[mythtv-users] FCC admits CableCARD a failure, vows to try something else

[Alan Marchiori]

On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 7:36 PM, Rod Smith <mythtv at rodsbooks.com> wrote:
> On Friday 04 December 2009 05:08:18 pm Johnny wrote:
>>
>> Now any
>> individual can share a video with anybody they want in the whole world
>> and do it for free. That is going to make it worse for the media
>> companies. But I agree that the DRM schemes will be unsuccessful at
>> preventing this, and will only hinder those who pay for the content.
>
> How about watermarking? If STBs or some future CableCard replacement inserted
> a watermark in the video files, then the copyright holders could go after
> anybody who widely distributes captured video. This would even deter people
> sharing video on a small scale, providing the presence of the watermark is
> widely publicized -- if I give a video to my next door neighbor and he then
> uploads it to YouTube, the copyright holders would come after me, and my
> knowing that would make me less likely to share the video with even one
> person.
>
> It's my understanding that the movie studios already do something like this
> with films shown in theaters, to help them track down on that source of movie
> piracy. Whatever technique they use for that is obviously robust enough to
> survive capture via camcorder and transcoding into whatever formats the
> pirates use, so something similar ought to work for more direct digital
> capture. Of course, you'd need a big database and a large number of unique
> watermarks that could be easily identified by the copyright holders. I don't
> know if current watermarking techniques would be up to that challenge.
>


This sounds like the best option I've heard yet.