Academics at the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering have been working on a digital fingerprinting technology which aims to protect music, video, images and certain documents from piracy by using anti-collusion codes (AAC). When a consumer receives a piece of content protected with AAC, the content is marked with a Digital ID which is unique to the user to allow tracing should it get leaked out or pirated. The AAC technology is designed to be transparent to the user, without affecting the content's quality as well as not requiring any specialised software or hardware, which DRM restricted content mandates. However, the AAC technology is designed to withstand any attempt of removing or 'diluting' it.
The technology is primarily aimed at protecting audio and Video-on-Demand services such as via the Internet or via satellite. The advantage with music/video download services would be doing away with the infamous DRM technology to improve playback compatibility, while at the same time strongly discouraging unauthorised distribution. For example, Sony's use of rootkit technology to help protect their CDs from piracy turned into a real disaster for the company. Other attempts of using DRM such as with iTunes, copy protected audio CDs and other music download services have all resulted in hardware compatibility issues, while having little effect at stopping piracy.
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The technologies aim to counter cyber criminals' use of sophisticated "collusion attacks", which occur when multiple users conspire to electronically steal and distribute copyrighted or classified material, diluting or erasing the original digital ID, or fingerprint, from the stolen multimedia content to avoid detection. ADVERTISEMENT
Wu and Liu's new, interdisciplinary digital fingerprinting technology involves anti-collusion codes (ACC). ACC is designed to protect multimedia content without compromising the quality of the multimedia product or inhibiting legitimate uses. |
In a way, this technology seems very similar to Fraunhofer's watermarking technology for MP3, with the exception that this is designed to work over a wide range of media formats. This technology does have one nice feature in that it would do away way with the notorious DRM restrictions and player compatibility issues, by allowing the use of standard media formats.
Unfortunately, as several people have pointed out with Fraunhofer's watermarking technology, this Digital ID technology does have a serious drawback in that the content is tied to the user. While this may discourage the user from sharing their content online, unfortunately it also means they will need to treat all their AAC protected content as they would with confidential documents! If any content falls into the wrong hands or they give a copy to a not so trustworthy friend, they could face serious problems if it turns up on a file sharing network.
Source: SC Magazine
