Hollywood's Excellent Watermarking Adventure

Among the latest tech proposals for content tracing is "forensic watermarking". This idea, which I discussed with SiDi, allows a production company to introduce subtle changes into media. These changes form a "fingerprint" - an identifying signature that lets someone with the right viewing technology tell the origin of a copy, since the watermark is carried from copy to copy.

Watermarking is not precisely DRM, in that it doesn't attempt to prevent the act of copying, but it is forensic in that it allows someone examining a copy to determine where the copy is generated from. Like DRM, watermarking can also be broken and removed, creating clean copies. This results in an increasing arms race where technologists attempt to embed harder-to-find and harder-to-remove watermarks, and other people work to crack these marks.

To the general end-user, a watermark has generally been harmless. Since it doesn't block action, you tend not to notice it. That may be changing. In the Register's deep dive on high-definition 4k watermarking it appears like the new standard will be used to block playing of content that doesn't have watermarks, or could even block playing of content that doesn't have a device-specific watermark. This would enable locking a specific copy of media to a specific player, possibly even preventing sharing within a household or across devices inside a consumer house.

In the next version, I hear there will be straps for your chair and comfortable eyelid-management capabilities.