Yep... my thought process was "What gets rid of the legal threats, while still letting the content holders make money? What would *encourage* them by being essentially free money that falls from the sky, at no cost or effort from themselves?" And it just seemed obvious. And watermarks are an obvious way to track individual file propagation, for future payment purposes.
Yeah, you could have special clients to handle downloads, that automagically report what goes where using the watermark, but I think that's probably not necessary, since the same people are going to be inclined to spend the same money no matter what.
The real benefit of a download-client-app system using a watermark-tracking system would be to the people serving as P2P seeds, since they could conceivably get paid on a per-distribution basis (the more you "advertise" for us, the more we pay you) or on a straight commission for each sale made secondary to a download. Consider that even 1/1000th of a CENT per download would add up to enough pocket money to entice most kids, and if even 1 in a thousand of those dowloaders then paid $5 for the whole album, the content holder is still ahead, having spent one cent to make 5 bucks. (Tho as Radiohead recently demonstrated, the actual ratio of deadbeat-downloader to paying-customer is quite a LOT more profitable than 1000:1; I vaguely recall it was somewhere around 10:1.)
So... I think even a badly-implemented platform would be effort in the right direction. But personally I don't see how it *has* to be tied to anything but a link to a shopping cart. Beyond that, let files propagate on P2P or usenet or any digital distribution chain; makes no difference how it gets there. You can encourage it with pay-to-seed and commission-per-sale schemes, or you can ignore it and just collect a small but steady percentage of sales that you wouldn't get otherwise. Either way, the content holders can only wind up ahead.
And same for consumers. More choice that's easier to get to and easier to buy, and an end to hostile litigation.
"The results demonstrate that the watermarking introduces less distortion than the compression algorithm."
That's probably the basis of its survivability right there.
And I agree, I'd much rather have a watermark, even with some risk of counterfeits (tho I expect the makers of the algorithm could tell them from the real thing, sufficient to convince a court), than the current craze of DRM and rootkits. And at least with a watermark, the content CAN survive the death/dissolution of the copyright holder. With DRM, it might not.
But it WILL apply if my furnace ever needs to be replaced. And then I get to freeze at someone else's whim.
As it happens, I already keep my main thermostat set at 62F, because propane is $3.20/gallon, and a gallon only lasts about (are you sitting down??) 10 *minutes*, as guzzled by modern high-pressure gas furnaces. Right now it's actually cheaper to run the electric space heaters. (About $100/mo. to keep it 62F in here, vs. about $300/mo. for propane -- and I only really heat ONE ROOM).
And contrary to popular belief, I've noticed that if you eat slowly, you will tend to eat more. But if you gulp your food, you'll also gulp more air, so the stomach feels full sooner.
Oh, and drink lots of water. Often when you think you're hungry, you're not -- you're actually *thirsty*, and mildly dehydrated.
Tea and coffee are all right too, but sodas are not (with OR without sugar -- and in my observation the sugar substitutes tend to INCREASE appetite).
My house is over 50 years old, and was built before houses in CA were insulated at all. There is NONE in the walls (the R-35 in the attic I put there myself), and it has single-pane windows, because that's how houses were built back then. After all, this is California, we don't need no steenkin' insulation!
Now, I've priced having the house updated (insulation blown into the walls, replace all the windows with double-pane models). Total cost would be somewhere around $10,000. (Somewhat higher if it were done one piece at a time.) I don't know about your money tree, but mine died in the drought, and I sure as hell couldn't cough up that much at once, nor could I pay the $30,000 *total* it would cost if it were financed. (Interest winds up being about double the principal.)
But hey, just cuz I don't make the kind of money that lets *you* buy a new house, it's fine to decree that *I* get to freeze and fry.
BTW my house is hardly unique. Probably half the homes in California, and nearly ALL of those built here before ~1975, are in this same boat. And a majority of these are rentals, or owned by retired people, or by lower-income folks who really can't afford to do major upgrades.
This is probably being pushed by Edison. They already offer "free" monitoring devices that curtail energy use during peak periods. Remember that as the industry is currently set up, the LESS power you use, the MORE money they make. So they're all for conservation, because it profits EDISON.
But the root of the problem isn't any "energy crunch" or even CA's very high usage. It's that a decade ago, some idiots decided "deregulation"** would be a wonderful idea, and did so.. but one of the requirements was that CA must sell all its generating plants. Which they did. To out of state and foreign interests... who now sell the power they produce (from plants formerly owned by CA_ back to CA at over 5 times the base price before "deregulation", with a rate structure that doesn't even allow you to run ONE LIGHT BULB before you get dinged for the highest possible rates (so the actual increase is somewhat more than 5x. My average bill went from $8 to $40 -- and I use 25% *less* power now than I did then. And my bill went up about 30% since last year even tho I've cut my usage *again*, by some 20%. Naturally my bill is much higher in winter, when I need to use the electric heaters.)
**CA copied the Montana Power model, blithely ignoring the fact that MT Power's "deregulation" was a scam perpetrated by MT Power's owners as an exit strategy -- I forget the details but it put millions in their own pockets, devalued MT Power's stock value to essentially zero (destroying the retirement funds many MT residents had counted on), and quadrupled the cost of electricity in MT... where probably half of all homes have electric heat, because that used to be cost-effective if you couldn't get natural gas (the cheapest option).
Los Angeles' then-mayor Reardon (THE man we need for President!) saw through this scam and refused to join in, despite massive pressure from Sacramento. So Los Angeles still owns its generating system, and L.A. residents still enjoy low rates and freedom from rolling blackouts.
I foresee a thriving market in portable heaters/coolers, followed by prohibitions on the sale of such devices. (Roof-mounted swamp coolers are already illegal in Palmdale CA!)
Contrary to popular belief, California is not uniformly "hot". And yes, the proposed system does connect to both heating and cooling systems. You can already get a "free" device from Edision that does the same job.
Northern California is NORTH of ALL of Colorado. The mountain passes along the CA/NV border are usually closed in winter, due to heavy snows. In 1981, the snowpack above Donner totaled 56 FEET.
I'm in California. SOUTHERN California. If you're in the high desert or any of the many SoCal mountain areas, you can count on hard freezes all through December/January, and I've see temps as low as -10F here. -- If I were driving this morning, I'd be scraping frost off my windshield. After having the heat off overnight, it was 52 degrees in my bedroom this morning.
Now, tell me again how someone else should have the right to turn off my heat?
I suspect this is being pushed by Edison, because the way our rate structure is set up, and since they have to buy all our electricity from out-of-state interests (at prices that can only be described as "gouging"), the LESS energy they sell, the MORE money Edison makes. Anything that conserves power makes Edison more money.
True -- whether through malware or counterfeit watermarks, it creates a risk of bogus prosecution.
So as I say above, don't use watermarking as a stick to prevent filesharing. Use it as a carrot to encourage *purposeful* filesharing (ie. as "free-sample" advertising aimed directly at your target market, and best of all at zero expense). Have each file include an ID3-link to a shopping cart, and whenever a sale is made, give a small reward to the *original* filesharer, whom we ID by a hash in the link to the shopping cart.
Yeah, there'll be some ID-link fraud, but so long as the money comes in from sales, what do you-the-vendor care?
"Just the scenario is enough to make gaining convictions on that detail alone almost impossible."
Well, that might be a good thing too -- given that most of the small-scale/P2P piracy really doesn't hurt them, and probably *helps* sales in the long run (by being free samples just like radio). Make it tough to prosecute, so they eventually give up and let people do what they're GOING to do regardless, and make it easy for potential customers to buy the real thing -- include a "where to buy" link in every ID3 tag, and use the watermark ID to reward the original filesharer for every sale made thanks to that particular file.
The only people left unhappy there are the promotions and advertising agencies, since P2P would be doing all the same work for free.
Hell, just take off your shoe and bean someone with it. Or take off your panty hose and strangle someone with 'em. Or just punch 'em in the nose with your mighty fist. Or kick 'em in the crotch.
Yep, the only way to ensure our safety is to have us all fly stark naked, in handcuffs and leg-irons. Or maybe in coffins, suitably padlocked so no zombies can escape and run amok at 30,000 feet.
=====
(And who's the moron who marked my previous post in this thread "troll"?? Go read the regs' timeline. It reads like a comedy of errors... you can tell that whoever wrote that page thought it was stupid too; it's slightly tongue in cheek.)
Nope... I vote per what I think is right (and at times I've withheld my vote, when NO option is good); I discuss why I vote how I do with whoever Needs Enlightenment [g].. so hopefully I contribute toward better options, rather than merely perserving the status quo.
I truly doubt we can do any good at the national level, but if it gives encouragement to local minor candidates (where there's a lot better chance of climbing above zero-notice), that's a start.
And after said collapse, you had people with zero freedom, because ALL their choices were thereby removed. "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose"...Right.
I didn't say money == resources; that's the friends etc. you speak of. But all the friends in the world won't help if NONE of you can afford to buy flour, or seed corn, or gas, or a train ticket, and you can only go so far on your own two feet. You'll all starve in your hovel together, with no chance to escape.
Judging by the "I have nothing to hide" and "what's wrong with RealID" crowd here on slashdot, most of whom at least *sound* like they're under 25, I'd say we have a great deal to fear from them, and little hope of rescue.
I don't know if it's still true, but Nevada has (or had?) a law requiring "None of the Above" as an option on Presidential elections. Back in the Clinton era, NOTA got something like 8% of the vote.
So (at a generous estimate) 10 percent of us vote for Ron Paul, and what do we get for it? Someone else, whom we vehemently opposed for president.:(
I don't know what the solution is. I doubt there will be much change in voter habits unless there is such a dramatic debacle at the Federal or national level (such as a total stock market collapse) that NO ONE escapes the pain, creating a much larger backlash than our microcontingent in support for minor candidates can possibly accomplish.
And then remember that the last such national debacle got us FDR, and probably the single biggest push down the long slide to the nanny state where we are today, where otherwise-sensible people believe that RealID will "protect" us.
"If someone tells me that they think the country is headed in the wrong direction and they're leaving, what reason do I have to listen to their thoughts on the matter?"
Precisely why I have no sympathy for illegal immigrants. If your country is broken, fix it. Don't come here and break mine.
Tho mine is rapidly becoming broken, as RealID amply demonstrates.:(
As the parent said... I note that the threshold starts with those who were adult during the last of the Cold War. And by 2017, most of those will have aged out of the system... leaving only people who've never felt the weight of the Iron Curtain, and don't remember how different things were on opposite sides of the Berlin Wall.
The timeline at http://www.tsa.gov/travelers/sop/index.shtm reads like the plotline from an episode of Get Smart. Embarrassing to have a government that thinks common lighters are a terrorist threat. Only people made happy or secure by that policy were those who work for manufacturers of disposable lighters -- gave them job security all right!!
I have often insisted that the only real freedom is financial -- because if you have money, you can go wherever you wish. All other freedoms derive from this one.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep... my thought process was "What gets rid of the legal threats, while still letting the content holders make money? What would *encourage* them by being essentially free money that falls from the sky, at no cost or effort from themselves?" And it just seemed obvious. And watermarks are an obvious way to track individual file propagation, for future payment purposes.
Yeah, you could have special clients to handle downloads, that automagically report what goes where using the watermark, but I think that's probably not necessary, since the same people are going to be inclined to spend the same money no matter what.
The real benefit of a download-client-app system using a watermark-tracking system would be to the people serving as P2P seeds, since they could conceivably get paid on a per-distribution basis (the more you "advertise" for us, the more we pay you) or on a straight commission for each sale made secondary to a download. Consider that even 1/1000th of a CENT per download would add up to enough pocket money to entice most kids, and if even 1 in a thousand of those dowloaders then paid $5 for the whole album, the content holder is still ahead, having spent one cent to make 5 bucks. (Tho as Radiohead recently demonstrated, the actual ratio of deadbeat-downloader to paying-customer is quite a LOT more profitable than 1000:1; I vaguely recall it was somewhere around 10:1.)
So... I think even a badly-implemented platform would be effort in the right direction. But personally I don't see how it *has* to be tied to anything but a link to a shopping cart. Beyond that, let files propagate on P2P or usenet or any digital distribution chain; makes no difference how it gets there. You can encourage it with pay-to-seed and commission-per-sale schemes, or you can ignore it and just collect a small but steady percentage of sales that you wouldn't get otherwise. Either way, the content holders can only wind up ahead.
And same for consumers. More choice that's easier to get to and easier to buy, and an end to hostile litigation.
[goes off, reads link]
This is interesting:
"The results demonstrate that the watermarking introduces less distortion than the compression algorithm."
That's probably the basis of its survivability right there.
And I agree, I'd much rather have a watermark, even with some risk of counterfeits (tho I expect the makers of the algorithm could tell them from the real thing, sufficient to convince a court), than the current craze of DRM and rootkits. And at least with a watermark, the content CAN survive the death/dissolution of the copyright holder. With DRM, it might not.
But it WILL apply if my furnace ever needs to be replaced. And then I get to freeze at someone else's whim.
As it happens, I already keep my main thermostat set at 62F, because propane is $3.20/gallon, and a gallon only lasts about (are you sitting down??) 10 *minutes*, as guzzled by modern high-pressure gas furnaces. Right now it's actually cheaper to run the electric space heaters. (About $100/mo. to keep it 62F in here, vs. about $300/mo. for propane -- and I only really heat ONE ROOM).
And contrary to popular belief, I've noticed that if you eat slowly, you will tend to eat more. But if you gulp your food, you'll also gulp more air, so the stomach feels full sooner.
Oh, and drink lots of water. Often when you think you're hungry, you're not -- you're actually *thirsty*, and mildly dehydrated.
Tea and coffee are all right too, but sodas are not (with OR without sugar -- and in my observation the sugar substitutes tend to INCREASE appetite).
Glad I'm not the only one who thinks so. :) They really are a feat of workmanship, especially considering that they're mass-produced.
And once they've died the death, I also love the pure clean notes some platters produce when used as a wind chime.
My house is over 50 years old, and was built before houses in CA were insulated at all. There is NONE in the walls (the R-35 in the attic I put there myself), and it has single-pane windows, because that's how houses were built back then. After all, this is California, we don't need no steenkin' insulation!
Now, I've priced having the house updated (insulation blown into the walls, replace all the windows with double-pane models). Total cost would be somewhere around $10,000. (Somewhat higher if it were done one piece at a time.) I don't know about your money tree, but mine died in the drought, and I sure as hell couldn't cough up that much at once, nor could I pay the $30,000 *total* it would cost if it were financed. (Interest winds up being about double the principal.)
But hey, just cuz I don't make the kind of money that lets *you* buy a new house, it's fine to decree that *I* get to freeze and fry.
BTW my house is hardly unique. Probably half the homes in California, and nearly ALL of those built here before ~1975, are in this same boat. And a majority of these are rentals, or owned by retired people, or by lower-income folks who really can't afford to do major upgrades.
This is probably being pushed by Edison. They already offer "free" monitoring devices that curtail energy use during peak periods. Remember that as the industry is currently set up, the LESS power you use, the MORE money they make. So they're all for conservation, because it profits EDISON.
But the root of the problem isn't any "energy crunch" or even CA's very high usage. It's that a decade ago, some idiots decided "deregulation"** would be a wonderful idea, and did so.. but one of the requirements was that CA must sell all its generating plants. Which they did. To out of state and foreign interests... who now sell the power they produce (from plants formerly owned by CA_ back to CA at over 5 times the base price before "deregulation", with a rate structure that doesn't even allow you to run ONE LIGHT BULB before you get dinged for the highest possible rates (so the actual increase is somewhat more than 5x. My average bill went from $8 to $40 -- and I use 25% *less* power now than I did then. And my bill went up about 30% since last year even tho I've cut my usage *again*, by some 20%. Naturally my bill is much higher in winter, when I need to use the electric heaters.)
**CA copied the Montana Power model, blithely ignoring the fact that MT Power's "deregulation" was a scam perpetrated by MT Power's owners as an exit strategy -- I forget the details but it put millions in their own pockets, devalued MT Power's stock value to essentially zero (destroying the retirement funds many MT residents had counted on), and quadrupled the cost of electricity in MT... where probably half of all homes have electric heat, because that used to be cost-effective if you couldn't get natural gas (the cheapest option).
Los Angeles' then-mayor Reardon (THE man we need for President!) saw through this scam and refused to join in, despite massive pressure from Sacramento. So Los Angeles still owns its generating system, and L.A. residents still enjoy low rates and freedom from rolling blackouts.
I foresee a thriving market in portable heaters/coolers, followed by prohibitions on the sale of such devices. (Roof-mounted swamp coolers are already illegal in Palmdale CA!)
Contrary to popular belief, California is not uniformly "hot". And yes, the proposed system does connect to both heating and cooling systems. You can already get a "free" device from Edision that does the same job.
Northern California is NORTH of ALL of Colorado. The mountain passes along the CA/NV border are usually closed in winter, due to heavy snows. In 1981, the snowpack above Donner totaled 56 FEET.
I'm in California. SOUTHERN California. If you're in the high desert or any of the many SoCal mountain areas, you can count on hard freezes all through December/January, and I've see temps as low as -10F here. -- If I were driving this morning, I'd be scraping frost off my windshield. After having the heat off overnight, it was 52 degrees in my bedroom this morning.
Now, tell me again how someone else should have the right to turn off my heat?
I suspect this is being pushed by Edison, because the way our rate structure is set up, and since they have to buy all our electricity from out-of-state interests (at prices that can only be described as "gouging"), the LESS energy they sell, the MORE money Edison makes. Anything that conserves power makes Edison more money.
True -- whether through malware or counterfeit watermarks, it creates a risk of bogus prosecution.
So as I say above, don't use watermarking as a stick to prevent filesharing. Use it as a carrot to encourage *purposeful* filesharing (ie. as "free-sample" advertising aimed directly at your target market, and best of all at zero expense). Have each file include an ID3-link to a shopping cart, and whenever a sale is made, give a small reward to the *original* filesharer, whom we ID by a hash in the link to the shopping cart.
Yeah, there'll be some ID-link fraud, but so long as the money comes in from sales, what do you-the-vendor care?
"Just the scenario is enough to make gaining convictions on that detail alone almost impossible."
Well, that might be a good thing too -- given that most of the small-scale/P2P piracy really doesn't hurt them, and probably *helps* sales in the long run (by being free samples just like radio). Make it tough to prosecute, so they eventually give up and let people do what they're GOING to do regardless, and make it easy for potential customers to buy the real thing -- include a "where to buy" link in every ID3 tag, and use the watermark ID to reward the original filesharer for every sale made thanks to that particular file.
The only people left unhappy there are the promotions and advertising agencies, since P2P would be doing all the same work for free.
What happens to such a watermark if the file is significantly reprocessed?
Hell, just take off your shoe and bean someone with it. Or take off your panty hose and strangle someone with 'em. Or just punch 'em in the nose with your mighty fist. Or kick 'em in the crotch.
Yep, the only way to ensure our safety is to have us all fly stark naked, in handcuffs and leg-irons. Or maybe in coffins, suitably padlocked so no zombies can escape and run amok at 30,000 feet.
=====
(And who's the moron who marked my previous post in this thread "troll"?? Go read the regs' timeline. It reads like a comedy of errors... you can tell that whoever wrote that page thought it was stupid too; it's slightly tongue in cheek.)
Nope... I vote per what I think is right (and at times I've withheld my vote, when NO option is good); I discuss why I vote how I do with whoever Needs Enlightenment [g] .. so hopefully I contribute toward better options, rather than merely perserving the status quo.
I truly doubt we can do any good at the national level, but if it gives encouragement to local minor candidates (where there's a lot better chance of climbing above zero-notice), that's a start.
And after said collapse, you had people with zero freedom, because ALL their choices were thereby removed. "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose" ...Right.
I didn't say money == resources; that's the friends etc. you speak of. But all the friends in the world won't help if NONE of you can afford to buy flour, or seed corn, or gas, or a train ticket, and you can only go so far on your own two feet. You'll all starve in your hovel together, with no chance to escape.
Yeah... I just wish I could feel more confident that it could happen in today's political arena.
Still, none of the major candidates has done squat to earn my trust, let alone my vote.
As has been said and resaid by many,
If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart.
If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain.
I don't know if it's still true, but Nevada has (or had?) a law requiring "None of the Above" as an option on Presidential elections. Back in the Clinton era, NOTA got something like 8% of the vote.
Wow, thanks for the link.
Plug in "for RealID" everywhere the article says "Nazi", and you don't have to change another word of it to reflect what's happening in Amerika today.
The Stasi have already won.
So (at a generous estimate) 10 percent of us vote for Ron Paul, and what do we get for it? Someone else, whom we vehemently opposed for president. :(
I don't know what the solution is. I doubt there will be much change in voter habits unless there is such a dramatic debacle at the Federal or national level (such as a total stock market collapse) that NO ONE escapes the pain, creating a much larger backlash than our microcontingent in support for minor candidates can possibly accomplish.
And then remember that the last such national debacle got us FDR, and probably the single biggest push down the long slide to the nanny state where we are today, where otherwise-sensible people believe that RealID will "protect" us.
"If someone tells me that they think the country is headed in the wrong direction and they're leaving, what reason do I have to listen to their thoughts on the matter?"
:(
Precisely why I have no sympathy for illegal immigrants. If your country is broken, fix it. Don't come here and break mine.
Tho mine is rapidly becoming broken, as RealID amply demonstrates.
There, fixed that for you.
As the parent said... I note that the threshold starts with those who were adult during the last of the Cold War. And by 2017, most of those will have aged out of the system... leaving only people who've never felt the weight of the Iron Curtain, and don't remember how different things were on opposite sides of the Berlin Wall.
Oh, this isn't 1950s East Germany? My mistake.
The timeline at http://www.tsa.gov/travelers/sop/index.shtm reads like the plotline from an episode of Get Smart. Embarrassing to have a government that thinks common lighters are a terrorist threat. Only people made happy or secure by that policy were those who work for manufacturers of disposable lighters -- gave them job security all right!!
And that's what it comes to when enough people have their freedoms restricted that there's nowhere left to go. :(
We need a new planet. This one is too crowded.
I have often insisted that the only real freedom is financial -- because if you have money, you can go wherever you wish. All other freedoms derive from this one.