What’s Next on the DRM Front: Watermarking Digital Media
By Alexander Grundner |
January 31st, 2006 
Ugh. I just finished reading Ian Brown’s recap of the Digital Rights Management conference in London, and boy, the future of free flowing digital media doesn’t look good. It turns out that next on the horizon is hack-proof digital media watermarking. So, even if a hacker is able to break encryption on media, the watermark will serve as a last line of defense when trying to playback content on a media player that recognizes and upholds watermarks. No doubt that the watermark will also contain personally identifiable information that can be traced to the original owner who purchased the content through an online service.
Also of interest was Ian’s statements after listening to Corporate VP at Microsoft’s Windows Digital Media Division, Amir Majidimehr, presentation. Ian writes: “Microsoft has not made any attempt to standardize their DRM technology through a standards group. They want to control the media business model through control of the platform. They admit their technology is not foolproof, but should serve to keep honest customers honest. (The real problem is the dishonest customers, who will break their DRM and share the resulting files on P2P networks that will never be shut down, as Microsoft researchers have stated).” SAY WHAT? Keep honest people honest? And there’s no way to stop the real perpetrators of piracy with DRM? So what’s the point of DRM then? Oh yeah, make money by tying people to a platform’s licensed ecosystem of products – Note: Apple is as guilty of this as well.
And lastly, Cory Doctorow also spoke at the conference and revealed a mind boggling fact: BigChampagne, an online media market research group, has found that “DRM-protected files exclusively released through iTunes typically appear in unprotected form on P2P networks 180 seconds later.” Ok, try not to laugh too hard guys. Anyone else feel like DRM is caught in an awkward tailspin?
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