Techdirt. Stories filed under "watermarks"

As Expected, Labels Now Want To Use Privacy-Reducing Watermarks As 'Cloud DRM'

Mike Masnick — Wed, 7 Apr 2010 13:44:00 PDT

For quite some time now, the record labels have believed that if they couldn't put old school copy protection on music files, the "next best thing" would be watermarks. This idea started showing up more than five years ago and when iTunes finally went DRM free, we were among those who pointed out that the files still contained identifying watermarks, in that the files themselves included info on who purchased the files. Two years ago we pointed out how these were a serious problem from a privacy perspective and it was best not to go down that road.

Surprise, surprise. The industry didn't listen.

As a bunch of you are submitting, with streaming/cloud music suddenly becoming popular, apparently the record labels are demanding that companies use such watermarks as a new type of privacy-invading DRM:

The labels, say our source, are demanding that a user can only stream music that is watermarked to their username. Change the username, or try to stream music that you've ripped from a CD, and those songs won't play.

While a bunch of people submitting this seem to think the watermarking is new, it's not. That part of the story has been known for years. But what is new (if not surprising) is that the labels are trying to lock up streaming services by using the watermarks as a weak form of DRM. Of course, like any form of DRM it won't work. Instead, it will annoy legitimate users who are stopped from listening to music they legally obtained the rights to. And, on top of that, it will put their privacy at risk. And for what purpose?

New decade. Same story.

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AP Convinces Newspaper That Watermark Will Stop Mythical Evil Copiers

Mike Masnick — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:49:54 PDT

Someone anonymous sent in an explanation by the Town News for its decision to use the Associated Press' hNews "watermarking" system which is the AP's silly and meaningless attempt to stop copying of AP content. The General Manager of Town News, Marc Wilson, explains why they signed up for the program using the totally unsubstantiated scare tactic, claiming that there are these awful content thieves out there stealing content:

Probably the biggest issue within the newspaper/Internet world is controlling the re-use of content posted on the World Wide Web.

Actually, I'd say that the biggest issue is figuring out a business model that works. If you're trying to control the use of content you put online, you're doing it wrong. And, oops, the hNews format doesn't do much to stop content reuse due to the magic of the world's worst copyright infringement tool: cut-and-paste.

Honestly, I'm still trying to figure out who believes this myth that copying news content is some massive problem. Sure, there are some spam sites out there, but they get no meaningful traffic. There are some claims that they cause search engine trouble, but that's overblown as well. Google and others are pretty good at sussing out where the content originated. But, according to Wilson, this is a huge problem:

But what they don't like the rise of the many companies that copy or scrape content off of newspaper Web sites -- and end up competing with the sites that originated the content.

Again, where are these mythical content copiers? There are spam sites, but they get no traffic and they go away pretty quickly. Besides, if you can't compete against a spam site scraping your content, you're definitely doing something wrong. If your brand and your community management is so weak that a spam site can compete with you, you don't deserve to be in business.

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Privacy-Invading Watermarks: Just Say No

Timothy Lee — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:45:00 PDT

A while back I had a piece at Ars Technica critiquing a study from the Center for Democracy and Technology on the use of "personalized" watermarks. I suggested that CDT should have explicitly noted that such technologies are a privacy hazard, and their only known use -- as an "anti-piracy" tool -- is counterproductive because it affects only paying customers, not people who get music illegally in the first place. CDT's David Sohn was kind enough to respond to my criticism last week. Sohn concedes that the best way to safeguard users' privacy is not to use personalized watermarks at all. He also acknowledges that fighting copyright infringement is the only known use for the technology; he speculates that additional uses might be found in the future, but he doesn't give a specific example.

Sohn's key point is that "watermarking may have some advantages over other technologies from a consumer perspective." Specifically, individualized watermarking isn't as bad as full-blown DRM, or putting unencrypted identification information in file headers. It's certainly true that the major labels have technological options that are even worse than personalized watermarks, but that's hardly an argument in favor of using the watermarks. Personalized watermarks punish paying customers less egregiously than DRM does, but they still make music less valuable by exposing customers to potential legal liability that wouldn't exist if they got music from other sources. And making your product less valuable is a bad business strategy.

Indeed, Sohn's argument strikes me as missing the forest for the trees. If someone asks you to write a report about the best way to shoot oneself in the foot, the first thing the report should say is don't shoot yourself in the foot. If the reader isn't persuaded by that section, I suppose it doesn't hurt to have a follow up section about the ways to minimize the foot-shooting damage: use small-caliber bullets, aim for the edge of the foot rather than the middle, have medical personnel close by. But a report that skips straight to the "how to" section is doing its readers a disservice. Similarly, the message music and movie publishers most need to hear is that individualized watermarks are bad for their bottom line because they only punish paying customers. Perhaps Sohn is right that most of them won't listen; if so, there's nothing wrong with also discussing ways to avoid a privacy fiasco. But CDT's report didn't even try to dissuade companies from using technologies in the first place, and I think that's a major missed opportunity.

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Digital Watermarks Are Not The Answer

Mike Masnick — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 13:38:00 PST

It was quite predictable that as the recording industry finally realized that DRM was a bad idea that it would move on to digital watermarking. The idea sounds appealing. It doesn't have the feature that people hate about DRM: preventing you from doing what you want with the music you've purchased -- but it does have a number of other downsides. First, it tends to degrade the quality of the audio. Second, it's often relatively easy to remove the watermark, making it effectively useless. Third, if watermarks are used to link a specific file to a specific user (which the industry insists it isn't doing... yet), it suddenly becomes a huge liability just to have those music files. Imagine if you lose your iPod full of watermarked tracks, and all of those tracks find their way onto file sharing sites? Even more importantly, the whole concept of watermarking is counterproductive to what music files should be about. If the industry were smart and understood the basic economics of what was happening, they'd want people to be sharing music. They should want people to be their biggest (free!) promoters of music. They should want people to be spreading the music of their musicians as a way to get the word out. The whole concept of watermarking goes against that very idea. It's more backwards thinking from an industry that is more focused on protecting an old way of doing business, rather than recognizing the opportunities of a new way of doing business.

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