Using Watermarking To Track Royalties (instead of statistical sampling)

Great article about watermarked pre-release CD’s...

Reading through it though, just made me want to challenge the industry even more on how to use watermarking to its fullest socio-economic potential - not for tracking individual uploaders of pre-released content - BUT FOR PAYING ROYALTIES ON ACTUAL USE!

Why can't we all collectively push for this non-intrusive technology to be put into all future media creation software as a plugin - that can then semi-permanently attach the original songwriters/musicians to their respective art ( i.e. a digital release signature) ? In the U.S., the The Register of Copyrights (or a similar type of official organization) could be designated to be the master database directory where this information gets stored and modified. Think of it as an additional requirement to filling out your SR and PA forms.....And eventually as the movement takes hold, this organization could fall ultimately under the UN's authority or a global PRO.

But for now, the same way that music subscription services (and internet radio broadcasters) are tracking playcounts based on metadata and server logs, this new form of major and indie "marked music" could automatically ping the PRO's [including SX] when it's played back on any internet connected device...

The desired result moving forward then, would be more accurate royalty payments for all of us long tailers :-)