Watermarks, Satellite Hacking, DMCA and more.

Peter Wayner pcw2 at flyzone.com
Wed Aug 8 11:04:26 PDT 2001


Lately I've been researching the world of satellite signal hacking. 
Some people think that there may be as many as 1 million people 
hacking into the DirecTV satellite signal so they can watch all of 
the sports, all of the movies and all of the porn without paying.

As an experiment I decided to sell electronic copies of a long story 
on the topic. I think both the payment system and the 
watermarking/copyright protection mechanisms are pretty novel. To get 
a copy all you need to do is send 75 cents from a paypal account to 
satstory at flyzone.com. You'll get a personalized watermarked copy in 
return. This is a far cry from the micropayment digital cash systems 
of our dreams, but it is fully functional.

The watermark is not sophisticated. You can learn how to disable it 
in the copyright notice to the story. There's no challenge for the 
3L33t h4X0rs among you. After all of the fuss about copyright 
circumvention, I thought a light touch may be better. It was also 
substantially easier to engineer. My guess is that the ease of use 
will bring in more sales than are lost to hackers.

More information can be found here:

  http://www.flyzone.com/satstory/

Please let me know if you  have any thoughts, complaints, or other suggestions.

Peter Wayner
pcw at flyzone.com





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