Re: Content Provider Problem?

David Berger (dvberger@cs.berkeley.edu)
Fri, 16 Sep 1994 14:24:38 -0700


Several people have attacked my original message because I dared to
question if we can protect information rendered in digital form.

The information may be text, audio, video, or images. Indeed, it
might be a hologram. After pointing out quite clearly that you cannot
do this, I suggested that we can make it inconvenient for people who
want to duplicate this information. But since it is not possible to
truly stop people from duplicating information, I then asked what
efforts exist to "watermark" information such that we can know who is
the offending distributor.

Now, I want to be clear. I am not interested in generating discussion
about how business should be conducted. Nor am I passing value
judgements on any particular stance. While I think we must be open to
looking at all facets of the problem, I am really only interested in
the technical discussion that pertains to marking data. So, please
accept that I will not reply to messages that attempt to engage me in
some sort of philosophical debate of what is right and what is wrong.

David Berger
Graduate Student Researcher
University of California at Berkeley