Putting A Trace On Copyrighted Booty

from the will-this-work? dept

Businessweek is running an interview with Paul Kocher of Cryptography Research about the work he's doing to offer the entertainment industry a way to track down pirates, without violating anyone's privacy. His plan is to put some code into the content itself that identifies where it was created, so that if someone is caught infringing then the material can be traced back to where it originated from. I'm a bit skeptical, even if Kocher does have a track record (he created SSL). Without knowing many of the details (and the article doesn't provide too many), I can think of plenty of ways that this could be defeated or lead to even greater scams, where people try to pin the blame for distributed content on other, innocent, victims.
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  • identicon
    DV Henkel-Wallace, 30 May 2003 @ 3:54pm

    err, watermarks?

    Isn't this just "digital watermarking" that people have been talking about for ages, and that Felton says can be cracked with differential techniques?

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Csharpener, 2 Jun 2003 @ 8:41am

      Re: err, watermarks?

      It's essentially a sliding encryption. I think the scarey thing about this technology is what they are not telling you. Even with on disk logic and such, the problem remains that a key needs to be static at some point. And how does the disk get that static key, if it's using multiple layers of dynamic encryption that are unique for every player? hmmmmm?

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    David, 30 May 2003 @ 4:16pm

    Previously, on Techdirt...

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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