Via SlashDot comes a story about a company in the UK called StreamBurst that is experimenting with DRMless video distribution. I’ve often thought about the way that an “advisory” DRM alternative could work, but the simplicity and beauty of the StreamBurst system strikes me as incredible.
StreamBurst currently doesn’t have any anime available (not surprising, they haven’t been around very long at all), but this system, or something like it, strikes me as THE way to go for video distribution, and I’ll be surprised if it isn’t used for anime sooner or later. I’ve done a bit (just a bit) of reading about Steganography, and I’m quite aware of its limitations (most techniques for watermarking images can be trivially defeated); nonetheless, no other system that I’m aware of so clearly indicated “ownership” of a file, both in terms of copyright and the person that purchases a copy, without fundamentally altering what can be done with the file. This is, quite simply, great.