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.'"
Does this spider infringe on copyrights? (Score:1, Interesting)
Somebody explain to me how a massive, netwide wget doesn't constitute copyright infringement.
Another Nightmare (Score:1, Interesting)
Oh great. We all know just how ths is going to work. Content will be guilty until proven innocent and any system that relies on the vigilence of its owners will run amuck when they don't. With this kind of tripe coming out, why don't we just turn off the net and go back to tin cans and a string.
Stupid idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:*cough* robots.txt *cough* (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ahem! (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't be a hypocrite. It'll do nothing to your "copyrighted information" put match it against a set of hashes and discard it if it doesn't match. If it matches, an operator would look for signs of illegal activity.
In other words, nothing that the industry isn't doing right now, but now more automated.
Noone likes RIAA suing grandmas and 10 yo girls, or terrible DRM schemes and so on. Doesn't mean you gotta get silly and react "by default" on any technology designed to help protect industry's intellectual rights.
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I'm only concerned with those crawlers going mad and sucking the bandwidth out of a site which hosts plenty of media files. Or dumbly downloading everything (zips, executables) and you having to foot the bill for the spent traffic in the end.
Google's Mozilla-based bot was found doing such damage on some sites (crawling at incredible speed, bringing the sites down with it), which I suppose were a number of isolated incidents since this bot is still being worked on.
Still, Google wouldn't download large binary files it can't understand, and this is likely to do so, and match everything against the "watermark", otherwise it'd be too simple to fool it. I just hope they implement it properly, if even because they'll have to pay for this bandwidth as well (aggregated).
Re:So what (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ahem! (Score:3, Interesting)
I especially like:
>I'm only concerned with those crawlers going mad and sucking the bandwidth out of a site which hosts plenty of media files. Or dumbly downloading everything (zips, executables) and you having to foot the bill for the spent traffic in the end.
That's a concern of mine, too.
I wanted in my post to get people thinking about the contradiction between how well protected industry's intellectual properties are protected as opposed to ours.
If I had substituted 'bandwidth' for 'copyrighted information' I suspect the results would have been better.
Re:Corporate IP infringements (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:So what (Score:5, Interesting)
I work in an academic environment, and I can't think of a single person in my life who has not violated a copyright or user agreement. If your job is to teach, it's almost inevitable. If you're an enthusiast or fan of a particular artist, it becomes a statistical certainty that you've broken the "law" regarding intellectual property.
I contacted Digimarc once because I wanted to find out about ways to add an identifying mark to a digital file that would let a user know that the file was the authentic work of a particular artist. Not to prevent copying, mind you, because the files in question were meant to be shared. I just wanted the users to be able to know with some certainty that what they were hearing was actually produced by who they expected.
The reply I got from Digimarc (I still have the email) was that they weren't interested in such uses of their product, and anyway "it's priced out of reach of the individual artist or production company". Real sweethearts.
In the last few days there have been lots of stories about people and corporations who make their money off the backs off creative folks. There are those who provide a real service (like the guy who delivers pizza to the recording studio, or the woman who fixes my digital mixing console) and there are those who live to suck the life out of what should be a source of joy for both the artist and the user. Like I've said before, parasites need to live, too. But what really galls me is when they act like they're really doing something of value to anyone but themselves and their accountants.
Seriously, to paraphrase Jesus or Steve Albini (it's one of those religious dudes, I forget which): "It's easier to drive a Range Rover through the butthole of a camel than for a label executive or booking agent to enter the kingdom of heaven."