1 reply to this topic

[Nvyseal]

You can say a lot of bad things about DRM, but one thing it didn’t do was ruin the quality of the content. Watermarking advocates will tell you that their technology is “inaudible” or “invisible” to the human ears or eyes, but that’s fundamentally impossible if the watermarking is to be effective. If the watermarking was truly inaudible, then it can be removed through analog filtering without affecting the quality of the image or audio. Since that would make the watermarking useless, it usually is visible or audible which means you’ve irreparably changed the content. It’s bad enough that downloaded music and video are worse than audio CDs or DVDs (even so-called HD video downloads are worse than DVD quality) because the bitrates are too low, but mucking it up with watermarking is just too much to bear.

One other potential usage of watermarking is user tracking. A. L. Friedman (writer for Contentinople) says that there will be no user tracking. That may very well be the case initially since music would have to be individually encoded for each customer, but it doesn’t rule it out in the future. Friedman noted that some of these fears are rooted in Apple’s embedding of the buyer’s name in the DRM-free music from EMI. The justification for these watermarks which are unique to each track but not unique to the user is to track which songs are being pirated on peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent and how often they’re traded. But if that’s all they want to do, then it would be just as easy to leave the watermark out of the track and simply track the hash of the file.


Read the whole Blog HERE. What a big mess

[Christopholofigus]

and here i thought watermarking was just used on documents and photos. Thanks for the info Mr X.

Edited by Christopholofigus, 21 August 2007 - 10:21 PM.