RIAA wants your fingerprints

[R. A. Hettinga]

[Moderator's note: This barely fits inside the list charter, but it is
too absurd to pass up. --Perry]

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/04/biometric_drm/print.html>

The Register


 Biting the hand that feeds IT

 The Register » Internet and Law » Digital Rights/Digital Wrongs »

 Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/04/biometric_drm/

RIAA wants your fingerprints
By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco (andrew.orlowski at theregister.co.uk)
Published Friday 4th June 2004 21:36 GMT

Not content with asking for an arm and a leg from consumers and artists,
the music industry now wants your fingerprints, too. The RIAA is hoping
that a new breed of music player which requires biometric authentication
will put an end to file sharing.

Established biometric vendor Veritouch has teamed up with Swedish design
company to produce iVue: a wireless media player that allows content
producers to lock down media files with biometric security. This week
Veritouch announced that it had demonstrated the device to the RIAA and
MPAA.

"In practical terms, VeriTouch's breakthrough in anti-piracy technology
means that no delivered content to a customer may be copied, shared or
otherwise distributed because each file is uniquely locked by the
customer's live fingerprint scan," claims the company.

iVue has been developed in partnership with Swedish design house Thinking
Materials (http://www.thinkingmaterials.com/). Since Veritouch already
supplies security authentication systems up to Homeland Defense standards
(in partnership with an Israeli defense contractor), we do forsee exciting
synergies ahead, should budget cuts force the War on Terror and the War on
Piracy to be consolidated into just the one unwinnable "war".


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com