Using Watermarks to Combat Piracy 406
TheEvilOverlord writes to tell us PC Advisor is reporting that researchers at the Fraunhofer Integrated Publication and Information Systems Institute have developed a new watermarking system to help track and combat piracy. From the article: "The system lets content providers, such as music studios, embed a watermark in their downloadable MP3 files. Watermark technology makes slight changes to data in sound and image files. For instance, the change could be a higher volume intensity in a tiny part of a song or a brighter colour in a minuscule part of a picture. Even the best-trained human eyes and ears, according to Kip, can't detect the change."
Re:Human? (Score:1, Informative)
If it is in the actual data (Score:2, Informative)
The practical use (Score:2, Informative)
band releases early copies of an album to reviewers. if the album leaks, the people who sent out the advances can find out who leaked it.
Re:And this fights piracy how? (Score:5, Informative)
You code media players to detect the watermark (which would have to be in a standardized format) and refuse to play anything that does not contain the watermark. Conversely, ripping programs will not rip anything containing the watermark, making it harder to copy the source. You wouldn't have to worry so much about removal programs, as programs that would "fake" the watermark, basically couterfeiting programs. Of course, those would pop up fifteen minutes later.
Re:Human? (Score:5, Informative)
That's a valid intput, but steganographers thought of that years ago already. Decent steganographic techniques include low-frequency information that can make them quite resilient to a fair deal of subsampling, recompressing, re-encoding and so on. The idea is not to make a "miniscule variation" but a very subtle variation over a large area. You can think of it like, the actual information is in the 'high bits' not the 'low bits'. Info in the 'low bits' is easily destroyed.
Short memories -- this was called SDMI (Score:5, Informative)
Basically, the Powers That Be came up with a very good watermarking system, but even the best system can be defeated by a very determined adversary -- especially since the watermarks can't be updated once the CDs are shipped.
Another problem that I've always had with these systems is the proof issue. If the RIAA tries to prosecute you for having watermarked files, they have to demonstrate the watermark. I can't imagine how they could show that without revealing exactly how the watermark is detected -- and once they do that, you should be off to the races.
Anyway -- this has been tried, and it has failed. The SDMI system was really quite sophisticated, and it failed almost immediately.
Thad Beier
Re:Human? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Human? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Human? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Human? (Score:3, Informative)
Oops, I don't actually know all that much about steg., it was years ago that I was into it (and mostly for images) and I've forgotten a lot of it now, so I don't feel that mod was deserved ... but anyway, this looks like a fair starting point: http://www.jjtc.com/stegdoc/ [jjtc.com] ... there are quite a few different techniques, most of which are detectable though.
Re:Human? (Score:3, Informative)
True, if you rip your own from CD. If you are purchasing online music though it will already be compressed ... some existing audio stego techniques are integrated into the compressors, e.g. mp3stego [petitcolas.net]:
"The hiding process takes place at the heart of the Layer III encoding process namely in the inner_loop. The inner loop quantizes the input data and increases the quantiser step size until the quantized data can be coded with the available number of bits. Another loop checks that the distortions introduced by the quantization do not exceed the threshold defined by the psycho acoustic model."
Re:Why should Clear Channel care about file sharer (Score:5, Informative)
Your problem is that you are accepting the recording industry's propaganda, i.e. "We oppose piracy because people will listen to pirated copies instead of buying CDs."
The *real* objection of the recording industry, and this goes double for clear-channel, is that P2P sidesteps their promotion monopolies and makes the music market harder to manage and control. Fragmentation of the market costs them their niche at the top of the foodchain.
The best example of this attitude was, a while back, movie industry executives noticed that some heavily promoted presumed-blockbuster (I forget which movie it was, The Island maybe) was getting far less than the guaranteed level of attendance given the advertising budget. Careful marketing research traced this phenomenon back to bad word of mouth, which was spreading faster than it had in the past, chiefly by cellphone.
The response of the movie industry was NOT "gee, we'd better stop making movies that even brain damaged 11 year-olds regard as intellectually insulting", but instead "is there any way we can make it illegal to badmouth our movies by text message? Libel law, maybe?" Fortunately, they concluded that was a non-starter.
That long tangent aside, look at clearchannel. Clearchannel's business model depends COMPLETELY on the willingness of the general public to agree-to-like whatever 30 songs they decide they want to play/promote in a single month. They also need to make sure that people keep listening to the radio and not to ipods. Alternate routes of distribution are just as much a threat to clearchannel as they are to the recording industry.
Re:Human? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Human? (Score:3, Informative)
As far as the watermarking tools themselves, all the ones I'm aware of are proprietary (patented and/or trademarked.) They are certainly not open source. If you think about it, that's the only way watermarking software can ever be made practical. Watermarking is 100% "security through obscurity." Once an attacker is aware of a watermark, that watermark can be tampered with and/or destroyed. But GPL'd code is not obscure: it is transparent by fiat. So anyone attacking an open source watermarked document would either completely undo the mark or completely and perfectly obscure the meaning of the mark.
Under 18 (Score:3, Informative)
[Commercial music radio stations] also need to make sure that people keep listening to the radio and not to ipods.
In that case, they have the under-18 market sewn up, as students in public K-12 school systems in the United States are generally forbidden to bring an iPod or other electronic music player on the school bus without the express written consent of school administration.
Re:Short memories -- this was called SDMI (Score:3, Informative)
"watermark" is supposed to mean it is invisibly small. A player that does not play things with the wrong watermark is an amplifier that removes the invisiblitiy. It is then not a "watermark". Any such player should be kept under close lock and key, not sold to the masses at Walmart.
Re:Why should Clear Channel care about file sharer (Score:3, Informative)
Here's the old
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08
Re:Human? (Score:1, Informative)
Each year the publisher gets a stack of poor quality air tapes (cassettes, when I was doing it....probably CDs now). Some poor schlub had to sit down and listen to all the tapes (which represented, at least in the minds of ASCAP), a statistically accurate sampling of all the airplay in the region), hoping to hear one of the tracks you own.
The tapes were typically poor quality, the tracks were usually covered with voiceovers or other effects, and often edited as well. The payoff was that if you could prove a radio station had played your music you could potentially get a large royalty check.
Now, if you can automate the process, by burning a watermark into your music and scanning the tapes with your computer, you have a much better chance of finding your music and potentially making money.