[Vorbis] off: Audio CD's and Microsoft

[Andrew Snare]

On Sun, Sep 16, 2007 at 02:24:51PM -0400, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> The rest of the opposition to the use of watermarking to mark
> commercial audio downloads really seem to reduce to "Oh shit, if I
> break the law I might get caught" ... Or in other words, your real
> problem is with copyright law and not with the watermarking.
> 
> People demanded freedom from DRM which turned their own devices
> against them. Fine. So the industry starts using watermarking. You
> should be happy, oppressive DRM is gone.  It seems to me that people
> are not happy about this turn of events because they never really
> cared about avoiding devices which were defective by design, never
> much cared about their freedom to do legal things... but were really
> only worried about their ability to get away with making illicit
> copies.

While I agree with the sentiment expressed here regarding people's
motivations, DRM and watermarking can be linked. There have been
various proposals for devices to detect such watermarking embedded
in content.

It's difficult to speculate how this might be used, but I can
understand it making people nervous. As historical examples you
have the behaviour of many consumer MD devices[1] which assumed
inbound content was copyright-protected. As a counter-example you
have the 'COPY PERMIT' flag for CD tracks which is almost universally
ignored. In the middle you have Apple's current 'stamping' of
DRM-free tracks purchased via the iTunes Store.

The point here is that watermarking could allow devices to infer
something about the copyright status of content, and it's not clear
how they would react. This leads back to the whole 'my device is
working against me' objection that many people have to DRM.

Cheers,

 - Andrew
[1] I never personally owned such a device, but I'm led to believe
that many MD devices made pessimistic assumptions about the provenance
of content.