Nielsen To Offer Web Copyright Protection System 108
J053 writes "The Nielsen company, along with Digimarc, are planning to offer their digital watermarking technology to web content providers. According to Information Week, the system will provide 'a way to quickly discover unauthorized content on sites. To do that, the system would leverage Nielsen's existing watermark technology, which is used on more than 95% of TV programming distributed today. The watermarks are used by the meters installed in people's home to identify the programs they watch.'"
fair use (Score:3, Insightful)
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Doesn't mean that it'll be implemented, of course, or that it's easy to make it fool proof, especially in edge cases, but it's certainly not impossible.
Re:fair use (Score:5, Insightful)
So implementing it is politically unacceptable for a company whose mandate is to maximize profit for its shareholders (like most for-profit companies) but only real product/course of action is to control the means of distribution. The "rights" of the end users are the least they care about. If they could get away with it, they would charge for every pair of eyes and ear every time one "experiences" the content.
I'm not trying to demonize them; but a lot of actions of "content companies" make sense if you take the view that maximizing profit is their main driver. What we need to truly defeat it is either find an alternate (legal) business model for artists or other "content providers", and find ways to (legally) make "content distributors" irrelevant. Of course the latter will fight toe and nail and use every political mean they have to keep their paychecks, like some corporate version of Luddites.
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Perhaps what is needed is a law that the companies should be obliged to maximize long term profits for its shareholders rather than the current, shirt-sighted trend which is to fill their shareholders' coffers today and screw thoughts about tomorrow.
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I agree that companies should not base their motives solely on profit (especially short-term profit) but at the same time I do not believe that we should force them to take initiative by enacting a law requiring them to do so.
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Its either to make a fair and believable shot at it, or alienate a fair number of your customers,
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If you open your eyes to whats going on, you will see ALOT of people have stopped buying music, watching TV and are meeting in different environments experiencing life other than what is prepackaged and prepared for us by huge corporations.
Well if that is indeed the case, than it is definitely relative. I can tell you for a fact that if you go to an average college campus today you will find that the bulk of the populace is still composed of mindless sheep. They still blast the latest hip hip singles out of their car windows and still buy brand-name clothing because it's what everybody else is doing.
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There are far better options than that, pal, and ones that don't require showing such disdain, or even outright hostility, for your customers. If you've ever spoken to a musician who's gone around once or twice with the record labels, you'd know that they could have made just as much money by g
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If you are an artist just starting out, you should spend your downtime learning all you can about Creative Com
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Well, for fucks sake, go and write and article about it to wikipedia, because there was no information about this fucking four fucking factor fucking test for fucks sake. And stop being such a fucking pussy with your insults, for fucks sake.
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You can see the factors listed as 1-4. Then the next bold headings further down in the section about US fair use cover the factors, each in turn.
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A check like you propose would certainly be a good attempt, but it isn't going to preserve fair use. It's a much more complicated test. 5% may be acceptable in one case but not in another.
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If such a system could reduce the workload for human-assisted operators to a sensible level, the operating costs shouldn't be too high. A community effort to raise the cost of DMCA takedowns by issui
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Ah, the fabled sexternary operator, nice to meet you! I can just smell all the minimalist legacy C programmers wetting themselves right now, getting excited over how unintelligible they could have made their code had they had access to such a beast in The One True Programming Language (TM) before they had to be tainted by this whole "class
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A community effort to raise the cost of DMCA takedowns by issuing counter-notices for all "bad" requests would also help lowering the cost of such a layer.
That, and we could actually enforce the penalties for sending frivolous takedown notices that exist in the same law that instated them. I've heard of many stories about companies getting caught sending these frivolous notices, but none that indicate that the company was ever punished for it.
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I'm sure this will have a painful affect on fair use - but the pain will only fuel the coming copyright revolution.
Re:fair use (Score:5, Insightful)
Well so what? If it's fair use it can be defended. I object to DRM because it prevents me from using the product I've purchased in fair ways and even worse, it prevents me from ever really owning what I've bought - never knowing when it will be taken away from me by a company's failure or a change in technology. But watermarking does none of that. If it doesn't interfere with my enjoyment of the product, then I have no problem with it. I think I even approve as a means of keeping down piracy will encourage companies to sell me products in a way that I want - i.e. as downloads.
Personally, I encourage watermarking.
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I think that you misunderstood his post. His objection is exactly the reason why he does not buy DRM-protected content, or that's at least how I interpreted his post.
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You're talking to Walmart nation here, doesn't that tell you something?
In actual response to your question, the problem is that lots o
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To me, buying music is not like buying coffee. If I buy a coffee somewhere and don't like the service I can just go and get a coffee elsewhere. Some coffees are better than others, but there's a lot of good coffee.
Good music*, on the other hand, is unique. You _can't_ go elsewhere for it, hence DRM screws you over. It's like the great art/philosophy - it's the lastest attempt by human kind to "work it all out".
This may sound wanky,
problem with 'vote with your dollars'... (Score:1)
You can hypothetically 'vote with your wallet' and not buy drm-ed products (do you count DVDs in that, btw? It's a debatable point, where there is DRM on them, but it's so trivial to get around...), but once you expand the scope of "stuff I won't buy because ethically, I don't support the actions of the producers", well, try and buy a computer that wasn't manufactured with near-slave-labo
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Fixed that for you. Nobody cares about you offering *your* media on file sharing networks, But if you do not own the distribution rights, its not for you to offer it. Unless you want to pay a few million to the movie production company that put up the money to make it. You seem to think its great that people get to enjoy the music and movies for free, but the people who pay their rent and feed thei
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The 'Statue of Anne' in 1710 introduced the idea of the author holding copyright and a term of protection for published works.
Compared to Art, it is just a baby. Human beings have been making art since we were painting the walls of caves, and probably even well before then, but few things have survived for so long. Some of what we still consider our greatest stories and plays and sculptures and paintings were created thousands of years before copyright first came into being.
So no, cop
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How long something has existed for (and a few centuries is plenty long enough in terms of law), is no basis for deciding if it is beneficial or not, it only provides further evidence on which to assess the matter. If someone produces music or a film that I enjoy, I want that person to be rewarded. Out of recognition that my tastes aren't universal, I'm even magnanimous enough to want artists to be rewarded for things other people like which I don't. Unless an artist is to hire their own thugs to go around
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Yes, if that were your goal. But that has never been the goal of copyright.
Copyright is meant to benefit the public, not authors. It benefits the public if authors create and publish more works, so an incen
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I don't agree with you. Where you say:
Wow! Harsh! It would be a terrible idea to have anything implemented into law that helped someone profit from their work? That is what most of your post is saying. That if I slave away for a couple of years over a novel, society has the right to rip it away from me because that benef
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No, only if that was the goal. If the goal is to advance the public interest by promoting the progress of science, and the best means of doing so happens to involve helping authors to profit from their creative works, then I'm entirely in favor of it.
I'm just saying that the goal of copyright is to maximally benefit the public. You're confusing the means for the end.
That if I slave away for a couple
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I agree with you 100%. that sort of thing is crap.
But is there a solution for songwriters on the Internet who don't want to end up broke like Jammie Thomas?
But that doesn't vaguely stretch to cover the issue that media companies have with filesharing, which is the mass copying and distribution of perfect digital copies of other peoples work. Surely you agree that this is wrong?
I agree that the intentional mass copying and distribution of entire newly published works without the author's consent and without transformative use is wrong. But in general, the U.S. copyright statute is utterly broken with respect to the "intentional", "newly published", and "transformative" parts. Worse, Congress takes too many campaign contributions from entertainment industry giants to have any
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Maybe if there was some kind of legal fund for defending fair use that you could dip into, you might have a chance.
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So what are you saying here? That if I make a backup of the media that I've bought, that Michael Bey is going to burst through my door with a lawyer under each arm? That I'll get into trouble for moving videos to a new machine or listening to music on a recently purchased player or lending a file to a friend that I trust?
Or perhaps you think the sam
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Go take a chill pill.
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I'm baffled. What in my post is incorrect and why?
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I think you may have hit reply to the wrong post? You said:
And I questioned what exactly you expected to be sued for? The chief aim of fair use for me is to use my purchased file in an unrestricted way - putting it on new machines, backing it up, having it in an open format that I'm not dependent on a company to main
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My point is that if someone wants to sue you for infringing your copyright and you think "Ha! Fair use allows me to do what I did!" then you better think again cause they can still sue you and you can still end up being bankrupted by the time you've proven that fair use is an adequate defense. Then you can happily try to find a "no will no pay" lawyer to recover some of your l
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You said I would be unable to defend myself against claims of copyright infringement. I listed the things that I thought constituted fair use and said that I didn't think any of them would result in a law suit. I'm asking you for the third time what in there was incorrect and why. If you're going to say that watermarking will result in people engaged in fair use being sued (and my point all along is that i
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And I've been saying all along, and very clearly and explicitly, is that I don't think it plausible that I will be sued for fair usage of a watermarked product. If you're not disagreeing with me on that point, then why have you been trying to argue with me for the last four or five posts? Have I been trolled?
Okay, let's just wind this up. I don't think anyone is still reading this thread but you and I.
Legal representation is still expensive (Score:1)
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The other problem being, 'it won't work.'
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> but the pain will only fuel the coming copyright revolution.
It will surely make for a few amusing emails on the `legal threats` page of PirateBay...
Fair use is never "provided", it must be "taken" (Score:2)
My peeve in fair use these days is ringtones. What about making a 10-second sample of a song for use as a ring-tone violates fair use? (You're just playing 10 seconds of a song you already "own" on a "music player" called a phone, right?) And yet, if you look at iTunes, they will only allow you to make ringtones of songs that the owners have explicitly permitted such usage.
Feh.
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"Unauthorized content" (Score:1)
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They won't outlaw them. You will just have to pay a monthly fee as long as you remember [to do it].
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What? It would be fatal to remove it from your brain? Who cares.
Those of us with flawed implants [imdb.com] have nothing to worry about.
Actually somewhat sane. (Score:4, Insightful)
But if we must have the DMCA, I'd much rather have takedown notices than outlawing circumvention.
Historically speaking (Score:1)
Careful Comerad, they listen always. (Score:1)
My thoughts about this (and the tech where your personal info is embedded in your legal/bought copy of movies/music) as follows.
Would you have to actually remove the watermarks? If they are designed so that they don't corrupt the media enough for you to notice/care, it should be simple to write random white-noise over the watermarked sections. Hopefully the new data would al
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Additionally, TFA says that if there's no watermark, they'd generate a digital signature and compare that. So strip the watermark, and it'll take a
Watermarks are hogwash. (Score:5, Interesting)
By the time they get "watermarking" to work what they'll have is a pattern matching machine that can match tv shows to youtube clips. They are a long ways from doing that though due to the amount of content it would have to work through in a timely manner.
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It's not like that'd be hard. Just have a list of their TV shows, then send them in search requests to Youtube. Then check each title to make sure it contains the searched text in the right order (eg. "How I met your mother" - and possibly spelling variat
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Audio watermarks are used all the time. The company I work for uses them to assist in identifying ad plays on broadcast radio. (The company I work for also identifies audio without watermarking. You don't need watermarking, it just makes things easier.)
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Listen to the radio much lately? Or watch TV? Go to the movies? Most of what's being produced as a result of this "economic incentive" you speak of is total absolute crap.
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Most of what's being produced as a result of this "economic incentive" you speak of is total absolute crap.
Thanks for introducing whine number two, right on schedule. "I don't want to pay for it, cos it's crap, yet strangely I still want to waste my time viewing it as long as it's free". Just how much consideration should we give to the opinions of someone who values their time so little and has so little taste? And if root of this problem is the "economic incentive", what do you suggest replaces it? Just what else is going to get Hollywood out of bed and spending millions making TV/films that aren't crap
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Then why do you want to watch it? I dislike our copyright laws, but many people on my side are also under the delusion that somehow the quality of popular art will somehow improve if there was no copyright.
Some Guy Who Doesn't Want To Take Out A 2nd Mortgage To Go See A FSCKING Movie
The work is FUCK, as in "fucker," "fucking," and
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Welcome to the circus (Score:4, Funny)
That does it... (Score:2)
This is my New-Years resolution, starting now;
No paid TV subscriptions. Bell ExpressVu you are history.
No paid radio subscriptions. Sirius good-bye.
TV will be limited to OTA access only.
Media center linux-box will serve-up my movies.
That should save me ~$90/month. That can offset the cost of a very fat internet pipe.
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http://www.thenation.com/special/bigten.html [thenation.com]
You wouldn't want to purchase your "fat internet pipe" from the very same corporation that used to provide you with television.
Uhm.... (Score:2)
Still waiting for Google-Tunes
Other uses for Watermarks (Score:1)
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"Leverage"? (Score:1)
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Or more likely the "verb form"? http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=2&q=Leverage [reference.com]
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Watermarking is fine (Score:3, Informative)
Why is Neilson still in business? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd think that over a hundred million samples would be quite a bit better than a few thousand, no matter how well-chosen those few thousand are. As for privacy concerns, I'd specifically choose a cable company that tracked what shows I watch, since it'd mean that shows I like wouldn't get canceled because by some fluke, a few thousand people chosen for their willingness to keep a diary of their viewing habits, happened to not like it (or maybe just didn't notice it was available). They'd get canceled because I really am the only one actually watching.
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95% of all TV worldwide? (Score:2)