And here I was thinking realpolitik had mostly won.
"They" are not one unique set of individuals any more than slashdotters are. Hardware vendors have one set of interests; copyright holders have another. Many large copyright holders are certainly interested in making such things mandatory (and damn the innovation) -- but this is an article regarding an innovation by a hardware vendor, and as a group they're much more interested in retaining their ability to create and sell new products (and provide just enough concessions to the copyright holders to protect themselves).
The public interest is reasonably (not perfectly) well-aligned with hardware vendors' interests, even though it's badly disaligned with those of the large-scale IP holders.
And that said -- it's not even the copyright holders you're worrying about, but rather the neocons and nanny-state folks, an entirely different set. If and when that group tries to make watermarking mandatory, it can be suitably addressed at that time. Starting a backlash against anyone who tries to make a tool which could be used by an oppressive government to reduce individual rights is unreasonable -- after all, an oppressive government can use guns, cars and uniforms; should we thus be intrinsically opposed to any manufacturer making one of these three items?
I'm not really interested in reading something that's going to try to make me see anything and everything that enhances trackability as a slippery slope towards what you're describing.
Things are what they are; evaluating them as pieces of some "humongous jigsaw puzzle" rather than for their individual, standalone functions and repercussions is unreasonable.
"These SOBs" aren't the copyright cartel in this case -- rather, it's a hardware manufacturer who wants the ability to innovate without getting sued for all they're worth. The article summary is extremely misleading -- the devices this is about aren't DSL gateways but "home media gateways", and the intent is to watermark not all media passing through but rather all media which the device is used to encode. Manufacturers who make devices capable of encoding and sharing media are under substantial scrutiny from the content industry; this one has found a way to protect themselves that doesn't take away fair use rights.
Most of the folks I see getting really riled up in this discussion are misunderstanding or misrepresenting just what it is that they're arguing against.
I've already addressed this elsewhere: The article summary is badly misleading. This is not DSL router functionality, it's "home media gateway"/settop box functionailty. It does not impact arbitrary files you send and receive; it impacts things you use the hardware to record.
Not only are there all sorts of situations where this isn't that useful, VPNs, proxies, onion routing, etc. Having an IP will only tell you the owner of that netblock. You need to go through possibly several stages (which include getting the relevent court orders) to have any idea who that IP might relate to.
Yes, but the corporations involved in large-scale copyright-enforcement do quite a lot of that already, and have gotten fairly goood at it.
In addition there's the issue that if the device fails to work if it cannot "phone home" the problem has better not be on your side. Since if it's in anyway "your fault" that your customers cannot use their (expensive) device at best they will just be angry, at worst they will be reaching for their lawyers.
Yes, making it not work if it can't phone home is stupid. This is a cover-the-hardware-manufacturer's-ass measure, not a kill-the-pirates measure, remember? If the few users who are savvy enough to block phone-home packets from this device manage to do so -- so what? The watermark still provides evidence to implicate or exculpate an individual should they be otherwise identified, and the hardware manufacturer can still argue to Congress and/or the courts that they have 99%-effective measures in place (as far fewer than 1% of users are going to be the savvy block-the-packets types).
I have an essential liberty to record content off of cable TV or the airwaves without the hardware I use tagging the generated files as created by the individual device.
This is not a computer that manipulates my content silently. The article summary claiming that this is about DSL routers is flat out wrong; it's about home media routers and network-enabled PVR-type boxes which can be used to record content off the airwaves.
So -- we're already not modifying preexisting content; rather, we're marking newly recorded content as created by this machine while we create it.
Not even "sharing with their friends". The watermark isn't checked by any kind of automated process; it's intended to help track down folks who posted something out to the world via BitTorrent. It's a bit more than a few colored bits on the screen -- a good watermark is robust enough to survive a trip through the analog hole, or reencoding with a low-bandwidth codec, so think large, subtle color shifts over time [large in terms of the size of the regions in question, that is].
Sure, the big-time pirates will use different equipment (why bother stripping a watermark when you can just use equipment that doesn't put in there in the first place?) -- but the point to this is giving manufacturers of networkable PVR boxes a defense to the charge that their equipment is helping to put TV shows on the Internet for free / kill babies / etc.
DRM isn't foolproof either -- but even knowing this, the content industry has yet to consider it worthless. (Also, watermarks can be surprisingly difficult to remove -- and this one is supposedly robust enough to survive an analog-hole roundtrip with a camcorder).
Even if we grant that software for removing these watermarks may become available, sophisticated infringers (ya know, folks who actually are aware of the watermarks and know where to find tools to remove them) aren't going to be using Thompson consumer-grade set-top boxes to digitize content they intend to share anyhow; they're not the audience this is intended to address.
Of course they'll both be used, if the content industry has their way. It's not the content industry doing this, though -- it's a hardware manufacturer; they have a completely different set of interests. Content-industry folks want to sell more copies of content, even if they have to suppress some innovation in the process. Hardware manufacturers, by contrast, want to innovate and sell more hardware -- but need to avoid lawsuits if any of the innovative and interesting functionality they add could be argued to assist copyright-infringing activities; see what happened to these folks for an example of what the content industry does to hardware manufacturers who get a bit too uppity.
This distinction being what it is, hardware manufacturers' interests generally align much more closely with those of consumers -- and if they can convince Congress and the courts that watermarking without heavy DRM is an appropriate way to allow them to innovate while still adequately protecting the content folks' interests, the content industry just might have to give.
When someone uses real arguments against me, I'll bother with real arguments to counter them. Claiming that I'm a shill without bothering to look at my posting history is just name-calling, not worth any kind of real response.
(Also, my writing style is fairly distinctive; it shouldn't be all that hard to google up some old posts and check for contiguity, if someone really thought I wasn't who I say I am).
I meant "no parties paying others to remove functionality", which should have been obvious from context; the intent was to refute the parent's claim that some malfeseance must have been going on.
Compromise?! Who decided the copyright cartel deserves even that?
They may not deserve it; however, what they deserve is far less important than what they manage to actually get.
If giving an inch of the public's privacy prevents the legislature from taking a mile out of our ability to make fair use of 3rd-party content, it's better than the alternative. Denying that we're even on the defensive does nothing to reduce the ground being lost, and reminds me very much of Executive-branch positioning regarding a certain war going on.
You're reading the blatantly false article summary, not the actual article.
This is not about DSL gateways, it's about "home media gateways" and set-top boxes. They do not in fact tag all video uploaded -- only video ripped using the hardware in question.
The watermarks aren't used to determine whether you're allowed to watch something; they're used to track down people who are sharing things for which the copyright owners haven't permitted redistribution. They're applied not to the media, but to the equipment that records and plays said media. I don't know where you get the idea that personally recorded media would also need to be watermarked.
The massive database you refer to doesn't need to track media ownership, but only player location (ownership can be determined after-the-fact; even just recording the IP address from which a player last dialed home [this is for high-end, network-connectivity-enabled boxes] would be adequate). It's not an end-all-be-all government-mandated deal; it's a way for a single manufacturer to strike a bargain which isn't quite as anti-consumer as the one that's otherwise getting shoved down our collective throats.
That's not a problem with watermarking; rather, that's a problem with the courts, and properly a legislative issue. In some cases SLAPP laws might be used to counter any such baseless assertions of infringement -- they can make bringing a lawsuit against a private individual very expensive indeed.
Hey, Dave -- it's been a while. Look me up if you're even in the Austin area, 'kay?
Back onto topic... the Betamax case is no longer so sweeping as it once was; the breadth of its holding was significantly reduced by Grokster, and there are ongoing attempts to legislate around it entirely. A simple PVR is safe for now, but once one starts adding any kind of network functionality to it (even functionality clearly intended for space-shifting within a household), things become significantly less clearcut.
As you say, the law should be changed for the better (and ongoing attempts to change it for the worse should be resisted) -- but if I were a hardware manufacturer in that line of business right now, I'd want to cover my arse for the event that it changes for the worse.
I think you misunderstood what he was saying -- either that, or I did.
HARDWARE_VENDOR_A wants to build a system by which rich folks can digitize their whole DVD library and play back the movies they own on any screen in their house without needing to shuffle DVDs around. Thing is, the last folks who tried to do that were on the receiving end of a very nasty lawsuit from the motion picture industry (true story). So what does HARDWARE_VENDOR_A do? Well, one option is to buy a watermark chip from HARDWARE_VENDOR_B and including it in their product with the intent of mollifying the MPAA; at a minimum, it'll help them show in court that they were acting in good faith, and thus reduce their liability somewhat even if it won't be foreclosed.
Why does HARDWARE_VENDOR_B develop this technology? Not because they're getting kickbacks, but because they want to sell it to HARDWARE_VENDOR_A! Why does HARDWARE_VENDOR_A buy it? Because they want to limit their liability.
No kickbacks involved, and parties paying someone to remove functionality from a product.
Ahh, but here's the thing: Part of the point of these watermarks is to be robust enough to be detectable even when you've tried to use the analog hole to get around it. So, if you use your camcorder to record a DVD playback, the watermark applied by the DVD playback is intended to still be detectable given a large enough sample -- and the folks making this equipment do in fact claim to be able to do precisely that. To put it a bit differently: You don't watermark the recorder, you watermark the playback.
So if the watermark applied by the PVR does its job, there isn't any need whatsoever for an additional one provided by the camera.
It's also about helping YouTube avoid massive liability by giving them better support for detecting ripped content before putting it up in the first place -- which also stops the moron in question from being sued into bankruptcy, at least unless he's moronic enough to then go and find a different hosting service which doesn't look for watermarks.
This isn't about watermarking everything; it's about watermarking content recorded using this "home gateway" device. If you record something with a camera you own (rather than recording it off the airwaves using your home gateway/media router), that's an entirely different deal -- so the home movie of your kids or the evidence of government malfeaseance is completely unimpacted.
Some of us don't live in the utopia where we happen to get that option -- if we're buying consumer-grade "solutions", anyhow.
Hardware manufacturers are necessarily pragmatic, and if you're making a consumer-targeted all-in-one solution with features that aid in redistributing copyrighted content, you risk getting shut down via a contributory infringement suit -- and the relevant laws are getting harsher and more restrictive all the time.
Now, for cameras I can see your point -- folks have a reasonable expectation of privacy with regard to being able to create content anonymously. On the other hand, if content is being recorded off the airwaves, a DVD or cable TV, there's a reasonable presumption (not always true, but pretty darned close) that someone holds copyright in it. You want hardware manufacturers to stop taking defensive measures like this? Get Congress to reinforce Betamax as the law of the land, clarify safe havens from contributory infringement suits for manufacturers making potentially misusable devices nonetheless clearly intended for noninfringing or fair-use purposes, and generally roll back the clock to pre-Napster. Good luck.
There is only one reason that a third party would want to get involved with this bullshit -- kickbacks from the MPAA and other media conglomerates.
No, no, no. The reason for a hardware manufacturer to get involved (and I think it's a damned compelling one) is avoidance of contributory infringement suits.
Slashdot Mirror
And here I was thinking realpolitik had mostly won.
"They" are not one unique set of individuals any more than slashdotters are. Hardware vendors have one set of interests; copyright holders have another. Many large copyright holders are certainly interested in making such things mandatory (and damn the innovation) -- but this is an article regarding an innovation by a hardware vendor, and as a group they're much more interested in retaining their ability to create and sell new products (and provide just enough concessions to the copyright holders to protect themselves).
The public interest is reasonably (not perfectly) well-aligned with hardware vendors' interests, even though it's badly disaligned with those of the large-scale IP holders.
And that said -- it's not even the copyright holders you're worrying about, but rather the neocons and nanny-state folks, an entirely different set. If and when that group tries to make watermarking mandatory, it can be suitably addressed at that time. Starting a backlash against anyone who tries to make a tool which could be used by an oppressive government to reduce individual rights is unreasonable -- after all, an oppressive government can use guns, cars and uniforms; should we thus be intrinsically opposed to any manufacturer making one of these three items?
I'm not really interested in reading something that's going to try to make me see anything and everything that enhances trackability as a slippery slope towards what you're describing.
Things are what they are; evaluating them as pieces of some "humongous jigsaw puzzle" rather than for their individual, standalone functions and repercussions is unreasonable.
"These SOBs" aren't the copyright cartel in this case -- rather, it's a hardware manufacturer who wants the ability to innovate without getting sued for all they're worth. The article summary is extremely misleading -- the devices this is about aren't DSL gateways but "home media gateways", and the intent is to watermark not all media passing through but rather all media which the device is used to encode. Manufacturers who make devices capable of encoding and sharing media are under substantial scrutiny from the content industry; this one has found a way to protect themselves that doesn't take away fair use rights.
Most of the folks I see getting really riled up in this discussion are misunderstanding or misrepresenting just what it is that they're arguing against.
I've already addressed this elsewhere: The article summary is badly misleading. This is not DSL router functionality, it's "home media gateway"/settop box functionailty. It does not impact arbitrary files you send and receive; it impacts things you use the hardware to record.
Yes, but the corporations involved in large-scale copyright-enforcement do quite a lot of that already, and have gotten fairly goood at it.
Yes, making it not work if it can't phone home is stupid. This is a cover-the-hardware-manufacturer's-ass measure, not a kill-the-pirates measure, remember? If the few users who are savvy enough to block phone-home packets from this device manage to do so -- so what? The watermark still provides evidence to implicate or exculpate an individual should they be otherwise identified, and the hardware manufacturer can still argue to Congress and/or the courts that they have 99%-effective measures in place (as far fewer than 1% of users are going to be the savvy block-the-packets types).
I have an essential liberty to record content off of cable TV or the airwaves without the hardware I use tagging the generated files as created by the individual device.
Riiiight.
This is not a computer that manipulates my content silently. The article summary claiming that this is about DSL routers is flat out wrong; it's about home media routers and network-enabled PVR-type boxes which can be used to record content off the airwaves.
So -- we're already not modifying preexisting content; rather, we're marking newly recorded content as created by this machine while we create it.
Not even "sharing with their friends". The watermark isn't checked by any kind of automated process; it's intended to help track down folks who posted something out to the world via BitTorrent. It's a bit more than a few colored bits on the screen -- a good watermark is robust enough to survive a trip through the analog hole, or reencoding with a low-bandwidth codec, so think large, subtle color shifts over time [large in terms of the size of the regions in question, that is].
Sure, the big-time pirates will use different equipment (why bother stripping a watermark when you can just use equipment that doesn't put in there in the first place?) -- but the point to this is giving manufacturers of networkable PVR boxes a defense to the charge that their equipment is helping to put TV shows on the Internet for free / kill babies / etc.
DRM isn't foolproof either -- but even knowing this, the content industry has yet to consider it worthless. (Also, watermarks can be surprisingly difficult to remove -- and this one is supposedly robust enough to survive an analog-hole roundtrip with a camcorder).
Even if we grant that software for removing these watermarks may become available, sophisticated infringers (ya know, folks who actually are aware of the watermarks and know where to find tools to remove them) aren't going to be using Thompson consumer-grade set-top boxes to digitize content they intend to share anyhow; they're not the audience this is intended to address.
Of course they'll both be used, if the content industry has their way. It's not the content industry doing this, though -- it's a hardware manufacturer; they have a completely different set of interests. Content-industry folks want to sell more copies of content, even if they have to suppress some innovation in the process. Hardware manufacturers, by contrast, want to innovate and sell more hardware -- but need to avoid lawsuits if any of the innovative and interesting functionality they add could be argued to assist copyright-infringing activities; see what happened to these folks for an example of what the content industry does to hardware manufacturers who get a bit too uppity.
This distinction being what it is, hardware manufacturers' interests generally align much more closely with those of consumers -- and if they can convince Congress and the courts that watermarking without heavy DRM is an appropriate way to allow them to innovate while still adequately protecting the content folks' interests, the content industry just might have to give.
You're just jealous. :)
When someone uses real arguments against me, I'll bother with real arguments to counter them. Claiming that I'm a shill without bothering to look at my posting history is just name-calling, not worth any kind of real response.
(Also, my writing style is fairly distinctive; it shouldn't be all that hard to google up some old posts and check for contiguity, if someone really thought I wasn't who I say I am).
I meant "no parties paying others to remove functionality", which should have been obvious from context; the intent was to refute the parent's claim that some malfeseance must have been going on.
They may not deserve it; however, what they deserve is far less important than what they manage to actually get.
If giving an inch of the public's privacy prevents the legislature from taking a mile out of our ability to make fair use of 3rd-party content, it's better than the alternative. Denying that we're even on the defensive does nothing to reduce the ground being lost, and reminds me very much of Executive-branch positioning regarding a certain war going on.
You're reading the blatantly false article summary, not the actual article.
This is not about DSL gateways, it's about "home media gateways" and set-top boxes. They do not in fact tag all video uploaded -- only video ripped using the hardware in question.
Huh?
The watermarks aren't used to determine whether you're allowed to watch something; they're used to track down people who are sharing things for which the copyright owners haven't permitted redistribution. They're applied not to the media, but to the equipment that records and plays said media. I don't know where you get the idea that personally recorded media would also need to be watermarked.
The massive database you refer to doesn't need to track media ownership, but only player location (ownership can be determined after-the-fact; even just recording the IP address from which a player last dialed home [this is for high-end, network-connectivity-enabled boxes] would be adequate). It's not an end-all-be-all government-mandated deal; it's a way for a single manufacturer to strike a bargain which isn't quite as anti-consumer as the one that's otherwise getting shoved down our collective throats.
That's not a problem with watermarking; rather, that's a problem with the courts, and properly a legislative issue. In some cases SLAPP laws might be used to counter any such baseless assertions of infringement -- they can make bringing a lawsuit against a private individual very expensive indeed.
Hey, Dave -- it's been a while. Look me up if you're even in the Austin area, 'kay?
Back onto topic... the Betamax case is no longer so sweeping as it once was; the breadth of its holding was significantly reduced by Grokster, and there are ongoing attempts to legislate around it entirely. A simple PVR is safe for now, but once one starts adding any kind of network functionality to it (even functionality clearly intended for space-shifting within a household), things become significantly less clearcut.
As you say, the law should be changed for the better (and ongoing attempts to change it for the worse should be resisted) -- but if I were a hardware manufacturer in that line of business right now, I'd want to cover my arse for the event that it changes for the worse.
I think you misunderstood what he was saying -- either that, or I did.
HARDWARE_VENDOR_A wants to build a system by which rich folks can digitize their whole DVD library and play back the movies they own on any screen in their house without needing to shuffle DVDs around. Thing is, the last folks who tried to do that were on the receiving end of a very nasty lawsuit from the motion picture industry (true story). So what does HARDWARE_VENDOR_A do? Well, one option is to buy a watermark chip from HARDWARE_VENDOR_B and including it in their product with the intent of mollifying the MPAA; at a minimum, it'll help them show in court that they were acting in good faith, and thus reduce their liability somewhat even if it won't be foreclosed.
Why does HARDWARE_VENDOR_B develop this technology? Not because they're getting kickbacks, but because they want to sell it to HARDWARE_VENDOR_A! Why does HARDWARE_VENDOR_A buy it? Because they want to limit their liability.
No kickbacks involved, and parties paying someone to remove functionality from a product.
Ahh, but here's the thing: Part of the point of these watermarks is to be robust enough to be detectable even when you've tried to use the analog hole to get around it. So, if you use your camcorder to record a DVD playback, the watermark applied by the DVD playback is intended to still be detectable given a large enough sample -- and the folks making this equipment do in fact claim to be able to do precisely that. To put it a bit differently: You don't watermark the recorder, you watermark the playback.
So if the watermark applied by the PVR does its job, there isn't any need whatsoever for an additional one provided by the camera.
Yup, a shill. Uh-huh. Look at my UID again.
What I am is a realist.
The article title is sorely misleading; this isn't about DSL gateways; rather, it's about settop boxes, "home media routers" and the like.
They aren't trying to take on Linksys, Netgear or D-Link -- at least, not with the products in question.
It's also about helping YouTube avoid massive liability by giving them better support for detecting ripped content before putting it up in the first place -- which also stops the moron in question from being sued into bankruptcy, at least unless he's moronic enough to then go and find a different hosting service which doesn't look for watermarks.
This isn't about watermarking everything; it's about watermarking content recorded using this "home gateway" device. If you record something with a camera you own (rather than recording it off the airwaves using your home gateway/media router), that's an entirely different deal -- so the home movie of your kids or the evidence of government malfeaseance is completely unimpacted.
Some of us don't live in the utopia where we happen to get that option -- if we're buying consumer-grade "solutions", anyhow.
Hardware manufacturers are necessarily pragmatic, and if you're making a consumer-targeted all-in-one solution with features that aid in redistributing copyrighted content, you risk getting shut down via a contributory infringement suit -- and the relevant laws are getting harsher and more restrictive all the time.
Now, for cameras I can see your point -- folks have a reasonable expectation of privacy with regard to being able to create content anonymously. On the other hand, if content is being recorded off the airwaves, a DVD or cable TV, there's a reasonable presumption (not always true, but pretty darned close) that someone holds copyright in it. You want hardware manufacturers to stop taking defensive measures like this? Get Congress to reinforce Betamax as the law of the land, clarify safe havens from contributory infringement suits for manufacturers making potentially misusable devices nonetheless clearly intended for noninfringing or fair-use purposes, and generally roll back the clock to pre-Napster. Good luck.
No, no, no. The reason for a hardware manufacturer to get involved (and I think it's a damned compelling one) is avoidance of contributory infringement suits.