IBM, Sony and others agree on DVD watermaking

A slew of industry giants, IBM, Sony, Hitachi, NEC, and Pioneer have signed off on a plan to "watermark" digital content on DVDs. They have all agreed to a standard, which will be presented to the Copyright Protection Technical Working Group. The big boys, of course, want to "protect" their data-the thought is that this technology maybe used in digital broadcasts as well.

No Subject Given

[drwiii]

As long as it doesn't interfere with 1) my right to make a backup copy for archival purposes, and 2) picture quality, then whoop-de-doo.

DIVX encryption key

[sjames]

That's a good point. I wonder how big a pain it would be to cook up some new firmware?

How do they stop bitmap copies?

[Colin Smith]

I don't understand how putting a watermark in with the data stops copying.
The watermark will be copied when a bitmap copy is done of the data, and if you want to get rid of it, just twiddle the lsb of the data as it is copied.

Watermarking, Not Encryption

[jsproul]

This is good, folks. Watermarks cannot be enforced by DVD-ROM drives, only standalone DVD players. You'll still be able to copy DVDs as raw bits without anyone being the wiser. With DIVX, on the other hand, the data is encrypted and is useless without the appropriate key, which can only be obtained from the DIVX server. (Short of breaking the encryption algorithm which, while not impossible, is much more difficult than a raw binary disk-to-disk copy.)

dd if=/dev/dvdrom of=~/enemy_of_the_state.dvd

Video Free America

[malus]

It'll take all of 30 minutes for some 16 year old geek to devise a crack.

Crap

[Rotten]

I'm tired of hearing this stupid stories about great new copy protection systems. I've been hearing them for the last...12 years?. Piracy will exist forever.

Watermarking and fair use

[Todd Knarr]

As long as they don't interfere with fair-use copying, having the copyright information watermarked in and using it to prevent illegal copying sounds good. If they try to use it to prevent legal fair-use copying, that's another story.

I wonder what the result would be if, if they try to restrict legal copying, people just started denying the right to use their material to any entity that tried to restrict fair use of it's material.

To all who already bought DVD players- SUCKERS!!!

[Hanzie]

See your DVD players get worthless, now that they won't handle the new watermarks.

Or see them quadrouple in value if watermarks are viewable, but not enforcible by the older generation.

Anybody care to wager?

DVD watermark

[jkdufair]

I couldn't find much detail on this. It doesn't sound like the data is encrypted. If not, will it be enforced in hardware? How will a system know it's been copied "once?" Sounds like, as usual, the emperor has no clothes.

Jason Dufair
"Those who know don't have the words to tell

Watermarking is more sophisticated than that.

[pain]

I second that. A friend of mine is working on AAC encoding. He told me about watermarking that will still be present even with noise being twice the volume of the original watermarked signal.