Paged through a recent (June or July 13) edition of Billboard magazine yesterday. There was an article about the music industry, the internet, and copyright issues. Didn't have a chance to read in thoroughly, but it mentioned using digital watermarks which contained info on to who (CC number) and when the material was sold... the watermarks allgedly could survive if a CD was taped, copied several times and redigitized. It's rather interesting for several reasons... imagine if every CD you owned was tagged with a link to your identity. So imagine getting a used CD or from a garage sale... after several years a pirated edition is floating around the internet... The anti-piracy scheme is only useful for direct sale to a customer though. If you buy music anonymously, how is it traced? This only works for pirating on-demand purchases. Other issues: what if an eavesdropper steals the music or video? It's tagged with your ID. If he spreads pirated material, you get in trouble even though it's not nec. your fault (if no secure communications are available, anyway). If it uses a credit-card number as (part of) an ID, that's pretty bad. Someone can sniff for CC numbers if they know how it's stored. The system will have to rely on proprietary tech and security through obscurity. Even know how watermarks are stored without understanding the math, one must be able to somehow garble the sound without distorting it, but which renders the watermark useless. That a watermark can survive when the music is converted to analog and then redigitized is interesting... (if it's saved as inaudible tones, what's to prevent one from blurting them out with noise in those frequencies?) Guess I'll have to hunt down that issue and post useful excerpts from it...in terms of far use, of course. (Or perhaps an alt-vista search...) Rob --- No-frills sig. Befriend my mail filter by sending a message with the subject "send help" Key-ID: 5D3F2E99 1996/04/22 wlkngowl@unix.asb.com (root@magneto) AB1F4831 1993/05/10 Deranged Mutant <wlkngowl@unix.asb.com> Send a message with the subject "send pgp-key" for a copy of my key.