[Infowarrior] - Audio Watermark Web Spider Starts Crawling

[Richard Forno]

 New "watermark" system scours the net for infringement, notifies owners

2/27/2007 10:05:26 PM, by Ken Fisher

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070227-8937.html

Watermarks date back at least to the 13th century, when paper manufacturers
found a way to "mark" sheets with an unremovable, barely-visible signature
to denote either the paper's origin, ownership, or both. Watermarks have
come a long way, and companies such as Macrovision and Digimarc have made a
king's ransom offering "digital watermarking technology" to today's
purveyors of content.

These days, digital watermarking is now being tasked to make money on
unauthorized file distribution. The proposition is simple: what if video and
audio content flowed freely online, sans DRM, but owners were somehow
compensated when files were played or accessed? That's the basic idea behind
Digimarc's latest patent.

According a patent filing at the US Patent and Trademark Office, Digimarc's
"Method for monitoring internet dissemination of image, video and/or audio
files" is a monitoring service that scans the Internet, consuming content as
it goes. The system downloads audio, video and images, and then scans them
for watermarks. If it finds a watermark it recognizes, the system then
contacts that mark's registered owner and informs them of the discovery.

Digimark announced their successful patent application this month, but the
patent has been a long time coming. It was first filed in November of 1998,
long before the YouTubes and MySpaces of the world existed. Now Digimarc is
promoting the monitoring system as the cure to what ails these social
networking sites. According to Bruce Davis, Digimarc chairman and CEO, the
system could help build "viable business models" in an arena rife with
"disruptive changes in entertainment distribution and consumption."

"Much of the repurposed content on YouTube, for example, contains
copyrighted entertainment," Davis said in a statement. "If social networking
sites implemented software to check each stream, they could identify
copyrighted subject matter, create a report, negotiate compensation for the
value chain and sell targeted advertising for related goods and services.
There is no need to impede consumers. In fact, the specific identification
of the content could guide provision of related goods, services and
community designed to maximize the consumer¹s enjoyment of the entertainment
experience."

For the system to work, players at multiple levels would need to get
involved. Broadcasters would need to add identifying watermarks to their
broadcast, in cooperation with copyright holders, and both parties would
need to register their watermarks with the system. Then, in the event that a
user capped a broadcast and uploaded it online, the scanner system would
eventually find it and report its location online. Yet the system is not
designed to hop on P2P networks or private file sharing hubs, but instead
crawls public web sites in search of watermarked material. As such, this
"solution" is more geared towards sites like YouTube and less towards casual
piracy, which rarely involves posting things to a web site.

Generally we've laughed off most watermarking solutions because they seemed
like solutions in search of a problem. Now that Google has learned the hard
way that content owners want to be paid when their content shows up on
YouTube, we may see more of these "solutions" in the future.