Techdirt. Stories filed under "watermark" Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us Techdirt. Stories filed under "watermark"http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Thu, 13 Dec 2012 23:57:15 PST Sony's New German Ebookstore Features Thousands Of DRM-Free Books Tim Cushing http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121212/14130321366/sonys-new-german-ebookstore-features-thousands-drm-free-books.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121212/14130321366/sonys-new-german-ebookstore-features-thousands-drm-free-books.shtml
The Digital Reader brings us the news that Sony, of all companies, is opening its own ebookstore in Germany, bringing with it a large selection of DRM-free books. 
The press release mentions that not all of the Epub ebooks sold by Sony come with the onerous Adobe DE DRM. Some of the ebooks, numbering in the “thousands”, use digital watermarks instead.

Apparently several German publishers have decided to go with this low-hassle security, including Bastei Luebbe Verlag, which publishes novels by Ken Follett, Andreas Eschbach, and Dan Brown (it is not clear that any of these authors’ novels are DRM free).
Rather than inject malignant coding that often fails to distinguish between paying customers and file sharers, these German publishers are opting for digital watermarking, which generally works as well as nastier forms of DRM but without the negative side effects. Booxtream is handling the watermarking for Sony, having proved its worth to publishers by providing this service to one of the biggest ebook storefronts of all time, Pottermore.

So, what convinced Sony to go DRM-free on thousands of titles? Perhaps it was observing Booxtream's success in deterring piracy without having to resort to draconian measures.
According to Huub van der Pol, the founder of Booxtream’s parent company iContact, the official release of the Harry Potter ebooks saw a decrease in piracy of the series.

Once the titles were available legally, and were easy to use, pirates saw little reason to post copies of the ebooks online.
As Hoffelder points out, you can't make that same claim about DRM-loaded ebooks. In nearly every case, the DRM is discarded easily by enterprising file sharers, or just as often by consumers, who strip their purchases of this handicap in order to move them to other devices -- or simply to make sure the publisher, bookstore or the DRM itself doesn't suddenly decide to render their purchases unavailable or useless. Some customers may download the pirated version even if they've purchased it, just to have an easily portable version unhampered by DRM. Why punish your paying customers in order to temporarily annoy/entertain infringers?

The other key to Booxtream and Pottermore's success is the simplest one to solve: make the book(s) available for sale at reasonable prices and with as few limitations as possible. Do this, and your "piracy problem" will very possibly solve itself. 

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]]> in-other-news,-Sony-sells-e-readers http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20121212/14130321366 Fri, 12 Aug 2011 06:14:44 PDT UMG Watermarks Audiophile Files, Pisses Off Paying Customers Timothy Geigner http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110809/04114515451/umg-watermarks-audiophile-files-pisses-off-paying-customers.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110809/04114515451/umg-watermarks-audiophile-files-pisses-off-paying-customers.shtml
Now let's say that when Earth's army confronted their enemy and fired their weapons...the bullets, instead of firing, simply blew up, taking the limbs of Earth's infantry with them. As a result, the pod people were free to take over the world. You'd be pretty pissed, wouldn't you? Unless you're a pod-person, I mean?

Yet that's about how effective Universal Music Group's latest attempt at watermarking is. You can read the fascinating exchange on the message board of Hydrogenaudio.com, but here's the skinny. A customer of Passionato, a site dedicated to bringing audiophiles high quality recordings of classical music, notices that he was getting an odd thrumming noise on his FLAC file of Tchaikovsky's 5th Symphony that he got from Passionato (the file was advertised as lossless), a noise that wasn't present on the file he got directly from UMG. There's some back and forth between helpful board members about some technical issues that could have been the problem, but eventually, after multiple users go and test files similarly, they arrive at the conclusion that it must be watermarking. It culminates with someone from Passionato showing up and indicating that the file received was faithfully translated from whatever UMG supplied the site, meaning that any sound artifacts would have been the result of UMG's file, not a technical issue resulting from compression or file extension switches. Basically, UMG watermarked files being distributed through their partners. Files which are being advertised as lossless recordings for audiophiles.

A couple of things were clear in that board exchange:

First, nice try, UMG, but this isn't going to accomplish what you want it to. You're talking about a dedicated group of audiophiles here. There were all manner of suggestions for nixing the watermarking, from pirating an un-watermarked file (keeping in mind that it was already purchased in what was supposed to be lossless format), to doing a cut and paste remixing of the file from a clean one to cut out the artifact. Either way, it can be done away with.

Second, these are your damned customers! Seriously, as ridiculous as my opening analogy was, this is equally stupid. Your watermarking is only pissing off paying customers. Now they have to, in addition to... you know... giving you money, go around and figure out a way to fix what you screwed up for them. And that's going to make them buy from you in the future? And that did what exactly to keep the files from being pirated elsewhere?

I can't believe I have to say this to an established company, but: UMG, customers are people, too. Stop screwing with people and sell the product as advertised, or you'll find you'll have no more customers left to piss off.

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