Hmmmm ... Inaudible? Scattered throughout the song? Sounds less like watermarking and more like subliminal messaging to me.

It's not the subliminal advertising that bothers me, I don't consciously notice it. It's the liminal and superliminal ads that bug me.

Good: Linking back to the photo's Flickr page.
Less good: It's not a CC-licensed photo.

If they replace Janus with this, then I don't care. It would be better than having invasive DRM that keeps me from my fair use rights.

In an unrelated note, your message box here hates my spacebar and enter keys, as it takes about 5 seconds for my spaces to show, and 10 seconds for the enter, but the rest of the text is fine.

I'm sure MS would only use this as a "watermarking" technique and wouldn't seize the opportunity to add little extra. I'm not usually the paranoid type, but anything sold to me with "stealthy" or "owner-tracing" technology worries me. Especially if I, the supposed "owner" of the media, have no access to the data being "traced".

was I just "stealthily" banhammered?

Although I wouldn't put evil intent past the Microsoft camp, there are actually some legitimate uses for such technology... such as allowing the creators of music to automatically get paid royalties when their music is aired or performed.

Right now it's a total PITA to track where our music is played... it would make royalty reporting much, much easier (and way more equitable among big stars vs. upstarts and indies).

Luke: SMOKE.

Y'know, I think this has been done before. It bothers me when certain corporations (e.g., army-of-lawyers companies) file patents on "doing so-and-so" instead of "method for doing so-and-so." MS specifically has patents on the isNot() operator, which checks if two variables in a program point to the same point in memory. For non-programmers, this is incredibly basic: "return !(&a == &b);" and you're done. Sneaky watermarking is not a new idea, having been touted in the news this year in regards to HD video. It's downright obvious when you take into account the history of steganography, wherein one hides data inside a picture, video, document, or recording.

Won't work.

Face it: if it can be used to track the owner it must be detectable/decodeable. Thge 'stealth' only applies to the fact that a person can't detect it.
It's only a matter of time before someone puts a 'hack' online to remove this type of watermarking.

End result: every customer pays extra for the R&D for this, and it won't stop the problem of content getting online. At all.

thats stupid, why does Microshaft want sooo badly to keep people from illegaly distributing music? who really cares that much any more?

audition required to comment. bogus, particularly when you are stealing other peoples' work (ref: Flickr photo used which is clearly NOT offered up under any Creative Commons license nor released to the public domain. And the irony of doing so on an article about rights management. Audition? You need to audition new writers, not commenters.