Adam Back wrote: > In my opinion copymarks are evil and doomed to fail technically. > There always need to be playble non-certified content, and current > generation watermarks seem easy to remove; and even if some really > good job of spread spectrum encoding were done, someone would reverse > engineer the players to extract the location parameters and then they > too would be removable -- and in the end even if someone did manage to > design a robust watermarking scheme respecting Kerchoff's principle, > the identity information is weakly authenticated, and subject to > identity theft or the content itself could be stolen or plausibly > deniably claimed to have been stolen and this only has to happen once > for each work.
The thing that gets me about all this is that exactly the same argument can be made for all existing media - and, although piracy is rife, no-one is attempting to mark videotapes or CDs, AFAIK. So why all the fuss about more modern digital media? Has no-one noticed all the ripped videotapes, CDs and DVDs? Are we really expected to believe the whole media reproduction industry is ever going to switch over to producing each disc individually, expensively watermarked? So what's the real agenda? And don't tell me its because broadband will eliminate physical media: a) I believe physical media will always have higher bandwidth than broadband - why? Because you have to feed the broadband from somewhere, and archive it somewhere. b) Even if physical media goes away, individual watermarking blows away multicast - and broadband will just never work without that. It seems to me that putting the details of the purchaser in plaintext on the beginning of the file and making it illegal to remove it is as good a protection as you are ever going to get - but that would ruin a whole bunch of business plans, so I guess no "expert" is going to admit that. In short, the agenda, it seems to me, is the business plans of companies in the watermarking business. No more, no less. I'm amazed the media moguls are willing to waste so much of their time and money on it. Cheers, Ben. -- http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html "There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
