While I frequently complain about Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) and the way it takes user's freedoms away, I have not really worked my way through the alternatives. It is clearly evil for someone to sell broken CDs (sometimes known as "copy protected"), let alone infect customer's computers with malicious software.
Yet there are many voices claiming that digital technology has made copying of data so easy that rightsholders must have some kind of instrument to persecute infringement of their rights. The best-known way of protecting music or video is to slap it with some kind of DRM, which foists all sorts of annoying restrictions on buyers. Often, you can't copy music files to your portable .ogg player, at least not unless it has some sort of weird crippling technology on it (which, by the way, significantly shortens battery life). Not to mention the many other ways to make the music you bought online a piece of junk in comparison to the one you bought at the CD store.
There's a thing called watermarking or, more accurately, fingerprinting. Information is embedded in music or video which can be linked to the person who bought the track. Thus, if it shows up on a filesharing network, a buyer who uploaded it can be held to account - yet the buyer's fair use rights remain unharmed.
This type of protection is popular with indie online stores such as Beatport. Beatport is a place where a lot of DJs and electronica musicians buy their tracks, and these people want to do the kind of things with their music that DRM-mongers get all worked up about: Remix it, sample it, take it apart, stir it up and put it back together. Any restrictions on this would totally devalue the music for the buyers.
After thinking a while, I still haven't quite made up my mind with regard to watermarking. Is this the holy grail of a compromise with which record labels and music buyers can live (as well as the army of lawyers now writing menacing letters to computer users, and who are at the root of much of the bally-hoe)? Is it a mean scheme by Big Brother, trying to put together a database of every song you listen to and every movie you see? Or a communist subversive plot to deprive well-meaning intellectual property rights holders of their right to to fight users with DRM?
I would like people on this site to voice their opinion on this, helping me to form my own. Some voicing has been done over at indicare.org, as well as on ZDNet, where there's comments aplenty. Also, Freedom to Tinker takes a look at the systemic weaknesses of different ways of watermarking.
In case I'm just warming up yesterday's news, please let me know. If not, your thoughts will be much appreciated.