As online downloadable video content may be the next big thing to come and possibly take over from DVD, the movie industries are looking beyond DRM into ways of protecting downloadable content from piracy. One of the latest anti-piracy technologies is from Nielsen and Digimarc, which is a digital watermarking and fingerprinting service called "Nielsen Digital Media Manager". Unlike DVDs where it is difficult to uniquely watermark and fingerprint the content of each DVD to enable tracking, this is something that can be easily done with downloadable content.
The two main features of the technology would be to control distribution rights such as prohibit the displaying of video if a specific piece of advertising is not shown (such as for ad-sponsored content) and to allow content illegally distributed online to be traced back to the culprit. The Nielson Company expects this to help allow more content providers to go online with a lower risk of their content being illegally distributed online. The executive vice president and general counsel of NBC Universal claims it will achieve widespread commercial adoption and in turn contribute to a dramatic reduction of the ease of online copyright theft. Nielsen and Digimarc expect these services to be available mid 2008 and to later extend this technology to cover other content such as DVDs, music, video games and so on.
From what I can see, this sort of technology will have some serious downsides. One thing for sure is that anyone who downloads fingerprinted digital content will need to protect it and their logon details like they would protecting financial documents. For example, even if one manages to break the DRM or make a copy, the embedded fingerprint will certainly make most think twice of even giving it to a friend or in fear that it may later be shared online. Even careful consumers would be at risk, for example, if a hacker distributes a phishing e-mail disguised as a special offer, but instead snatches people's logon details to movie and TV download websites, it is possible for them to illegally obtain movies to try making counterfeit copies from. The consequences for the account owners may make dealing with credit card fraud or even Bank fraud seem like nothing compared with potentially facing legal action as a result of the illegal copies all containing digital fingerprints linking back to the owner.
Further info can be read on this DailyTech source.
