How can you miss me unless I go away?
I apologize for the break in posting. It has been a very busy spring as the vacuum created by the presumed demise of DRM has created the beginnings of a vortex about watermarking. Whether you are tracking the government, the business press, or the many tech pundits, the tone and number of items about watermarking took a spike this month.
It wasn’t overload, or being at a loss for words. Rather it was the strange set of illnesses that seem to come with the change of seasons, and the NAB convention, where the broadcast industry gathers annually to trade smoke, expense account meals, and kick tires on the various technologies that constitute the production and distribution pipelines.
Several things need to be pointed out, some of which have been stated here before, but bear refreshing. First of all, many observers still seem to think of watermarking as a DRM scheme. While it certainly could be integrated or integral to a DRM solution, in our view, watermarking is a distinctly different and independent approach. Both in terms of values and technology, watermarking is an enforcement strategy, not a prevention one.
Another is that the marketplace for watermarking is years younger than that for DRM.
DRM has years of investment for some really simple reasons, while watermarking has not. The first is that the content distribution industry has generally enjoyed a technological boundary to theft. In the analogue era, if you didn’t have a 35mm projector, having a print was pretty pointless. The physical nature of distribution made the price of entry into any sort of theft made piracy a fairly contained risk. When video and then digital tools first arrived, they were still relatively expensive and complex. In the last decade has it become cheap and easy to scale quality pirated content. Even then, it has been natural to imagine that the very technology that enables the theft would also enable a silver bullet that would make it impossible to steal.
Except it doesn’t. That hasn’t stopped the entertainment industry from pushing the consumer entertainment and IT industries from spending a lot of time and money creating and deploying a lot of complex technologies that resulted in more expensive less capable gear that frankly isn’t even holding back the flood of unauthorized duplication and transfer of copyrighted content.
With this kind of investment, both financially and emotionally, it is going to take more than Steve Jobs saying it should go away for DRM to collapse. If you have doubts, just check out this agenda for a Hollywood high level Digital Rights Management Conference. See who is speaking? With a registration fee of $699 for the webcast and sessions on “The Government’s Impact on Digital Rights Management” this is not the meeting of a retreating army.
Something else conspires against the ‘bull market in watermarking’ that Om Malik, ‘founder and chief blogger’ for GigaOm Media., is looking for. That is the fact that the value of enforcement is still a cost.
When you wire your home for an alarm and subscribe to the service, you aren’t expecting to see a multiple of that cost show up in the appraisal of your home. When you insure it for fire , it is because there is a known risk that you are preparing for. For some reason this kind of thinking is not applicable in entertainment distribution because a loss estimated at $18 billion annually isn’t anything like their house burning down.
In fact it isn’t even like having a bad water leak. When you have a leak, you might have a flood, or have to swim through your basement or something like have a floor collapse when a leak saturated a structure. But nothing like that happens when an enterprise pirate takes a pristine iteration of your product, produces a quality rendition and goes to a market that you are overpriced relative to the wages of the population, like say the slums of Mexico City. You just don’t feel that as pain, the way you do when your house actually burns down.
Combine the two – no real pain and the myth of the silver bullet- and you have the right combination of factors to support denial and BAU (business as usual).
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