Digital watermarks and copy protection

AP story via NBC4.TV: Hollywood Alters Movies To Foil Camcorder Pirates. 'Forensic Watermark' Imprints Bars On Recording.

Meantime, down at Stanford on Wednesday, Michael Lustig is giving a talk on "Real-Time watermarking system for audio signals using perceptual masking," to wit:

Recent development in the field of digital media raises the issue of copyright protection. Digital watermarking offers a solution to copyright violation problems. The watermark is a signature, embedded within the data of the original signal, which in addition to being inaudible to the human ear, should also be statistically undetectable, and resistant to any attempts to remove it.

The work was the winner of Texas Instrumentsí ìDSP and Analog Challengeî worldwide competition, receiving a prize of $100,000. The Computer Systems Laboratory Colloquium will be held at 4:15 pm Wednesday in the NEC Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building B03. (The url for this is here.)

Wish Edward Felten or Larry Lessig could pop in, because everything I've heard about watermarking suggest that all such encryption systems can be defeated.