Comment by kmeisthax
2 months ago
EURion is a funny[1] kind of DRM, what caught the fake Pokemon cards is Xerox DocuColor[0], a watermarking technology.
The difference is that DRM is designed to prevent you from copying something, while watermarking is designed to make you dox yourself if you copy something. I've yet to see evidence that EURion et. all actually stop counterfeiting, but watermarking has been very effective at finding counterfeiters.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
[1] Most DRM is intended to enforce copyright; but the state is not asserting copyright over the image of a banknote. There are cases where it is legal and moral to completely reproduce a faithful image of a banknote, and those cases are much broader than the various exceptions to copyright that exist.
> but watermarking has been very effective at finding counterfeiters.
Whistleblowers, too. That's believed to be how they got Reality Winner, because the documents published by The Intercept contained those tracking dots.
Eurion is part of a series of programs that stop some high-end scanner, printers and editing software from handling currency. Try scanning/editing/printing a eurion note and you will run into roadblocks. That makes it a type of DRM.
>watermarking is designed to make you dox yourself if you copy something
Is that a legal requirement on paper somewhere?
It seems like an expensive feature to add if not required.
Not really, the firmware just adds the dots automatically to the rendered print. It's just datetime and the serial in most of the version of this. What's expensive about that?
It is expensive at scale. In a world where each gram of CO₂ is taxed. "Windows Timer Resolution: Megawatts Wasted"[0] - Microsoft has since added coarse timers and coalescence.
[0] https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/windows-timer-r...
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Kind of, most version it's just the serial number which is a very soft dox. Going from that to the identity of a real person is really hard if you don't have the investigative powers of the state or have hacked the printer manufacturers registration data (if the person even bothered to register their printer).