Watermarking to Replace DRM? 365
An anonymous reader writes "News.com has an article on the announcement of Microsoft and Universal to introduce watermarking technology into audio files. The technology could serve several purposes including tracking file sharing statistics and inserting advertisements into audio tracks. The article goes on to suggest that watermarking could possibly replace DRM in the near future."
Won't help (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Won't help (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Won't help (Score:5, Interesting)
Should you succed in detecting one watermark, who says that they have not many watermarks in the sound? Can you prove that you have removed ALL watermarks from a file?
A sound file might be small enough for just having a few watermarks, but a movie should be big enough for each file to have several watermarks in it. Happy sharing.
Re:Won't help (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Won't help (Score:4, Insightful)
Suppose that you have multiple watermarks, some are identical from files to files, some specify the server they comes from, others the buyer, and some the music company?
And finally, not being a watermark expert... there might exist water mark technology that can survive such behaviour.
Still, if it was you who bought the file, i would very much dare you to prove that even after you did what you describe that after that, there are NO watermarks left.
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Re:Will Help (Score:5, Insightful)
Watermarking is quite frankly fantastic. If these companies are moving to watermarking instead of DRM then more power to their balance books! I'm not interested in downloading music or movies. I want to buy them. DRM stops me doing that and from getting the product that I want. Watermarking doesn't stop me from doing anything I'm legitimately allowed to do so if it satisfies their requirements to go and catch people who do make illegitimate copies, then I would very much like them to use Watermarking. Hopefully it will lead to more products that I can buy online.
Watermark detection may prevent copying... (Score:4, Interesting)
As I understood, one of the entertainment "industry" proposals was to watermark everything then convince or require by law that consumer electronic manufacturers put watermark detection into their hardware. Such hardware wouldn't copy or play "unauthorized" watermarks. In fact, wasn't this put into the SSSCA?
Actually such a system seems to be in place for banknotes and photoshop... [slashdot.org] I also heard some printer drivers do this. Seems to require lots more CPU time as one would expect. Here are some interesting articles: Adobe anti-counterfeiting code trips up kosher users. [theregister.co.uk] Currency Detector Easy to Defeat [wired.com].
A better idea... (Score:5, Informative)
I posted a comment at news.com with basically the same idea.
If the bits and bytes can be adjusted in an undetectable manner to put a watermark on, say, an audio or video file, why can't someone just come along after and adjust the bits and bytes again in some random manner to effectively erase the watermark? I mean, if they can't read the bits and bytes that they put on the media because they've been altered, they wouldn't be able to track it, and the watermark would pretty effectively be broken.
It just seems to me that although having a bit-for-bit identical copy of the original would be nice, they've already altered it so that we can't get that. Altering it a bit more (no pun intended) wouldn't really be harmful, and it would still meet the end goal of distributing the media untraceably.
But you're right, another option would be to have two (three? four?) accounts get multiple copies of the same file and do a bit-by-bit comparison, either averaging the differences or picking from one of the two copies at random. If you have multiple copies, you might even be able to derive a highly probable copy of the original.
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It is possible to make a watermark that is a sequence of encrypted bits that are sufficiently scrambled and modulated over multiple orthogonal frequencies as to appear to be nothing more than very slight background hiss. Redundancy from multiple copies of the watermark would still allow extracting it even if other noise is added. You'd have to know how to decode the watermark, or at least demodulate it if the frequency set is not cryptographically selected, to remove it. If you merged two songs, you very
Re:Won't help (Score:4, Insightful)
What if pirates get ahold of multiple MP3s? Why bother? Pirates can hijack the ships that carry CDs across the sea and rip the CDs themselves, making MP3s that don't contain watermarks.
Yeah, there's a joke in there, but I have a serious point. It's likely that someone with a lot of technical knowledge will be able to remove watermarks, it's also true that a person with a lot of technical knowledge will be able to bypass DRM. Someone who's serious about distributing copyrighted material will be able to find a loophole somewhere, and the only realistic purpose of a DRM scheme or watermarking scheme is to discourage casual sharing.
Even though people will find a way to remove this watermarking, most people won't bother to figure out how to do it. It might succeed at discouraging casual file sharing without impeding customers from using the content they've purchased.
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I believe that the music industry are capable of spending a lot of money on developing a sufficient good watermark technology, also one that will survive multiple reencoding attempts.
Also, suppose that they give each buyer a sufficiently unique number, and then they put this number into al
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Its VERY easy to remove watermarks, no matter how sophisticated. Don't believe me? Take two or more originals, uncompress the format, compare the difference, null the offending part, and re-encode.
This cat-mouse game will continue until the end of time.
Re:Won't help (Score:5, Insightful)
Its VERY easy to remove watermarks, no matter how sophisticated. Don't believe me? Take two or more originals, uncompress the format, compare the difference, null the offending part, and re-encode.
This cat-mouse game will continue until the end of time.
Even if you have the original CD, and you rip the track from it, encode it into the exact Mp3 format (same bitrate and all) as the watermarked one, what guarantees that iTunes used the same disc to encode it? What guarantees that iTunes rip the same exact way as you? Nothing, so the Mp3 file will be different even if encoded with same parameters.
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Re:Won't help (Score:5, Insightful)
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The Joe Sixpacks of the world apparently don't care about quality (hence the ubiquity of MP3s)
Has it suddenly become fashionable on slashdot to slag off MP3?
When MP3 was first released it was head and shoulders above the other audio formats available (apart from Real Audio) in terms of quality per MB of filesize. Lets remember it is now 16 years old. In 1991 your choice was uncompressed (approx 60 meg per track) or MP3 (approx 6MB per track).
Nowadays MP3's are ubiquitous not because none of us care about the lss in quality, but because it is the easiest format to find portable devices that play the
Re:Won't help (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Won't help (Score:4, Insightful)
Obviously, the information watermarked needs to be limited to an identifier rather than encoding the name in for privacy, but if they know that the MP3 with the watermark 19584202984512903 was sold to me, they can track it back if they find it on P2P without exposing my personal information.
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I don't see a jury convicting a peer because their player was lost/stolen. Heck, anyone could just say their player was lost/stolen, the perfect defense next to the Ch [wikipedia.org]
Great idea if properly implemented...it won't be (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately it will be used to connect specific downloads to individuals allowing the RIAA to target their lawsuits more accurately. It will still be as impossible to prove in court but will drive an even deeper wedge between the RIAA and reality.
The only way the RIAA will stop suing is when someone wins a countersuit big enough to affect the bottom line of the corporations supporting them.
Re:Great idea if properly implemented...it won't b (Score:5, Insightful)
Quite correct. If you buy Hillary Duff's latest single today, and are sick of it in two weeks, and decide to sell that MP3 to someone who isn't yet sick to death of hearing about her crap, and then that buyer uploads it to all the P2P networks (I'm still trying to figure out who the hell is buying her crap in the first place but bear with me) the RIAA would go after you. They'd insist that in addition to not having Fair Use, you do not have the Right of First Sale. It SHOULD be simple to squelch their argument but unfortunately they have deep pockets with which to buy the courts.
But: that is where watermarking can be harmful. If you buy an MP3 and resell it legally (destroying all copies you have) you're LEGALLY in the clear, or if you purchase it as a gift (and again, destroying all copies you have) the "evidence" would point back at you, but the evidence really isn't proof of ANYTHING in this case. It's like a crime having happened in a subway with no witnesses, and you get charged because your fingerprints happen to be on one of the handrails. That fingerprint is simply evidence that you were there sometime in the past, not that you had anything to do with the incident.
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I happen to think it's unethical to share copyrighted work without the artist's permission (regardless of whether it's legal or not).
Sorry, but I had to say something here. It's not the artist's permission 99% of the time - it's the permission of the record company that coerced ownership away from the artist.
I don't approve of copyright violation as a general rule, but in this one case, why not? The record companies are basically evil incarnate these days. Want to predict how they'll handle a given situation? Ask yourself What Satan Would Do. Given that they're working to change the law to steal from me (by effectively revoking
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Re:Won't help (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Won't help (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Won't help (Score:5, Insightful)
Watermarking isn't good in my view, even compared to DRM. There will still be legal restrictions on what you can do. You won't be legally allowed to do ANYTHING to the file except play it. You could even be legally responsible if a virus happened to alter the file.
This won't affect pirates. It won't affect file sharers. It only hurts the consumer and hurts everyone in the long run.
Re:Won't help (Score:5, Interesting)
I assume "They" want to catch the sophisticated pirates distributing tons of material, not the unsophisticated share-1-song with a friend people. Oh wait... that would make sense in a sane world.
Watermarking pretends people have control. (Score:5, Insightful)
There are numerous other ways files are moved around. If you take your computer in for repair, it is possible [blogtoplist.com] the repair person will copy any files he or she wants.
Re:Won't help (Score:5, Interesting)
I love the smell of FUD in the morning...
Seriously. Watermarks are progress. You disagree, that's fine, but lets debate it on its merits and not base our opinions on fear-mongering and FUD.
What about the techniques used in CDMA? (Score:5, Interesting)
The downside is that by definition the noise you add has to be audible. Note that for a long time audio cassettes sold very well despite their awful noise characteristics, so this may be acceptable to all but the strictest of audiophiles.
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Legal uses include fair use and right of first sale. You still have the right to sell it to someone else when you are done with it and no longer wish to possess it, and you have the right to give it away. In both cases you must destroy all copies.
Re:Won't help (Score:4, Insightful)
DRM has also never been a tool to eliminate filesharing. I guess in the meantime even the RIAA has understood that. It's a tool to reduce it. Just like copy protection on software is. If someone wants to crack it, he will. But Joe Average won't.
I think watermarks would give everyone what they want. You can actually buy content without fearing that it won't work in your application. The RIAA gets the limitation of sharing because the watermarked stuff could be traced. And well, if you can remove DRM you can remove watermarks.
It's actually win-win all over.
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I think watermarks would give everyone what they want. You can actually buy content without fearing that it won't work in your application. The RIAA gets the limitation of sharing because the watermarked stuff could be traced. And well, if you can remove DRM you can remove watermarks.
You forgot about the practical joke possibilities. Such as borrow the mp3 player of a coworker/boss/ex-girlfriend, copy the watermarked tunes out, post them on a P2P network, then sit back and watch a squadron of RIAA attack lawyers ruin his/her life...
The *only* ones who benefit from watermarking are the content distributors - it gives them traceability so they know who to sue. It *does* give the consumer a less restricted product, but at the cost of making said consumer liable if the "wrong person" eve
Still a reason not to buy (Score:5, Insightful)
Congratulations, record companies, for coming up with yet another reason not to buy your products. To a consumer that is toying with the idea of buying a song rather than downloading it for free, watermarking could potentially be an even larger disincentive than DRM.
- DRM: If you buy this song, you run the risk that you won't be able to play it on the hardware that you have now or will have in the future. Total risk exposure: 99 cent
- Watermarking: If you buy this song, you run the risk that it somehow ends up on the filesharing networks with your name written all over it, and you get sued to smithereens by the RIAA. Total risk exposure: a gazillion dollars
Why would consumers find this so much more attractive?Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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In the US legal system, the burden of proof tends to fall on the person who doesn't a multimillion-dollar legal department at his disposal.
Besides, the RIAA prefers extortion to legal action. They just have to send you a letter stating one of your music files ended up on a filesharing network, and you can pony up a few grand or face the consequences. Heck, they don't even have to be telling t
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Examples are numerous of how digital files can leak away from you. You would need to be paranoid and skillfull to properly secure music files which would become very
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>a filesharing network, perhaps? There is no other way
Of course there are other ways. They might vary some depending on what country in question the person happens to be in (including travelling to/through). Many countries allows for various legal cases of when copying is perfectly legal. Similary, many countries allows for a change of ownership of a copy (for example thorugh gift, loan, purchase and so on). Just two examples.
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This is a way to ACTUALLY go after the abusers of file sharing, not the consumers or the original downloaders.
BTW Digital watermarking has been in photos and video for a LONG LONG time now, you can open up most p
Re:Still a reason not to buy (Score:5, Informative)
It's drafting us for market research, not preparations for lawsuits.
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Perhaps it's not about "buying". Perhaps it's about "giving it away and seeing how it becomes popular." With tracking information from the watermarks, the labels will have some better understanding of how & when a song becomes a "hit", making it easier for them to market future artists.
Microsoft may try to pitch this as not "control", but "make money from free music". RIAA companies need to find a new way to market and distribute their money for profit, and they need it fast. What better way to do t
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If you buy this song, you run the risk that it somehow ends up on the filesharing networks with your name written all over it, and you get sued to smithereens by the RIAA. Total risk exposure: a gazillion dollars
That's right. In exactly the same way you'd get sued if your car is stolen and ends up involved in a bank robbery. I guess you should avoid placing your name on any of your property. No knowing where it might end up, doing what, and you'd automatically be liable!!
In what way is this input 'insightful'?
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What impact? (Score:2)
The only impact will be on the people who still buy the stuff; those who share it online won't have any problems.
Impact? The only thing most consumers will care about is that they CAN rip the tracks to their PC, share them with their friends, load them onto network and USB devices, etc. The need to by pass the watermarking will now be pretty much relegated to the piracy groups.
Even if this doesn't prevent the piracy groups from doing their thing, at least it won't interfere with consumers fair use rights the way DRM does. There will be a few consumers who complain about damaged audio quality due to the watermark, but
Re:Won't help - are you really sure? (Score:2)
Please prove that a bought
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Watermarks can be invisible or imperceivable so they will have no impact on people who buy the stuff - unless they share them around. In normal use they would have no effect on listening / viewing. What a company would do if they caught you filesharing is an interesting question, but assuming you were law abiding you would be just fine. This is
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By analogy, when college students copy other people's work on papers or other assignments (another "crime" of convenience), they nearly always copy verbatim, may
A nice idea, but short-lived? (Score:2, Insightful)
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It's the same as with invisible watermarks in pictures. Just save the image (normally a jpg) again, with recompressing, and the watermark will be mostly gone.
You can argue that re-encoding songs like this diminishes quality, which is true, but it is so little that it's not audible. A minor, inaudible quality loss is a small price to pay for DRM/Watermark fr
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But it's a hassle and most people aren't going to do that - they probably won't even realise that it is there in the first place.
Music companies seem to be smelling the coffee. DRM would never work because you only need one clever person to circumvent it and then it will turn up on P2P for everyone to see. Conversely, with watermarking you only need one stupid person to put their unstripped content on P2P and you have found the culprit.
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Even if this doesn't prevent piracy (which it's not designed to do, if you RTFA) it doesn't piss off customers and probably isn't very expensive at all, since the file format doesn't change, doesn't require special software or codecs on the users' end, and is generally painless to everyone.
The article talks about this only being used to track where a file came from originally, and not watermarking them individually. Personally, I think it would
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It may be trivial to remove, but the average consumer will be too lazy/inept to remove it.
Re:A nice idea, but short-lived? (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally, I'd say the first. If someone's a "heavy P2P user", he doesn't care about either. Someone WILL have removed that DRM or watermark for him. No matter how tough, no matter how good, DRM has always been broken and will always be broken.
So what's left? The market for the Joe Average users who do not know how to circumvent DRM or watermarks, and who do not know about P2P. And those people will buy, as long as it works in their players.
Merge the files (Score:5, Funny)
its just a way of hiding information.
reading up on it says nothing bad.
Situations may arise when it will be used incorrectly.
To be certain though we should filter out the bad stuff.
Perhaps a better way would be doing nothing.
or maybe we can filter them out
Suppose we find multiple files and merge them.
That would work wouldn't it?
Re:Merge the files (Score:5, Funny)
Shame you spent so long working on your acrostic that you missed the 1st post
Next time I suggest your starting point be "Eighth Post"
Same as with DRM (Score:4, Informative)
Which is precisely why it won't work. What one tool can detect, another can circumvent.
Oh, and it's detectable and not detectible. Don't know what moron at news.com.com hired Taco...
This message is brought to you by the Bureau of Massively Distributed Peer Review, Department of Free Culture.
Tired of advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
We live in a world of massive information-availability. A consumer who wishes to consume is equipped to find the "best" product for the job, and often will. Brand-recognition is a weakening force and it's high time we stop polluting our senses with invasive advertising.
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no problemo (Score:4, Interesting)
One teensy problem. Microsoft don't have the power to force other media file players to enact its scheme, and even if they could, no-one in their right mind is going to require that people re-encode their current collections to work with the new system. Hell mine is almost 150gb, most of that audiobooks, with individual files up to 30mb in size, I'm blowed if I'm going to redo it to use media player, which I don't use in any case, because its a bloated tool (not because its made by microsoft, just because its horrible to use). Audible and the apple store, where I shop, use their own protection systems, and both have 'rip th audio cd' in their options for anything I purchase.
This scheme is ultimately unenforceable except for new purchases, and that from people who agree with microsoft. All it will give them is a way to quietly wrap drm in a blanket and heave it off a bridge late one night.
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A double-edged sword... (Score:5, Insightful)
But the question is how the media companies will use this newfound power... I support the idea of companies having the option to trace leaks, but this could make it possible to determine exactly who shared the 500 000 copies present of Band X's single Y on P2P network Z. Ensue more lawsuits?
Sounds better (Score:2, Insightful)
Watermarks: Anyone can run it.
Whether it can be hacked around or otherwise... time will tell, but from a accessibility standpoint, at least its looking like anybody can at least play it. That has to count for something. If I have to accept restrictions, this is better then what we had before.
You're being manipulated (Score:2)
I'm sure there's a formal name for this method, but it escapes me at the moment. I haven't had my coffee
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There are other ways ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Instead of the current market where any whore can get on stage, prance around singing other peoples songs (if they are in fact signing at all), then market a CD and demand millions of sales, why not allow the market to decide.
1. Seed the market with your wares. Apply for a business loan from a studio, get a CD or two out there, do live performances, etc.
2. Promote new album under the prem
Can be removed LEGALLY (Score:5, Interesting)
The DMCA [wikipedia.org] makes it illegal (or legally difficult) to remove DRM. But any watermarking and advertising is fair game...
Not likely to work (Score:3, Interesting)
Watermarking is designed to embed something into the audio that does not get noticed by the listener, but contains various information.
At the same time, most audio codecs are designed to save space and one way they do this is to drop things from the stream that would not be heard by the listener anyway.
So one would imagine that re-encoding, whilst perhaps sometimes unadvisable for various unrelated reasons, would do a fairly good job at removing or at least severely damaging a watermark.
Any codec exports got a view on this?
Jailhouse Rock (Score:2)
I don't understand Microsoft. Here's a company that wants to sell you an operating system, then spends the rest of its time collaborating with other companies that want to throw you into jail.
A Positive Step with One Downside (Score:4, Interesting)
The only potential problem I can see is what happens if a device that you've got your legally purchased media on is stolen and the person who steals it uploads some or all of that content? What happens if, say, you buy a new PC, copy all of your legally purchased media to the new PC, delete it from your old PC and either give the old PC away or sell it and the new owner runs an undelete program and recovers the media and then uploads it?
I can see a lot of ways that watermarking could bite someone in the ass if they aren't careful with their files.
Water marking proves what? (Score:3, Insightful)
not saying that DRM is the answer either, but you cant run around blaming the people that leased the file in question for it being 'released'.
Repeat after me (Score:2)
It's just a passive form, not an active one.
Watermark cracked in 3... 2... 1... (Score:2)
2. Find the bits that are different.
3. Randomize those bits.
4. Post to LimeMuleKazDonkeyTorrent.
5. Profit!
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A good step, but also won't work (Score:2)
First, replacing DRM with watermarks is a very nice step. It changes those companies position from support a future like Right to Read [gnu.org] to merely accusing people on baseless evidence. So, we can stop acting like they want to leat us to an Orwellian society, and just ask for a better judicial system.
Now, watermarking also doesn't work. If it is audible, people won't like it. If it is not audible, it is useless information, what works against compressors and will be removed on every possibility. With time, al
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A 'watermark' in audio or printed media is a slight distortion of the audio or image that is unable to be detected by humans but can be deciphered by a computer.
You apparently didn't read the full summary or the article did you? Though what should I expect from slashdot.
The technology could serve several purposes including tracking file sharing statistics and inserting advertisements into audio tracks.
Here it is, so you don't strain too much. I love you got modded up for not reading. Chalk that one up to slashdot as well.
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What kind of FREAK would think of taking something like a watermark and using it as a cue as to whether to play an advertisement or not? Why not just play them for ALL songs? This is so amazingly stupid I still can't believe it was possible to come up with.
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More likely they'll use the watermark to deliver targeted ads. Either they'll use a few bits more and encode profiling flags into the 'mark, or else they send it back when they download the ad, and the ad server can use it as a key to look up your profile data. More likely the second, since that way they can build a profile of what t
Re:Just What We Need... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm guessing that he actually read the article.
FTFA:
Activated Content hasn't explained exactly how it'll use the Microsoft technology, but the company's Web site promotes a very interesting service called ActiveNow. The idea: whenever a watermarked file is played on an ActiveNow-enabled device, the service could dynamically insert some sort of advertising--presumably audio, but perhaps video or text depending on the device being used.
Douchebag.
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"FTFA:
Activated Content hasn't explained exactly how it'll use the Microsoft technology, but the company's Web site promotes a very interesting service called ActiveNow. The idea: whenever a watermarked file is played on an ActiveNow-enabled device, the service could dynamically insert some sort of advertising--presumably audio, but perhaps video or text depending on the device being used."
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In Florida, the new legislation requires all stores buying second-hand merchandise for resale to apply for a permit and file security in the form of a $10,000 bond with the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. In addition, stores would be required to thumb-print customers selling used CDs, and acquire a copy of state-issued identity documents such as a driver's license. Furthermore, stores could issue only store credit -- not cash -
Re:Ideas!! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Ideas!! (Score:4, Insightful)