Re: hacksdmi?

["Granquist, Lamont" <lamont () ICOPYRIGHT COM>]

On Fri, 13 Oct 2000, Blue Boar wrote:
> OK, here's another tangent to the issue:
>
> Why do they (RIAA?) want a watermark in the first place?  What can you
> do with it?
>
> Here are the possibilities I see:
>
> 1 Watermark must be present to play in an SDMI player.
> 2 Watermark can be used to trace origin of music
> 3 Watermark is designed to intentionally degrade sound quality
> 4 Reliable identifier of a particular piece of music
> 5 Lack of watermark denotes something
>
> What am I missing?

I think the idea is that they tag the content that you download off of a
website with a watermark, then they run it through some kind of
encryption/compression algorithm to the SDMI format.  The client that you
use to download this is the same client that you use for playback.  The
watermark is tagged with a specific key which will only allow you to play
it back on the client that you used to download it.  Therefore, if you
give the SDMI-encoded file to your friend they will not be able to play it
on their player since it has a different key.  This is similar to your #1,
but the goal is to watermark so it can be played in *only one* SDMI
player, thereby to prevent sharing by 90% of the people out there.

That seems like goal #1.  Goal #2 is probably your #2 above.  That means
that if someone does do an D/A->A/D->MP3 on the music and distributes it
that they will be able to automate the process of discovering the illegal
mp3s and they will be able to track down who is downloading and
distributing them.  The fact that SDMI will probably use some kind of
encryption also makes people (yes, in the USA...  for now...  watch
out...) suable under the DMCA.