is in the hands of a thief! Yikes! Sounds like a really good reason to remove the watermark!
Your "personal information" would probably just be a unique ID of a piece of media you've purchased.
How do you know you can trust the watermark? Is it cryptographically secure? Could someone change the watermark to incriminate their neighbor? If its cryptographically strong, then it needs more bits, which makes it even easier to find and remove.
They would need to know what media had been purchased by you and what the watermark for that media is. If they have that access the cryptographic security isn't going to help you. Will the watermark survive removal from simple lossy compression? Probably not. If its not supposed to effect the medium in such a way as to be perceptible by a human, then it will probably get lost in compression
Can you be totally certain that simple compression will remove the watermark? All they care about is there's enough doubt to stop you from distributing it.
Rosetta stone attack) If you have an unwatermarked file, you can use a rosetta stone attack. This happened with the ill fated SDMI approach from the 90s.
Why would you need to remove the watermark if you have an original?
Oracle attack: If the attacker has access to an Oracle (a device/program for detecting the watermark), he/she can fiddle with the file with impunity to find the watermark, and again remove/obscure/modify it.
How do you know how many watermarks there are on a given file? Can you be sure you've got them all?
Lossy compression attack: Just use lossy compression, it will probably destroy the watermark.
Some watermarks work by phase adjustment. This is not perceptible but offers no benefit to compression.
But all this aims to do is to make it so it's not worth anyone's while to make free copies avaialble online. Are you really going to go to the effort of analysing the watermarking system and removing it just to help a load of internet freeloaders?
Well, okay. I made the mistake of assuming that the term "pitch" for a sports field made sense in the US. But an American football field and a soccer field are about the same size and accurate enough for indicating size to most people of a certain nation. But you raise a good point. With national specific items, I agree with you. The size of a quarter is something that is known to all Americans, but not really a good indicator outside. But is 10cm really a useful size? I'm sure most Americans and most British people over the age of 50 aren't going to have any idea. Most Europens will probably struggle with 4 inches. I'm sure more people have seen a grapefruit than regularly use either of those measurements. And when someone talks about 1kg, I tend to think how heavy a 1kg bag of sugar is to get some idea of the weight we're talking about.
The second pont was just a silly joke.
As for turning it through 90 degrees - no. I couldn't picture that. Without looking up measurements, what size building would you say is the same sort of size?
I remember reading that a particular hangar was "As tall as an olympic swimming pool on its end". This irritated me for two reasons.
Fair enough. I was just suggesting a way in which one could possibly circumvent the watermarking. Your criticisms are perfectly valid; my idea does depend entirely on exactly how the watermarking and the encoder work. Certainly I wouldn't imagine anyone, apart from a few curious geeks would buy a second copy to disable the watermark. I certainly wouldn't put my faith in a third party application that claims to remove the watermark, because the company could change their watermark mechanism at any time.
Uhm. No. They're saying the AHRA provisions do apply. This isn't about copyright, so fair use is irelevent. This is about audio device design.
VCRs tend not to. VHS recorders do have an automatic gain control, which I believe is now a mandatory part of copy protection, but Betamax recorders didn't have this.
My idea is that you just need access to two copies with different watermarks. Find out where they differ and you should be able to speculate on the other places you might find watermarks. Even if you can't get anywhere by speculation, stripping the files down to components, and randomly selecting from both copies should at least confuse things sufficiently.
I don't see the watermark, in and of itself, as sufficient to prove anything in court.
No. It probably isn't. And I think most people are probably happier that way. There will presumably always be ways for the content to leak out that there is no reasonable way the purchaser could protect against. So give them the benefit of the doubt, and perhaps warn them that this has happened and they really ought to look into securing their system. But if someone seems to be regularly getting hacked, or losing their backups or whatever, then the sellers know who they are and can cancel their account, or if they seem to be losing a supsiciously large number of files, investigate further, or look for legal remedies or whatever seems reasonable.
It would be reasonably easy to do that sort of thing. But it's just as easy to circumvent DRM. It's a lot of work to go to just to give something away.
But then how does the copyright holder distinguish between the purchaser engaging in illegal distribution vs being the victim of theft?
They can't.
But if you happen to be the victim of "theft" a lot of times, then they could reasonably start asking questions.
3D graphics are a lot more mature than a few years ago. Each revision of D3D has been a smaller improvement than the previous edition, and the cards have had a sufficiently wide range of capabilities that developers have primarly targetted more speed rather than more features. The new features that are available are quite nice, but a lot more specialised, and I'd imagine many games simply aren't going to use them.
Targetting DX10 simply isn't going to give a substantial enough improvement for most people to justify upgrading to Vista.
But at day one, Direct3D was absolutely terrible. It worked a lot more like the low level driver interface than an actual 3D API. Later versions improved on this quite dramatically.
Now, it is generally agreed that distribution of information is generally desirable. Copyright is based on a view that giving creators control of their creation is generally desirable. You may disagree with these, but that's somethign of a radical viewpoint. I'm going from what is pretty much prevailing wisdom. Not much has changed in copyright media for the past 50 years. There are more media types available, but the entire production and distribution of a DVD or a piece of software is not fundamentally different from the production and distribution of a novel or a vinyl record. Likewise, a satellite transmission, is not fundamentally different from a longwave audio broadcast.
What has changed more recently is ease of copying. But video and audio data have been easily copyable for decades. Copyright law has presumably dealt with this adequately. We still have a large industry based on copyrighted works so we canpresume that this has been dealt with adequately.
So the only substantial change has been that it's now a lot easier to distribute information, and a lot easier to store it
I can send a movie file to hundreds of people with easily purchased consumer equipment. By my earlier arguments this is a good thing - "distribution of information is generally desirable". It's also a bad thing "giving creators control of their creation is generally desirable".
So what the law needs to do is find a balance. The law is already taking into account the control aspect. Everything that is likely to need to be protected already is. But there are a lot of restrictions on distribution and archiving. One might argue too many. Countless works have been lost because preserving a copy has been seen as not financially viable for the owners and illegal for others. Copyright holders are hoarding information that is no longer seen as saleable, and could be shared freely at no loss to anyone. Society would become richer as a result. The law needs to be changed to account for this. Screw your right to share Pirates of the Caribbean on bittorrent. That's not important. What is important is making more information available to the world.
I, for one, have recordings of several silent movies that were so old to fall into the public domain.
Quite a few talkies became PD properties as well. Before 1978 (I think) the term was 28 years with optional extension. So many films from 1950 or before were not renewed and became public domain. By the 1930's cinema had become a fairly major media force so there's a decent amount of material.
It wouldn't play standard formats.
If it was capable of recording or copying, the MPAA would seek to regulate it.
It's more akin to the MPAA's insistance that video devices conform to their specifications, or the RIAA insisting on DRM.
It's hard to find an impoverished country that has fat internet pipes.
Not if you have $1 billion to spend. Spend half of it on your island ($500 million is still above the GDP of a lot of poorer countries), and the other half on your connections. The nation you're investing in is unlikely to object to getting a fast internet connection.
So, my grassroots lobbying is ok as long as nobody is paying attention? And if I do post something which gathers a political following, suddenly I've got papers to fill out?
No. The law is drafted so that certain types of lobbying need to be registered. There are a number of exceptions. In case these exceptions might still cause undue problems for small blog operators, there's a catch-all for these.
I think you said, "Transfer my entire balance to Bill Gates. To confirm, say 'Yes'"
Okay.
"'Ere in blighty a bloke can get 'em for 6 bob a time"
Wheras your extensive research, which you will no doubt supply in a follow-up to this comment, shows clearly that placing no limits on copying is better.
Nope. All I have is my own dogma. I'm not making decisions. I have the right to unsubstantiated opinion. If I was making decisions about applying DRM, I'd make sure they were the right decision.
For all I know, they might be right. Maybe DRM does increase sales. But they're just assuming this is the case. Few other industries reduce utility to increase sales. Aircraft manufacturers could sell twice as many planes if they made them smaller. Truck makers would logically sell more units if they lobbied the government to reduce the permitted load on roads.
I think they insist on DRM simply because they're convinced that limitting the number of people who can watch something is better. But they haven't researched. They just take it as a self evident truth. It's become more of a religion than a business strategy.
I was under the impression that pal VCRS were made to handle NTSC by slowing down from 30 FPS to 25,
Mine just outputs at 30FPS (or 60 fields per second). Most European TVs seem to be able to handle PAL60 at least. In fact, most reasonable quality ones can handle an NTSC signal. Not sure if there's a difference between these formats if we use RGB.
None of them do a simple speed-up. This would be extremely noticable. The only speed up is the 4% needed to go from Film's 24fps to PAL's 25fps. My previous DVD player did convert but not very well. I think it just dumped every 6th frame. It was visibly jerky. I'm sure some do a reverse 3:2 pulldown, but it's not really needed.