Re: IMPRIMATUR Website

Jeremy G. Byrne <jeremy[_at_]midnight.com.au> wrote:
>
> On 4/06/97, John Enser <jxe[_at_]olswang.co.uk> wrote:
> > >
> > > The enjoyable content of the music can be transferred to someone
> > > else -but the compression will destroy or seriously weaken the
> > > inaudible tones.
> >
> > BUT if, like cerberus.com, you can only decompress with a
> > user-specific player
>
> Oh please! And how does this player prevent the user simply piping
> its output into an MPEG3 compression utility and dubbing off a perfect
> copy for alt.tunez?
>
> All of these mechanisms designed to prevent duplication of digital
> informtion can and will be circumvented. And, on the Net, it's
> likely to take about three days...

This is a problem we wrestled with in the COPICAT project, the results of which can be found on http://www.mari.co.uk/copicat/copicat.htm. The solution we came up with can be summarised as "late decryption into volatile space". It survived the attacks of a group of computer science students, but we didn't have the resources to commercialise the results.

In the ECMS world, there is a broad division between those who favour absolute prevention of unauthorised copying - the COPICAT approach - which is technically difficult and can compromise usability, and the tracing approach (e.g. IMPRIMATUR) using embedded digital watermarks, which is on the whole technically easier. Both approaches are valid and neither is perfect.

Edward Barrow
<edward[_at_]plato32.demon.co.uk> Received on Sat Jun 07 1997 - 12:18:33 GMT