{"id":1035,"date":"2008-01-12T15:42:39","date_gmt":"2008-01-12T22:42:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=1035"},"modified":"2008-01-12T15:42:39","modified_gmt":"2008-01-12T22:42:39","slug":"from_cripplewar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=1035","title":{"rendered":"From crippleware to spyware"},"content":{"rendered":"

Be careful what you wish for. The retreat of media companies from digital rights management (DRM) schemes, at least in the music business, may be followed by a growing use of digital watermarks that enable companies to track the use of files, reports<\/a> David Kravets of Wired News. The watermarks, which “are digitally woven into the fabric of a download and do not restrict listeners from making backup copies or sharing music with friends,” enable companies to track the copying, trading, and transmission of files and can be programmed to include “a unique serial number that a music company could match to the original purchaser.”<\/p>\n

Kravets reports that Sony and Universal are already including watermarks in their DRM-free files, though the companies say they don’t record information about the purchaser. Warner and EMI are not using watermarks. Microsoft has won a patent on a “stealthy audio watermarking” scheme, named El Dorado, that is, says the patent, “designed to survive all typical kinds of processing, including compression, equalization, D\/A and A\/D conversion, recording on analog tape and so forth.” Such watermarks could be used by ISPs to automatically block the transmission of files through peer-to-peer networks, achieving one of the aims of DRM by other means.<\/p>\n

But this kind of spyware, which could ultimately be encoded into many different kinds of files, could be put to uses beyond clamping down on the sharing of copyrighted music, from collecting evidence for use in litigation and negotiation to providing data for marketing purposes. One expert quoted by Kravets says that the watermarking systems provide “forensic precision” in monitoring the use of particular files.<\/p>\n

In the future, your music could be listening to you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Be careful what you wish for. The retreat of media companies from digital rights management (DRM) schemes, at least in the music business, may be followed by a growing use of digital watermarks that enable companies to track the use of files, reports David Kravets of Wired News. The watermarks, which “are digitally woven into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1035\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}