Standards are not always a good thing, says Philips, the company that made a fortune from setting the CD standard. It says the current quest to set a single standard for 鈥渨atermarking鈥� pictures, movies and sound in order to protect copyright is flawed.
Philips points out that hackers will eventually crack any single system by finding the standard mark, working out what added noise will spoil it, and posting the secret on the Net. Its answer (US 2003/56101) is to work from an agreed but broad range of watermarks, adding several different ones to different parts of a tune or movie throughout its length. An authorised detector will then look for all the different types of marks.
Philips says hackers will have to analyse the whole recording many times over to work out which mark is where, so most simply won鈥檛 bother.
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