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DivX and MP3 Developers Work Together on Watermarks 235

Posted by timothy from the not-so-strange-bedfellows dept.
An Anonymous Coward writes: "The DivX and MP3 developers are working on digital watermarking techniques together... Ogg anyone?"
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DivX and MP3 Developers Work Together on Watermarks More

DivX and MP3 Developers Work Together on Watermarks

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  • Well... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Warped-Reality ( 125140 )
    We have Vorbis... Now we have to wait for Tarkin and hope it is as good as/better than DivX

  • more information (Score:5, Informative)

    by flynt ( 248848 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @06:55PM (#3287535)
    here's another fascinating article [piacipr.com] about this sort of "digital watermarking". Ogg is looking more impressive too, but mp3's are just so entrenched it'll be tough to get the average user to convert.
    • Yeah, but you only need to get the average MP3 player to convert. Shouldn't be too hard since it's FREE right?
    • but mp3's are just so entrenched it'll be tough to get the average user to convert.

      I'm not so sure I'd agree. Remember when GIFs were all the rage? I thought no one would ever convert to JPGs because GIFs were so popular. Now, you hardly ever see them. I know, JPGs are better at compression, so maybe that's the reason.

      Maybe a better comparison would be PNGs compared to GIFs or JPGs? I use PNGs all the time, but I don't have a feel for how popular they are in general.

      I guess my point is that if there's a compelling reason, people will switch file formats in a heartbeat. For that matter, I know people who switch MS Word formats every few years or so. Oh, wait...

      • No comparison (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Bitsy Boffin ( 110334 )
        There is a big difference, going from a 256 colour GIF (big (file) and ugly) to a millions of colours jpeg (small (file) and purdy) is a very big improvement.

        Going from mp3 to ogg for most people is of no advantage.
        • Going from mp3 to ogg for most people is of no advantage.

          Currently, yes. But once it's a choice between ogg (no watermarking) and mp3 (with watermarking), then there will be a big advantage. If mp3's become crippled so that people can't do the things they want with them, but they can with ogg, they'll switch.

      • Re:more information (Score:2, Informative)

        by rajinder ( 303281 )
        I'm not so sure I'd agree. Remember when GIFs were all the rage? I thought no one would ever convert to JPGs because GIFs were so popular. Now, you hardly ever see them. I know, JPGs are better at compression, so maybe that's the reason.

        ... umm...what? Says who? GIFs may not be as prominent as they once were, but they are still very much in use. The general rule of thumb is that if you have a photo, use JPG, and for images with very few colors in them (or if they require transparancy), use GIF. (...although, honestly, I wish people would use PNG instead of GIFs nowadays...most browsers after 4.x support them. (I think there's a problem with IE4 not showing transparencies with PNG properly..but that's about it.))

        • IE5 has the same problem. I don't know about 6, but it's annoying as hell. I don't want to use gifs, but since IE renders colours differently than the image, you can't even do the ol' coloured background hack.

          • Re:more information (Score:2, Interesting)

            by Cerberus7 ( 66071 )
            I've had the same problem with IE6. Damn straight it's annoying. I had a gif-less page working just fine in Mozilla and was content that my work was done. Then I looked at it in IE. Eww.
          • When I want to get IE to display a PNG properly, I always do the following (in GIMP):
            • threshold alpha ( so each pixel is either fully opaque or fully transparent)
            • convert to indexed mode (for some reason RGBA confuses IE)

            Limiting I know, but the alternative is a "best viewed with Mozilla or Konqueror" in the alt attribute ;)

    • Re:more information (Score:3, Informative)

      by Fembot ( 442827 )
      It is interesting to note however that the latest beta of winamp3 has ogg support AS STANDARD

      way to go nullsoft... havent checkt the linux version recently though
    • here's another fascinating article [piacipr.com] about this sort of "digital watermarking". Ogg is looking more impressive too, but mp3's are just so entrenched it'll be tough to get the average user to convert.

      Amen to that, i am not the average user, but i know from personal experience that it is difficult to move from mp3s. I have a large collection of MP3s that took me many hours to rip and encode to MP3. I do not fancy re ripping them and moving 100% to OGG. I try to ensure that any new CDs i get i rip to OGG, but even that can be difficult to remember to do. And support for OGGs as far as Hardware players, ripping/encoding software is in the case of H/W players not readilly available, and ogg based software is not quite mature enough. It is also hard to try and convince someone to go with something new, when "everyone else" uses mp3s!.

      Just an aside, would it not be possible to impliment watermarks in OGG any ways? I mean it is an open, free and more importantly PATENT free audio compression algoithm. (Not that I support watermarking, just a thought).

    • Re:more information (Score:2, Interesting)

      by minard ( 264043 )
      Excellent point. Why would anybody upgrade?

      What many people here seem to be missing is, the question is not "wouldn't everybody switch to ogg vorbis" but "why wouldn't people stick with the version of mp3 they already have?"

      Many people already have mp3 files, tools and players that do exactly what they want. Why would they "upgrade" to a deliberately crippled version that limits what they can do? To persuade people to upgrade, you have to provide them with something new of value that they didn't have before, not less.

  • All we need is another digital media security scheme. There are already too many now. By the time these all shake out they will be irrelevant.
  • ...there will ALWAYS be a way around it until we have big brother inside of all of our equipment. So don't be concerned about any of this.

    Start getting concerned when all video card manufacturers are forced to include rights management firmware, and when you can't get a PC DVD-ROM without (more) intrusive/limiting firmware.

    • Re:Digital rights management won't work this way.. (Score:4, Informative)

      by jsproul ( 4589 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @07:15PM (#3287658) Homepage
      You're right, but video card manufacturers are already including DRM firmware - it's called DVI. DVI creates a secure link between the PC and the display to prevent digital copying of decoded streams (e.g. DVD).

      BTW, I'm surprised no one has yet challenged the DVD regional licensing scheme under US antitrust law. The Sherman Act makes such geographic price discrimination illegal.
      • I don't know that it would apply, as DVD price fixing is constant in the US... It only changes outside the US, where US laws (theoretically) don't apply. After all, I can go to Mexico, get some Cuban cigars, smoke them, and not get arrested for violating the Cuba embargo when I re-cross the border into the US.
        Don't get me wrong, I would like it if DVD region encoding when down the tubes, so I could get more foreign DVD's (anime, primarily). But, I just don't know if the argument applies.
        • To really stretch a point... If the US Gov't was really pissed at you, you could probably get nailed for smoking said Cuban cigars in Mexico... just as one of the charges against John Walker stems from supporting the Taliban, which was on our (US) list of embargoed countries/terrorist supporting... Just as Cuba is.

          But for them to care, you'd probably have to do a whole lot more than post a few mp3's tothe internet.

          Sorry... just felt like nitpicking/..
    • Do you want to live in a world where there's Draconian DRM or a world where there's DRM that makes casual piracy hard?

      OK, there's the third, remote possibility that we'll end up in an another world in which "information wants to be free" rules, but the sorry, true fact is that whatever information wants, people want to own information and charge other people for it. Especially people with lots of money. And therefore power, and therefore clout to shape the world.

      There's a growing body of opinion that holds the best way to keep us from getting draconian DRM is NOT to shrilly scream about free information/content and drop into a frenzy of distribution violations, but rather, to show how a mild solution can give us the best of "fair use" and "new economy" rules while not totally threatening the status quo (just enough to keep 'em on their toes).

      In that light, digital watermarking for mp3 and divx is good. 5 letter acronyms introduced to congress are bad....

    • There is some uncertanty over the quote but the spirit of it is:

      First they came for the socialist and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.

      Then they came for the trade unionist and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.

      Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.

      Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me.

      - Pastor Martin Niemoller [hoboes.com]

    • People, people, people. We should really all be supporting this technology. This really is the answer that we want.

      Let's make a few assumptions.

      1. Someone can make a non-trivially breakable watermark technology. One that stands up to peer review without threats of legal ramifications.

      2. Content providers can then use this watermarking technology on a reasonably fine scale - probably not individually watermarking every CD, but perhaps broken down into regions. Digital downloads could be individually watermarked, given enough CPUs.

      What would this do? It gives the content providers ammunition and evidence to go after the big time copyright violators. Those that are burning CD's and turning around and charging money. Granted, a lot of these folks are probably overseas...

      It allows us to use our digital media as we see fit. We can listen to it on our PCs. Download it to our Rios. It still allows us to swap digital media among friends. Content providers aren't going to go after the small fry, there's no return on investment.

      This allows us to say to our congressmen, "Yes we care about and value copyrights. But we also value fair use."

      This is a happy medium ground.

      And being the crazy optimist that I am, this is the way I see things eventually settling down. The question is will it settle down in 1-2 years, or 10-20?
  • Let the "I am switching to OOG!" posts begin. The real point is that ANY watermark that they divise will be cracked. Sooner than later. All this is, is two companies trying to polish their public images in order to acquire lucrative licensing deals with big name media producing companies. They need to shed the 'your product is only good for piracy' image. That is all.
  • Actually, no. Why bother converting everything when I've got a perfectly good copy of LAME?

    - A.P.

    • Re:"Ogg, anyone?" (Score:2, Insightful)

      by reynaert ( 264437 )
      Don't convert your old MP3's (you'll only lose sound quality), but use Ogg for your new music.
    • Mod parent up.

      What're these guys going to do, somehow magically eliminate all the 'clean' copies of codecs and encoding software in the wild?

      While the occasional video post on Usenet is encoded with DivX 4 or 5, the majority of them are still encoded with the good-ol Microsoft-ripped DivX 3.11a!

      Got LAME Source? You've got watermarkless MP3 for as long as you want. And, let's face it, DVD-audio maybe great for I-can-hear-the-difference-between-catgut-and-sheep gut-audiophiles, but it will be posted online in MP3 format... Just like the old dog tracks on the Fast and the Furious soundtrack were minutes after the disc was released.

  • How many hours before someone cracks it?

  • Would it degrade audio quality? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by dudeX ( 78272 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @06:59PM (#3287564)
    I don' think its a bad idea to have a watermark as long it can achieve the following:

    Integrity of source
    Playback on any system

    How the watermark can be useful is if it is treated like a serial number not a lockout device. Suppose I am a musician and I want to sell some MP3s. If I can uniquely mark all the songs I sell, I can track which user decided to violate fair use if I see that unique mark on a peer to peer network.
    • Excellent point!

      Why don't these huge companies get it that if they change the license and not the product they will be able to protect themselves? If you could track the download of the song (the watermarked data could be a hash of your name and/or account number) and then that could be used to bill you for copies that you illegally distribute. Granted, it wouldn't be that long before someone would figure a way to easily remove the watermark...

      • It's not that easy (Score:2, Insightful)

        by dark-nl ( 568618 )

        The watermark would only show which user you originally sold the copy to; it might have been sold secondhand, for example. Or simply stolen. And if users leave the files on their Windoze machines, then expect the next SirCam-like virus to target .mp3 instead of .doc.

      • Great idea! (Score:3, Funny)

        by czardonic ( 526710 )
        And maybe they could use this information to track more than piracy. For example, they could use it to gather data on what listeners like to hear, and keep their customers updated on other products that are sure to appeal to them. They could even do it automatically, via e-mail of some kind of machine generated snail-mail. Think of it, no more being annoyed by ads that don't apply to you. Let some corporation do the grunt work of tracking your habits and maintaining a database of your activities. Why, eventually, this method could become so advanced that companies would send you products and deduct your accounts without you ever having to hassle with shopping or making any decisions at all!

        Man, what a wonderful world that would be. Of course, you can bet that a bunch of criminals who are bent on hiding their nefarious activities will object. What kind of country is this where criminals and paranoid cranks are allowed to stand in the way of progress?
  • they are preventing the wrong kind of piracy. sure, it will prevent the piracy of content that was originally intended for divx, or officially released divx, but they are missing the target. this will be cracked within a matter of days, and besides that, it does nothing to prevent copies of television shows or movies that were independantly decoded from getting out on the net.
  • Still, DivXNetworks and Fraunhofer are confident that they can jointly develop a digital rights management system that provides content owners with a secure means to distribute copyrighted works over the Web.

    It doesn't matter what they do, sooner or later someone will break it, it's just a matter of time. There is no ultimate "secure means", as there is no 100% secure system [slashdot.org]!
  • A: Someone will break the watermark.
    B: If they know its watermarked, then someone will get it from another source.
    C: Rip it off a CD in your format of choice.

    good try though.

  • a good thing? (Score:1, Informative)

    by Jucius Maximus ( 229128 )
    "The DivX and MP3 developers are working on digital watermarking techniques together..."

    According to the article, the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics [igd.fhg.de] is in on this too. But really, we knew that this was coming. Someone was going to do it. Would you have preferred that that someone was hired by Hillary Rosen (RIAA) or Jack Valentini (MPAA) ? This might be the best we can hope for. At least vorbis will provide a way out for those in the know.

    • If you can't keep up, take notes. Fraunhofer are the MP3 developers. :)

      Frankly, I don't care who develops this technology, whether it's someone the RIAA or MPAA specifically hire, or whether it's existing format owners. The net effect is that it adds signal to the pro-DRM thought stream. What's annoying is that this isn't going to help at all.

      They can't possibly expect watermarking to do any good since it is so easily defeated either with filter software, D-A-D re-encoding, or simply purchasing with a shill buyer (i.e. untraceable violation). It only takes one re-encoded, filtered, or shill-bought file, since P2P sharing can quickly take a single file and turn it into millions of copies.
  • First, open source could be criminals theme, then DVD playback on Open source prohibited in U.S., then this watermarking.

    I'm going to sleep an maybe tommorow all articles will be nice as high tech beer glass and no politics.

  • Not surprising... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JoeShmoe ( 90109 ) <askjoeshmoe@hotmail.com> on Thursday April 04, 2002 @07:09PM (#3287633)
    Step 1) Create a system or product that, while having some legitmate use, also enables a much more popular illegal use.

    Step 2) Gain a huge user base while fretting and pretending to "study solutions" to the illegal use.

    Step 3) Once your system or product has become a leader in the marketplace, throw a switch and make the illegal use much harder.

    Hey, it worked for countless companies throughout the ages. I mean, when did AOL enable the features that prevented users from e-mailing warez to each other, before or after they became the number one ISP in the US? So, it's not surprising that DivX and Frau. would be following the pattern like everyone else.

    - JoeShmoe

    .

    • Re:Not surprising... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ZxCv ( 6138 )
      Despite the amusing conspiracy angle you've taken, I don't quite buy it. I think it's more likely that as a company starts off a new service, they are much more lax on restrictions because the user base is small enough that such restrictions aren't really needed. However, as the user base grows and grows, doing certain things become infeasible if you still want the service to function for everyone. Hence, gradually more and more restrictions are put in place, in order to preserve the best possible experience for all users. This same pattern is true of almost every type of service that has ever had to "grow" a userbase.

      AOL isn't a very good example of this. AOL became popular because of marketing and ease of use--they still continue to attract new subscribers despite how hard it is for users to email warez to each other. Many web-based email sites better exemplify this scenario. One in particular started with no restrictions on inbox size or outgoing message size, for example. However as its userbase grew, restrictions were implemented so that a small few couldn't ruin the service for everyone.

      • Re:Not surprising... (Score:4, Informative)

        by JoeShmoe ( 90109 ) <askjoeshmoe@hotmail.com> on Thursday April 04, 2002 @09:50PM (#3288332)
        No, AOL is a perfect example. Back in 1991 they were a very small bulletin board service that was dwarfed by online giants such as Compuseve, Prodigy, GEnie and the like. The people who joined at this point were almost entirely joining to play Neverwinter Nights. In all other categories of online services, AOL stunk across the board (I think PC World gave them the lowest score of all online services when it was first reviewed).

        However, for broke teenagers, there was one reason to use AOL...it was free. Thanks to the easy availablity of sign-up disks, anyone could get online. All you had to do was sign up, fill in bogus payment information, and enjoy a month or more of free service. This went on for years. There were even tools written to automate the account generation process. From 1991 to about 1996 there was absolutely no authentication of payment information before activating an account. AOL would simply let the account run and then after a couple of months of sending "your payment information is invalid" messages it would finally close the account.

        Each of these AOL accounts had five screennames. Each of these five screennames could have 550 e-mails stored on AOL servers. Each of these 550 e-mails could have up to 10MB in attachments. So here's how it worked. Someone would get online to their local warez BBS and download the latest warez release. That person would then repack the release into 10MB pieces and send them to himself via AOL (uploading the files to AOL). From there he would forward the e-mails to everyone else, essentially e-mailing gigabytes of warez to you with a single click. This also went on for years. AOL warez groups were flourishing right up until around 1996.

        Surely this couldn't have escaped AOL's knowledge. In these days, you were lucky if an ISP let you keep 10MB on a server and here AOL was giving you basically 2.5GB of online storage. As long as you kept forwarding to fresh accounts before your old ones expired, you had access to all the programs you could ever want. But they had to be kept somewhere...and AOL had to pay for that storage not...to mention all those countless modems and dial-in access minutes.

        So why would an ISP allow such rampant abuse of their account and mail system? Well from 1991 to 1996 something else was happening...AOL was growing. On the books, they went from about 100,000 members to 1,000,000 members in about two years. They surpassed Compuserve a couple years later. I seriously doubt that at any time during this era that more than a 1/3 of the accounts on AOL were actually valid paying customers (besides all the fraudulently generated accounts, there were boatloads of AOL4Free Macintosh customers). But on paper, I'm sure it looked good to investors to see how the membership was growing. And I'm sure it looked really good when they had more members than any other ISP.

        Most telling to me is the fact that right around 1996 when they were working on getting, IIRC, their sixth millionth customer...AOL suddenly implemented a raft of policies that killed the AOL warez community. First, they started actually trying to verify payment on what was entered during sign-up. That did away with the fake generators...now you actually had to have stolen credit cards to get online (much harder to come by). Two, they started deleting files after they had been downloaded a certain number of times (people estimated it to be about between 250 and 500 times) or the account that uploaded it was cancelled. Last, they started blocking the private rooms where people met to trade mail forwarding with each other. These things happened boom, boom, boom within months of each other.

        But by then, AOL was the number one ISP, and if I remember correctly, this was right around the time they moved to flat rate unlimited access so they could no longer afford to have a huge population of floating freeloaders when they didn't even have the capacity to support all of their legitamately paying customers.

        So, call me a conspiracy theorist if you must, but to this day I belive that AOL turned a blind eye to piracy to enjoy the rapid growth that it encouraged, and then once they had grown as much as they good, they easily were able to disable the piracy. So do I think it took a major corporation six years to notice the problem (despite the BSA and others constantly launching tirades about AOL warez scene) and figure out a way to stop pirates (despite e-mails where techies suggest inplementing call-backs during the sign-up process to counter theft and their bosses responding it might scare off legit customers)? Or do I think they didn't really want to stop the problem until the potential risk for getting caught was suddenly higher than the potential gains from it?

        - JoeShmoe

        .

    • Re:Not surprising... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Cyno ( 85911 )

      Excuse me? What illegal use are you talking about? I have a right to fair use reguardless of what any law says. Its perfectly legal for me to use technology to use the music and movies I buy in the same way I used them for years. The only difference now is that we have laws like the DMCA which threaten fair use. That only means that anyone who wants to sue me for using and sharing my content the way I have always done will get a fight destined for the supreme court. And boy would I love the courts to throw away my rights to fair use. That would be the last day I'd ever pay for content again. But as thing are right now, as long as the MPAA and RIAA don't sue me, I'll continue to purchase my DVDs and CDs and rip them onto open unencrypted media formats that are portable and give me access to my content when I want it. No matter what you say there's nothing wrong with that.
  • Now, they can find out who's putting this shit on the P2P networks, go find them, and arrest them for copyright violation.

    Think about it, if they can do that, then they don't need all this stupid other shitty laws out there. Then they can do what everybody on here says.. Only go after the people that are violating copyright, and all us out there that still use MP3s legally for our portable players and such don't get screwed.

  • Now everybody repeat after me... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jucius Maximus ( 229128 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @07:12PM (#3287649) Journal
    ...we're not gonna crack it until AFTER the industry has fully adopted it!

    No more screw-ups (as in early cracks) like last time [com.com].

  • There will never be a truely secure method until someone creates one.

    I hold that there will always be a way around, but then the cost of getting around it may get too high.

    Many of us Christians believe that one day the government will track every single in-duh-vidual with an implanted chip, or some other type of imprinting device (Mark of the beast and all that).

    Hard to copy music when the government is watching everything you do.

    Even if you say it won't happen, you'll be wrong one day just like your great-great-great-grandpappy was wrong when he said they wouldn't be tracking you via your SSN.

  • DiVX is Falling Behind the Times (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LuxuryYacht ( 229372 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @07:13PM (#3287651) Homepage
    DiVX is a very close variant of MPEG-4 and no longer has its source open. H.26L is open and already provides for 1.5 x better compression than DiVX. XViD [xvid.org] is also about 10% faster and is open source and nearly all GPL at this point.

    DiVX will just fade away the same as MPEG-4 due to it's too greedy nature.

    • DiVX will just fade away the same as MPEG-4 due to it's too greedy nature.
      Much like Microsoft has faded away due to its greedy nature. ;)

      Greedyness has nothing to do with a product's death. If they can make more money and convince more people to use their solution rather than "better" Open Source products, then they will. In fact, a company that is more "greedy" is more likely to survive, since they'll have more money to push around.
  • I think it's about time we simply boycott all stuff that uses the "Digital Watermark" technology. If the companies won't trust us as a consumer, then I simply won't buy their stuff. I'm usually honest about software. I usually buy all my software from legit sources. Why do I have to be treated like a criminal?

    MP3 music watermarking is BS anyways. If they put that on songs, then all I need to do is tape the radio for whatever song I feel like hearing. Why do corporations have to leer over us?

    All I know is that a full boycott of media from these companies will hurt them MUCH more than a few bad apples downloading media that they never paid for.

  • Ah, the futility... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Walter Bell ( 535520 ) <wcbell.bellandhorowitz@com> on Thursday April 04, 2002 @07:17PM (#3287673) Homepage
    "You can't prove a negative." --Professor Rowe, on the first day of law school

    I have friends who work in the security industry and crack codes for a living. Every time a watermarking scheme is publically proposed, they laugh long and heartily. The simple fact of the matter is that a system designed to check for a watermark can easily be changed to invalidate the watermark. Watermarks are necessarily little bit-flipping programs that don't alter the outward appearance of the media they are attached to, so what makes record execs and PHBs so sure that they can't be removed?

    The only watermark that can't be removed is the watermark that can't be detected. And that doesn't help the digital rights management fascists one bit. So why do they bother?

    Well, they still think it's a "deterrent." Just like Macrovision is a "deterrent" when you can buy filters to block it [ebay.com] for under $25 on eBay. Sooner or later, though, the world is going to have to learn that information wants to be free, that trying to restrict the flow of bits on the information superhighway is futile, and that selling simple numbers [utm.edu] and calling it "property" is patently absurd. Mathematics is a part of nature, and nobody owns nature; the sooner our laws are brought into line with this simple truth, the better.

    ~wally

    • Re:Ah, the futility... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by azzy ( 86427 )
      > the world is going to have to learn that information wants to be free

      Not true. Information doesn't want anything, and if it did, who gives a damn?
      _People_ want information to be free, and that's more important, business/govnt should care about what people _want_.
  • from the not-so-strange-bedfellows dept. An Anonymous Coward writes: "The DivX and MP3 hackers are working on a way to remove the digital watermarking techniques together... Ogg anyone?"

  • watermarking only affects future content. Legacy content is watermark free, and with mp3 encoders freely available (lame, etc) future content will be watermark free as well.

    A side note on how some watermarking systems work (or have attempted to work): a popular method is to encode a heavy watermark and a light watermark in the content. By dicking with the stream, you end up destroying the light watermark but the heavy watermark remains. This is an easy way for a vendor to flag pirated content. Of course, actually implementing a robust light/heavy watermark is considered difficult.

    Now if you were talking fingerprinting, it'd be a different story...

  • ...find a new business model!

    Omnicontrol of every unit/viewing/hearing of copyrighted material is simply not possible without total hardware control (and halting technical innovation forever).

    How long can the media and entertainment industry push this before the market forces the new realities of the medium? Once a "title" is realeased, it is already "out there". Forever accessible and reproducible with minimum effort. No matter what encryption/watermarking scheme they come up with, somebody somewhere will always bypass it.

    Copyright infringement will happen no matter what. Companies and people will simply have to adapt to the idea that there will be new ways of making money with entertainment.

    It is not going to be just a new way of selling CDs online. It won't be charging for download or by viewing. It will simply be different, new. Media companies should spend more time shaping their futures by helping define that "new" than trying to keep their unsustainable business model alive.

    Unfortunately, the only way to get this through to current senior management in this industry is...actually, there is no way. We're just gonna have to wait until today's 12 to 18 year olds are running these companies and in a position to understand the new market.

  • I haven't bought a cd in many, many, years. In fact, I have Nirvana Unplugged sitting in my cd tray right now.

    Looks like I won't be able to go out and get the latest Brittany Spears albumn *darnit*.

    The sad thing is that the music industry is killing themselves with this shit. Oh well, that's capitalism.

  • Why I'm not using OGG (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Pope Slackman ( 13727 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @07:25PM (#3287709) Homepage Journal
    There's really only one reason: hardware support.
    I can take my MP3s virtually anywhere and be able to play them, whether it's a computer, a CD player a flash player or something else, it's almost universally supported on digital audio gadgets.
    I like Ogg, I'd say at the [high] bitrates I encode at it's as good if not better than MP3, but it just doesn't have the hardware support to make encoding for it worth my while, it's more time-effective for me just to rip to MP3 directly.

    C-X C-S

  • Ogg violates DMCA??? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xee ( 128376 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @07:27PM (#3287722) Journal
    How long will it be before the music industry claims that Ogg's Vorbis codec is a tool designed to circumvent copy protection by allowing users to encode audio in an unprotected format? You know it's going to happen sooner or later.
    • So what if it does?
      Dev work would continue underground and over the 'net.

    • Re:Ogg violates DMCA??? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Microlith ( 54737 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @07:56PM (#3287862)
      It does not circumvent anything. It does not break/bypass any method of (in)effectively restricting access.

      It is simply an unprotected format.

      Now, should the SSSCA pass (CPFDFJKFJSKD or whatever), it will be illegal because it won't have any protections built in.
      • Now, should the SSSCA pass (CPFDFJKFJSKD or whatever)[...]

        You mean the Corporate-Bought Disney-Trashes-the-Public Act? :-)

        That would be both scary AND irritating - "Free" Use (both "Gratis" and "Libre") was the whole POINT of the Ogg file format and Vorbis sound codec. This bill would make this goal ILLEGAL. (shudder)....

    • Hey, wait a second!!! Maybe there is a use for the Sarcasm Detector after all.

      ---From a good ol' Simpsons episode...
      Comic Guy: Oh yea, then everyone's REAL happy then...
      Lady: Do I detect a note of sarcasm?
      Prof. Frink (mad scientist): (reading sarcasm detector) Are you kidding me, this baby's off the charts, mmhay!
      Comic Guy: Ooh, a sarcasm detector... well that's a REAL useful invention.
      (detector blows up)
      ---
  • (famous words from every developers meeting ever scheduled)

    DivX was supposed to be free! Free! Freeeeeeeee!!!

    Guess not.

    Of course the "If you use use DivX commercially" (translation: if you have ever or will ever make money with a computer) "then you must contact us" (because publishing the real price means no customers) "for permission" (permission is a convenient corporatism for NO)

    But, somewhere, somehow, the checks have to go out on the 1st. I hope the Internet gets past this "never pay, no matter how cool it might be" approach to business. Think there's a lot of unemployment now? Wait till the value of information becomes zero because nobody can make even a modest living selling it.
  • Hmm, will I use the new encoder to encode the videos with a watermark, that I want to distribute P2P, or will I use the old encoder? Boy, that'll sure stop piracy.

    Is anyone distributing movies in DivX, other than pirates? I mean, are the studios releasing stuff in DivX? Am I out to lunch?

  • dangerous for open source, open content (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mmusn ( 567069 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @07:50PM (#3287838)
    Here is a possible scenario. Watermarking only works if everybody is using it and everybody is detecting it--otherwise, people will just end up using the non-watermarked codecs. The two companies will use patented technology for watermarking. They will then go the MPAA and RIAA and similar cartels and unite with them to pressure Congress to adopt their watermarking scheme. The end result is tidy for them: DivX and Fraunhofer get complete control over codecs, and copyright holders can completely control who does what with any content, whether it's their or independently created. And Microsoft will likely like it too, because they can afford to license such mandated technology and enforce its inclusion in their software.

    Excluded are open source software developers, researchers, and independent creators of content.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Ok where to begin (all AFAIK):
    1. They still haven't got it that DivXNetworks didn't create DivX - they just grabbed the name to bring out DivX4 which has nothing to do with DivX;-) (the beginning of DivX as a codec a hacked m$ one).
    2. The part of Fraunhofer which licensed DivX (Fraunhofer IGD) has nearly nothing to do with the one developing mp3 (Fraunhofer IIS) - Fraunhofer is a vast organization with over 50 different institutes
    3. DivX was licensed by Fraunhofer IGD months ago for "streaming technologies and software development within research activities" (http://www.igd.fhg.de/actual_divx.html)
    There was already a big discussion on /. then.
    4. http://www.divx.com tells us that one of the goals for the future of the DivX-codec is to implement DRM - they do this for months, too.

    Now, what's the "news" remaining in that article?
    Oh yeah, Fraunhofer wants to use the DRM part of DivX too.
    Wouldn't have thought they want to use that in streaming solutions.
    Now that was informative!

  • ... and the problem is what exactly? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Guppy06 ( 410832 ) on Thursday April 04, 2002 @08:31PM (#3288029)
    I look at the headline. I look at it again. I see the word "watermark." I don't see copy-protection, I don't see crippling CD-RW or DVD+RW drives, I don't see the MPAA and RIAA going on a lawsuit spree, I just see "watermark."

    A watermark is just that: A watermark. A way of determining the integrity of the watermarked object that is prohibitively difficult to duplicate. It doesn't prevent duplication per se, it just causes the ducplicate to proclaim that its a duplicate through the absence of that watermark.

    Yes, there are all sorts of immoral and possibly illegal things hardware manufacturers can do by automatically scanning for watermarks, but the watermark itself is pretty much morally neutral. In fact, I can think of many good things that can be done with such a tool. If the RIAA ever got their thumbs out of their asses and realized they should be selling media instead of mediums, a watermark would give those consumers that care about such things a way of finding out if what they have is genuine.

    • Mod this up! (Score:2, Insightful)

      by mrright ( 301778 )
      Exactly!

      There is absolutely nothing wrong with the music industry trying to invent a good watermarking technology. As long as they fight illegal copies with technical means i am all for it.

      The problem starts when they buy legislation instead of using technology to protect their stuff. My problem with mandatory DRM is *not* that I can no longer get britney spears songs for free, but that I am no longer allowed to own a general purpose computer.
    • While I in general agree with the point it isn't a bad thing, it is not the point of a watermark to go away with a copy, it is meant to not be removable, and just let anyone who has a copy know where it came from, maybe a copyright notice.

      So scanning machines to see which are watermarked and which are not don't help. Now with checks and money, watermarks do mean stuff that doesn't copy easily, but in the multimedia world, it is used to preserve copyright information (little logos at the corner of images are also called 'watermarks')

    • Yes, there are all sorts of immoral and possibly illegal things hardware manufacturers can do by automatically scanning for watermarks, but the watermark itself is pretty much morally neutral.

      I beg to differ. Given the purpose of electronic watermarking (locate illegal copies in the wild and be able to track it back to the specific customer who leaked it), imagine the consequences. The entertainment and software industries already calculate losses on a per-pirate-copy basis. A thousand illegal copies is a thousand lost sales and $price*1000 lost income.

      If you leak a watermarked product, you're pretty much done for economically if they prosecute (which they have no reason not to, since it's the entire idea of the watermarking to start with). Try to tell their minion of lawyers that your copy was stolen, for an exercise in futility.

      You'd damn better guard that watermarked product with your life, lock it in somewhere safe, never talk about it, cause you don't wanna deal with these guys if you "pirate" it by accident!
    • What is wrong is that the watermark is there for the corporation's benefit, not the artist's.

      And the corporation is immortal, claims eternal ownership of the material, can never be defeated in court by a mere mortal's legal resources, can crush you like a bug, can change the rules at any time, will never reimburse the artist for his/her work, and has no personal liability as an "individual" for legal abuses of consumers to match the "rights" that it claims as an "individual" under our laws.

      OK?
  • OK...

    Watermarking is not a Bad Thing. A lot of people have talked about hacking this or that it is DRM.

    You are missing the point.

    Even if you could remove the watermark... why would you do this? It doesn't make any sense.

    The point of the watermark is to encourage a micropayment industry to pop up.

    For example... Alice downloads Bob's MP3. Alice's MP3 player is smart enough to pick up the watermark.

    Alice's MP3 player is smart enough to mention that she has not paid Bob for this song. Since Bob is a poor starving artist, we want him to get paid.

    Alice them pays Bob and everyone is happy. If Alice doesn't want to pay then she doesn't have to .
    A lot of people are talking about similar systems. For example you could do this based on a Hash of the content but this has a number of problems (different bitrate encoding would change the hash).

    A watermark would be portable from CD, MP3, OGG and back to CD...

    This is a Good Thing and has a lot of potential for us to proove that a digital and robust economy is possible.

    Now all this is changes if the RIAA tries to force this on people...

  • ...to be the next biggest thing, we need more hardware support for Ogg Vorbis players. Please sign this petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/vorb123/petition.htm l [petitiononline.com] which aims to convince hardware manufacturers to include ogg vorbis support in their products. Many people are complaining that they can't make the move to Ogg Vorbis unless it gets hardware support. If we can get enough signatures to convince manufacturers to start supporting Ogg Vorbis, this is the biggest barrier overcome.

  • Irony! (Score:2, Funny)

    by jjsjeff ( 210138 )
    The competition is "going to be a tough area to crack..."

    It's pretty bad when the DRM people want to crack stuff too. :)

    -Jeff
  • Seriously hear me out: What would truly be the best for everyone, artists, producers, and consumers would be if artistA produces a CD/DVD/whatever and sells it to consumerB. ConsumerB is then able, via some sort of ID chip in all his electronic devices, to put his copy of the CD on any machine, including multiple machines, as long as they are his. If consumerB made a copy of the CD and gave it to friendC, friendC couldn't play the CD because their ID isn't the same as consumerB's, or pirateD on morpheus couldn't play the CD because his winamp ID isn't consumerB's. This would allow consumerB all the fair use he could handle, while the artist doesn't lose income because piracy.

    What would this require? Some sort of ID that people could activate and assign their own ID to. It would also require the cooperation of all technology manufacturers. And an unbreakable ID encoding. The only problems are: People won't buy products with the ID chip understandably. The tech companies won't cooperate. And no system is unbreakable. On top of this, it shouldn't be a government mandated, spawn of the RIAA/MPAA, system. It has to be developed with the cooperation of the consumer.

    Your thoughts.

    psxndc

  • Shouldn't the RIAA be trying to outlaw speakers? After all, I can turn the volume up on my computer and my girlfriend can hear the music in her study too - but I've only paid for one copy of the CD!

    RIAA-approved headphones are the next logical step.

    TWW

    • They are trying to "outlaw" speakers.

      They want all hardware in the loop -- the PC (sound card, hard drive, processsor, removable media controller), USB, Firewire, speaker wire, stereo components, and yes, the speaker itself, to have digital and analog copy control built in. And any non-complying hardware would be illegal to manufacture.

      Thought you should know.

  • love those adverts (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Have to laugh. I read the article and the in-page advert on news.com is for cheap CD burners... love it!
  • bit for bit copying process?

    How can it not be copied trough standard UNIX "cp"? What is it about these watermarks that makes it "disappear" in copied files?

    Or will all software have to be rewritten as to understand and ignore the watermark when copying a file?
  • I honestly don't expect the DivX Networks to land any fancy contracts with the movie industry once their watermarking scheme is finished. Even if they did, I'd wouldn't jump around, because I'm not sure I like the DivX people anymore. They turned greedy and lame, and we should never encourage people who try to support their greed on a proprietarty fork of GPL software. On the other hand, I still prefer them to MS or Real.

    As far as piracy goes, nothing will change. People who know how to encode movies and shows will do it using the latest and greatest codec available, and you can bet that even if they have the option to stick a watermark in it, they won't do it.

    Of course, one reason why "moviez" folks would want the industry to standardize on watermarked DivX rather than watermarked .WMV is because once you hack off the watermark, in the former case you get a clean DivX movie, where in the latter, you get something much uglier.

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