Audio Watermark Web Spider Starts Crawling 173
DippityDo writes "A new web tool is scanning the net for signs of copyright infringement. Digimarc's patented system searches video and audio files for special watermarks that would indicate they are not to be shared, then reports back to HQ with the results. It sounds kind of creepy, but has a long way to go before it makes a practical difference. 'For the system to work, players at multiple levels would need to get involved. Broadcasters would need to add identifying watermarks to their broadcast, in cooperation with copyright holders, and both parties would need to register their watermarks with the system. Then, in the event that a user capped a broadcast and uploaded it online, the scanner system would eventually find it and report its location online. Yet the system is not designed to hop on P2P networks or private file sharing hubs, but instead crawls public web sites in search of watermarked material.'"
So what (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Corporate IP infringements (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ahem! (Score:1, Informative)
You are allowed to protect unwanted use and access of your copyrighted information, after all!
Bzzzt. Why the hell did this get modded up?
As a copyright holder, you have the legal right to control who can make copies of your work. You do not control the distribution, use, or access to the work.
For example, if you write a book and hold the copyright, you control who can make copies of it. Say, Random House, for example. After you agree to let Random House make copies for $N in royalties per book, you are done. Random House can distribute them as they please, be it to Amazon or B&N, or your local mom and pop bookstore. Copyright law gives you no control over that. Copyright law doesn't give you any legal right to control distribution.
And once the book makes it into the public arena, be it in a library, a purchaser's hands, a book lended from one person to another, etc., you, as the copyright holder, have no legal say over who can read it, redline it, use it to prop up a crooked table leg, burn it, or generally do whatever the hell they want with it.
Re:I hope it works! (Score:3, Informative)
> works are made widely available.
You assume that there will be no false-positives. There will be many.
youtube isnt slashdot (Score:3, Informative)
Nowhere does it say youtube will be watermarking all content. For this to work that's the OPPOSITE of what needs to happen - but if all the content providers embrace some sort of standard watermark then it will be trivial for youtube to SCAN your "original" content and see whether or not it is ACTUALLY YOUR CONTENT. How will they know? Because YOUR content will either contain YOUR watermark or it will contain no watermark at all.
And youtube allows you to "retract" anything you say anytime you want. You can make your content private if you like, restrict it to select "friends," or take it back completely.
It is about copyright and who controls and distributes under that copyright, but youtube isn't slashdot. It isn't even itunes, where their business model is built around watermarking everything and charging for individual access to it.
And for the other geniuseseses who think you can simply "blur it out," RTFA on digimarc. Duh, if it were so simple to "blur it out" then it would be pretty damn useless, now wouldn't it? Some websites have been watermarking their images for years now and contracting with companies who DO crawl p2p services and usenet looking for infringers, and while it aint 100% effective it has been pretty damn effective at stopping people from sharing their shit. This isn't a watermark like on paper, it's a DIGITAL watermark - it's "visible" (or audible) but only in the sense it adds noise to the picture or sound and degrades its quality; you can "blur" it but that won't completely obliterate the embedded information as it is essentially an encrypted piece of copyright information steganographically embedded into the media.
I hate the way this stuff degrades the quality, but most dfon't even notice it. I know this because I've worked with some of these sites and I seemed to be one of the very few who ever had any complaint about it. I've shared marked and unmarked content hundreds of times and very few people seem able to tell the difference... so, without knowing what to look for in the file source, how will you even know what content to "blur" and what not to blur?
if this were adopted widely, it seems the biggest problem would be - ironically - with "original" content composed from fairly used bits and pieces of other works. If you just rip and post a part of a movie or tv show you're going to be pissing off only one content creator - but what if you make an original montage from ten different pieces of protected media? The watermarks would all still be there, you'd potentially be getting takedown notices and/or lawsuit papers from ten different content owners.
The technology is useful. But what's really needed (still) is meaningful regulation of terms and fair public use policy enforcement.
Re: How Digimarc's Technology Works (Score:2, Informative)
They simply introduce a bit pattern or, more often, a delta pattern (change in bits by some delta) which is less detectable. This pattern usually contains a recognition pattern and some encrypted data.
Certain bit patterns can be used in pictures and video so that as long as you capture the video out put at nearly any viewable scale you can recover this signature. This includes video taping a TV or monitor playing a Digimarc protected image etc. This is how they can figure out who leaked early copies of major movies to the black market even once the movie has been copied to various media a number of times.
Anyhow what you do to beat Digimarc's technology is to introduce "noise" over their "noise" in such away as to render theirs useless. One of the simplest ways to attempt this is to downgrade the quality. Still depending on the pattern used they may be able to detect it.
Another thing to remember is that their spider is limited by latency. Therefore they cannot commit a lot of time to the analysis of all files. Therefore I would have to imagine one wouldn't have to worry about using a heavy duty algorithm to erase the signature.
I think enough people on here are smart enough that they will be able to google for Digimarc's pattens and old articles to get a pretty good idea of what they do and then obfuscate their own signature. You don't need to worry about cracking encryption or anything that hard to get around their scheme. It's not a particularly strong approach.
Re:*cough* robots.txt *cough* (Score:3, Informative)
Re:*cough* robots.txt *cough* (Score:3, Informative)