Good points Gavin
-- Getting even more off topic, but at least I mention HPSUSAN in here
somewhere --

We've had many a heated discussion (fellow programmers here at work) re:
specifically the Napster case in analyzing how the RIAA could protect its
music.  There was no good answer to this because as long as someone could
hear it, record it, then store it in an mp3 and put it on Napster then it
would be possible to copy.  Once that's done, now anyone can copy it.

Just because it was found on the internet, doesn't guarantee a quality
recording, and often times they were very bad reproductions.  I suppose to
the teen-listening audience at large, it may not have mattered as it would
to the true die-hard audiofiles.

One of our bizarre suggestions was an encoded speaker keyed to the person
who bought it.  Basically the person who buys the music would have their
music associated with them.  The falacy is that they could not just take it
on the road with them in an mp3 player or such device, unless that was first
registered.   Another problem is that so long as audio was being emitted,
someone could still record it, albeit, not a digital reproduction.  And
finally, everyone would have to go out and purchase new equipment.  Now
every reproduction device would have the equivalent of an HPSUSAN in it,
with which without (pardon the triple-w) the music wouldn't play.

So you're right, the only solution is to encode a unique serial number into
everyone's head.  The media, be it visual, audible, or smellable (since
Smellovision will probably make it some day) would be garbled without the
correct match.  Imagine a good smell being garbled:  You might get a
different smell altogether.

As for a picture, I thought maybe if it was fed into a streaming video
device, might make it more difficult to capture, but I suppose you could
still hit print-screen and capture a snippet of the video.

> picture of the screen, or a microphone to record what comes out of the
> speakers, etc.  This is why all copy-protection schemes for
> information that
> is communicated to human senses are ultimately doomed to
> fail, at least
> until people are willing to have copy protection hardware
> installed in their
> heads (and the world does seem to be moving in that direction).
>
> G.
>