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Nothing, at a guess. I can't imagine a technical system which would allow a watermark to survive the typical cut/paste/sample process of a mashup. Of course, if someone just used the whole track, it might - but in that case, it's hardly a creative mashup, is it?
"How would it affect the principle of fair use?"
It wouldn't. Using music as an example, were I to use a track and be covered by currect fair use tems, then it wouldn't matter that it was traceable to me - what I was doing would, by definition, be legal. Of course, were that song to be found in its entirety on your friendly local file sharing service, being downloaded by thousands of people, then there is no fair use defence.
"Would Internet service providers start to block specific activity on the Web based on whether a watermark was detected?"
Unlikely, unless the ISP simply wanted to cut the amount of P2P activity - and there are easier ways of doing that. Far better to just maintain the current fiction that they have no responsibility for what travels across their networks, allowing them to continue to claim "common carrier" status.
Plus, it's worth baring in mind what Nick Carr says in his article:
"Such watermarks could be used by ISPs to automatically block the transmission of files through peer-to-peer networks, achieving one of the aims of DRM by other means."
If they did, indeed, block such traffic why should we care? After all, the law doesn't allow you to share copyrighted material with thousands of strangers for free. Watermarking doesn't prevent you from exercising the rights the law already allows you over copyrighted material that you buy. It *could* be used to prosecute you *if* you break the law. Isn't that a good thing?
"What would have happened if GC Coleman (the drummer) or Richard Spencer — the composer who holds the rights to the song, and is now a high-school social studies teacher — had a watermark on that sample?"
Surely the point of watermarking is to be able to trace the provenance of a piece of music? Given that, in the case you cite, we actually know the provenance of that sample anyway, it seems likely that watermarking would have made precisely no difference. Would more bands have been sued? No - we already know where that sample has come from (and it's easy to spot).
Except that fair use isn't so easy to determine, and I would expect
there to be many more cases where unknowing users were prosecuted
unfairly. And ISPs have been known to do all sorts of things -- and
are under pressure from the RIAA and others to filter more rather than
less.
As for the technicalities of watermarking, Microsoft's El Dorado
(according to the Wired piece) resists "all typical kinds of
processing, including compression, equalization, D/A and A/D
conversion, recording on analog tape and so forth. It is also designed
to survive malicious attacks that attempt to remove or modify the
watermark from the signal, including changes in time and frequency
scales, pitch shifting and cut/paste editing."
I love your blog.
Not to mention completely ripping off this YouTube video. Poor form, Alan Cross!