Audio DVD Watermarking Targets Pirates

By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

This has been a bad week for copy protection, what with the Sony DRM story from earlier in the week. This type of copy protection involves HD-DVD, so it hasn’t even hit the market yet … hopefully, when it does it won’t have the issues of Sony’s DRM.

Inaudible watermarks will be embedded in the soundtracks of movies … both those at theatres as well as consumer DVDs. They seem to have covered the end cases, including recording a video with a watermarked movie playing in the background. The player will only shut down if the watermark is playing for a long time … so hopefully you’re not making a 2 hour video of your child’s birthday party with a watermarked movie in the background.

We Say: As DRM schemes go, this doesn’t seem that bad. I’m not sure how it will be handled on a PC … will DVD playing software such as WinDVD and PowerDVD handle this? What happens if the software chooses to ignore it? Or will this have to be built into the firmware of PC DVD drives?

Hollywood has unveiled a powerful new technology which it hopes will help kill the pirating of movies. The system relies on sound – not vision – and was unveiled at a conference held by the international DVD Forum in Paris, France last week.

The opportunity for a novel copyright protection system arose because the Forum is now finalising the standards for the new High Definition DVD system that goes on sale early in 2006. The details of the system were explained by Alan Bell, executive vice-president of advanced technology with Warner Brothers in California, US.

All HD-DVD players will have a sensor that looks for inaudible watermarks in the soundtrack of movies. The watermarks will be included in the soundtracks of all major movies released to cinemas.

If a DVD player detects the telltale code, the disc must be an illegal copy made by copying a film print to video, or pointing a camcorder and microphone at a cinema screen. So the player refuses to play the disc. Source: New Scientist

DRM, Sony, Rootkit, HD-DVD, DVD, RealTechNews