It’s almost funny to me that Universal is moving into watermarking. We approached all the labels in late 2004 with watermarking as an alternate to DRM (which was really MS WM 9 at the time) and they shot it down. More accurately, they were open to it and liked it at first (except Sony who had ATRAC at the time and just said forget it), but if we did it, then they wanted us to create bots to scour p2p networks for illegal, watermarked files and report back who had them (we were opposed, but were willing). But then they decided that if we did that, it would probably over burden their already burdened legal departments so they shot it down. Now it’s back again. Sometimes it doesn’t pay to have vision.

Originally published on WordPress on September 11, 2007. Migrated to this blog on May 29, 2025.