On the German website PC Welt we can read about a new watermark system developed by Philips. They claim that in addition to their system being a copy protection, it can also serve as a digital rights management (DRM) tool. The new system can be applied to Audio and Video files regardless of the media used.
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The rights owner can specify, wether the Video or Audio file may be transmitted or used. It can be used by digital media (CD/DVD) as well as by digital transmissions over the Internet. This way a TV station can define how often and in which timerange a "Video on Demand" may be played back. According to Philips this digital watermark is invisible even for the expert's eyes and ears and it will not affect the quality of the multimedia contents. "A frequent playback and changing encodings don't affect the protection. Neither does compression and decompression of movie files" Philips say. The technology was already used for this years Oscar awards. The jury received Screeners that were protected by the digital watermark from Philips. An illegal copy of "The last samurai" with Tom Cruise appeared shortly after. With the help of the watermark it was possible to find out who actually copied the movie. One of the main suspects, Russel W. Sprague from Illinois was found guilty on Monday in Los Angeles. He provided 200 movies for download via Internet. He received the screeners by a member of the Oscar jury. |
I think this protection will be defeated. There was already such a protection a few years ago and that one was compromised. Possibly, the DMCA will be the only protection that this technique will have, once it's known how it works, as the author won't be allowed to publish the solution. Fortunately, the DMCA is only valid in the United States at this point in time.
Furthermore, a playback protection only works if you have equipment that is compatible with the protection. Current DVD players probably only display the protection pixels but that doesn't prevent you from watching the movie. The other technique of identifying a single copy is very unlikely to be applied to sold DVDs, as this one only makes sense for screeners.
Feel free to comment below, or place your bets if and when this protection will be hacked in our Copy Protection Discussion Forum. Of course, you should
also tell us if you managed to hack the protection
yourself.
Source: PCWelt.de
