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Disney Encrypting Screener DVDs to Prevent Piracy
Sascha J. writes "Disney is continuing their war against piracy. To their Oscar reviewers they now send out special encrypted DVDs, which can be played only on a DVD player of the "Cinea" series. From the article: "The DVD players are encoded with recipients' names, and screeners sent to those people are specifically encrypted so they can be seen only on those particular DVD players." Yet, Disney is alone on this. Sony and Universal Pictures said they won't follow that step."
Disney realeases bad movies anyways.
So what keeps people from recording the output and distributing that?
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
Making movies almost imposible or very hard to view for reviewers it's the best marketing choice.
Yeah, take this as irony.
>Linux is not user-friendly.
It _is_ user-friendly. It is not ignorant-friendly and idiot-friendly.
pirated copies of bambie :(
Because Pirates just can't resist a 0-day release of Cinderella.
It seems like a bad trhing from the start, as now they may be able to turn around and say that normalcustomers should possibly follow the example set by these people. How long until all players are 'registered' in a similar manner?
Just put a big, slightly visible watermark across the entire screen of the name of the guy you sent the DVD to. Like, just a 4% opaque "EBERT AND ROPER" diaganal across the screen. Then when it's turned to video, it'll either have to be blurred out, and thur ruin the film, or you've caught the guy whol let it out of his hands... How hard is it people!?
They love pirates of the carribean so much that they are making another. Somewhat of a double standard!!!
It'll be cracked in seconds, thanks to the valiant efforts of the war against the war against piracy.
Here's a novel idea, instead of fannying about trying to stop people copying your films (which people always will), you join the 21st century and make your films distributed on an internet download site, with a reduction of $2 on the cinema price.
It's a barmy idea that Apple and Napster tried, but it might just work!
Nothing costs nothing
Reality test... am I dreaming?
Somewhere in this system there must exist a "plain text" version of the video stream otherwise the video could not be displayed, I'm guessing this is between the DVD player and the TV, so all one would need to do is intercept this transmission and high quality copies can be made.
----
They don't think this measure will have any effect do they? Really? I have a MUCH better suggestion. Don't send them out. It is a win/win situation. No-one gives them bad reviews and they strike a blow against piracy! /cough/
Spend more time thinking about how to make a movie I want to buy, then make it a reasonable price...
I would believe they would make more profit if they used the money they use for developing copy protection for actually creating better content. These protections never work anyway..
..they send special gold-lined dvd players encrusted with diamonds.
Sometimes they even send a dvd movie to view.
I have a better idea. Instead of encrypting their DVDs, just mail them out along with a little note saying that the last guy to be caught pirating screeners died in police custody. I think pirates will get the hint.
Is it me or does it seem that the more 'piracy' is fought, the crappier the content gets. I know correlation doesn't signify causation, but I can't help but wonder if this is also a new innovative feature to fight 'piracy?'
If so, congrats Disney. In which case from my own experience, it must be working. You don't pirate what you don't want.
The Alphas get the golden chains given for them as a gift.
The Betas buy the silver chains at Saks.
The Gammas can pay for Wal-Mart chains to appear like a Beta
The Deltas can't afford their freedom.
The Epsilons can't afford their slavery.
I'm glad I'm not an Alpha, their too stuck up.
Foolproof method of copying any type of copyprotected AV that is still usable:
1. buy camcorder.
2. point at TV.
3. not-copy-protected copy of decent quality (or profit, depending on the way you look at it).
The only way to protect against this is to either make it impossible for a plain camcorder to record the images (which means that your eyes can also not see them, rendering it impossible for them to make any form of business) or to not allow you to use a camcorder (which is very hard to do in your own home).
This is really funny. Disney is basically saying that the academy is the biggest problem in the whole movie copying/pirating thing. Can this be seen as anything but a cheap shot at the Academy? Sure they're thwarting piracy. How easy is it to get your hands on one of these bad boys to begin with? If I put my mind to it I think I could figure out who one person is who would actually get one of these DVDs and that's because my brother taught the guy golf lessons a few years back. (I got to see Titanic on VHS when it was still in the theaters and I'm glad I didn't have to pay to see that steaming pile.) The odds of actually knowing who would have one of these and actually be able to get your hands on it is just about impossible. All I can figure is that there is either A. an extremely unlikely chance of stealing a delivery of a DVD and pirating it, or B. the people that are intended to receive them are considered by Disney to be entirely untrustworthy. Disney has to send them or risk not getting any awards, so instead they blow a load of money to make themselves look like a bunch of paranoid idiots. I think I'll go out on a limb and say that Disney isn't going to earn any more awards for future movies. I guess on the bright side Disney isn't really trying to win any awards for the movies they put out lately.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
This wins the Internet.
Slashdot requires you to wait longer between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.
1. Make movies not worth pirating
2. ???
3. Profit!
i haven't read all of TFA, but i would assume that the deterrents also included some type of watermark of the recipient's name in the output stream, something that would stay there even with the digital-to-analog conversion and would be awfully difficult to remove.
So when disney finds these on the net, its a simple matter of decoding and looking up the watermark to find out who to nail...whereas before they had no idea who released it onto the net.
Sony? Openness? I'll believe that when they'll release the specs for the various ATRAC formats.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
Lame.
If they're going to this much length to protect their content, they should just get a bunch of armed security guards to personally deliver the DVD within a sealed DVD player chained to his arm. Train the security guard on how to plug the thing directly into a TV.
Task Mangler
They should just forget about those pesky reviewers copying their films and simply send out the reviews of the movies to the papers.
Oh wait Columbia Pictures tried that... I wonder how Mr. Dave Manning is getting along!
There can be a number of weak rings in the chain.
Somewhere into the DVD player the content gets unencrypted: there you can copy it with, at worst, some soldering skills.
Somewhere the content is completely clear text before being encrypted: someone working there could access and copy it.
Movie and music companies can loose more money because of product quality than piracy. And becuase of high investments in screener encryption!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
If you want to place a watermark over the whole movie, you have to reencode the whole movie, which is a slow process - much slower than encrypting it, which can be done on the fly while you're burning the DVD. Each individual reviewer's copy would take hours to make instead of minutes.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
as a reviewer for BAFTA about this time last year.
I'm not impressed.
Ours is actually connected with a composite video lead rather than scart and every few minutes black bands begin to appear across the picture, which I assume is some sort of an anti-copying measure but also somewhat ruins the film.
The machine was difficult to set up, requiring registration, which is a pain, especialyl when you have to call a call-centre which is only open during US West Coast office hours. (which isn't really anyone's fault). The biggest issue, however, is the fact that, to my knowledge, he hasn't actually recieved any films which need to be watched using it.
As an ordinary DVD player it's worse than the first one that we ever had - it takes a good 30 seconds to start up and then obeys all the 'do-not-skip' tags, which isn't too bad for screeners because they generally go straight to the film, but with ordinary DVDs it's a torturous wait every time you want to watch it, at least you could fast forward with VHS.
Basically, the machines are a pain for everyone and it was a really bad idea on the part of Disney.
FGD 135
I read your post and basically you are saying: a) I work for disney but I post as anonymous so you have to believe me. b) Disney is evil. Why? You give no concise reasons.
Well, I would tell you that if you don't like Disney don't work for them and if you hate Disney don't buy anything from them, but please don't try to convince us that an entertainment company is going to ruin our lives!
Logo removal has come a long way. If you track objects as they fall under the opaque area, you can find when they are opaque and when they are not. You can calculate what area of the screen is opaque and you can adjust for it. A quick Google search turned up LogoAway and DeLogo.
Watermarks are more of a problem. I don't think I'd let a screener DVD out my door without comparing it to another screener DVD for watermarks. The biggest problem is that you aren't supposed to know if a watermark is even there without knowing its design. That means you can't really ever be sure that there isn't watermarking unless you compare two sources.
Actually I just read all that open letter as... "Disney sucks". Would have saved people a lot of reading if AC had just put that instead.
Which self-respecting pirate wants to watch saccharine Disney material anyway? If they fsck up the Narnia books the same way as they usually do with existing literature, I shall not be happy.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Actually, the wonders of modern technology suggest a rather simpler solution. Digital watermarking of video streams is a fairly well-developed field, with several companies offering working products. The "invisible" watermark is some extra bits of "payload" added by some transformation of the images -- nothing which perceptibly degrades image quality -- and can be recovered again by some simple transformation of the data.
Algorithms exist which embed this information "visually", in the sense that it is distirbuted across the whole or much of the image, and it survives "classic" image processing such as resizing, lossy compression, and recolouration of the image (not to any degree, of course, but you'd be ruining the movie before you got rid of the watermark), rather than just being a few specific bits which can be deleted or edited. Some of these techniques are also intended to be tamper-proof, in the sense that without the watermark-creator's key it is very hard to know how to remove or alter the watermark.
Such a watermark would seem to be much better than a glaring visual signal, for tracking down the originator of a leaked copy. It wouldn't stop viewers enjoying their leaked copies, but the leaker could be held accountable.
is this crap copy-pasted
I just wonder, how hard can it be to remove a few frames from the movie in each copy.when a screener is on the internet, look which frames are missing and you found the copier...
and if they want it to be secure, why not either invite the academy members for a screening, or have someone pass by them delivering (and after them viewing it collecting) the screener?it can't be that much of a cost compared to the cost of making a movie these days.... or do the academy members require viewing it several times over a period of time in order to judge?
Disney are typical of a big organisation, easier to buy up products than develop them. Hence all the characters they have bought and rebranded.
An old and tired troll.
while true;do echo -e -n "\033[s\n\033[u\134_\033[B";done
This is bullshit !!
What Sig
It's so insulting. If the academy members had any principles, they'd return the material with an angry letter alogn the lines of "This is not material that deserves to be taken lightly. On the contrary, it deserves to be thrown with great force into the nearest fireplace."
So many members are in a position to influence the studios in a way the rest of us never will be. Instead they seem to be supinely laying down moaning "Treat me like dirt! I'll do anything to be told I'm important and can afford to run five Ferraris at once."
Still, perhaps nearer the time Slashdot could run an article entitled "101 things to do instead of watching the Academy Awards". Alas, not very hard to do anyway, I guess, considering the crap standard of so many films these days.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
So, they can't deliver screenings on DVD securely any more without resorting to draconian measures. So what? Why can't they just go back to the days when you had a company rep with the film showing it in a private theatre to a collected audience. It was social, people could actually _talk_ to each other about it and they could have the rep answer viewers questions and no hope of the screeners geting duplicated bar shaky-hand-cam action. I would theorise that this is because they save a bit of cash by doing it via mail with a DVD instead. But they claim their losing millions due to the pirated pre-release getting out?! Do the math!
~Pev
Disney and other publishers continue in their attempts to control our freedoms, not to protect the producers, but their own profit.
Most of the leaks they blame on technology are the fault of their own insiders leaking crap.
Maybe if all other studios did this we would see:
A - watermarks embedded on any screener footage ripped from the player's output which could track down insiders
B - the true volume of "pre-release" redistribution which is not the fault of the studio's own lackluster security
C - less sensationalized press releases designed to turn public opinion against technolgy.
This is DRM yes, but it's not designed for generalized consumer use, but for use with contracted reviewers who are already under NDA's, etc.
A perfectly legitimate method, though i think it would be more secure if it phoned home (and don't tell me rich critics don't have broadband!)
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Sony? Openness? I'll believe that when they'll release the specs for the various ATRAC formats.
Eeewww! Who wants them?
A 64kb mp3 usually provides a substitute in terms of sound quality.
I suppose anybody that bought a recent mp3 / minidisc player from Sony might be interested. But they're probably too busy arranging delivery of the bridge that someone just sold them to do anything with the specs.
these are "screeners" we're talking about here. i'm no expert on this but the main point of a screener is not for entertainment, but critical review by insiders, marketers, or theater procurement staff who are evaluating it for various purposes. it's no different than vhs screeners (of which i've seen one, which also puts text over the screen every few minutes).
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Disney has made a huge number of block buster movies. Just because you (and I) think that they lack any artistic merit doesn't mean that there isn't vast bucks to be made by pirating them. I'm not sure that Disney is that bothered about the pirates who just copy for their own personal use. It's the high quality copies that turn up at our local flea market that really hurt their profits.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
Sounds like a way for Rove and Libby to earn a few extra bucks.
I'm waiting for Disney to release a kiddie flick about a boy who pirates movies but eventually gets in trouble and learns the error of his ways.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
I want to know what is economically gained by this? Screeners are sent to select people, and these select people are taking advantage of lack of supervision to leak their copies. Wouldn't it be much cheaper and simpler to fly them in and give them all the access they need to the films without giving them a copy rather than going through this massive infrastructure expense. Think about it... a few plane tickets once a year, or paying to produce limited number of cinea machines with virtually no economics of scale, paying royalties for the copy protection scheme, paying for administration regarding registrations, paying shipment, paying to have those dvd's specially processed, paying possible tech support for said machines, and still potentially (more like LIKELY) having material leaked? It just seems dumb. A lot of people are falling into this bounded thought trap that everything needs a high tech solution. My networking professor said it well, UPS is still has higher bandwidth for transferring large amounts of data than the internet does, and once you reach a certain threshold as far as a single file's size, it's just cheaper and faster to mail it, but i'll bet most netizens wouldn't think of that.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Loosing the menu, and especailly all the trailers are the reason i do not use disk i bought from disney, but i make a "movie only" rip from the disk.
My 3 year old son(target group of disney?) can just pop-in the dvd into the player and watch it.
I bet the screener disks are already cleaned of all the trailers.
The technology behind all this, was released "for your consideration".
I have worked in television for over 20 years and during part of that time worked in a facility that duplicated screeners.
I think everyone needs to realize that the production of these illegally pirated films from screeners is an inside job. Unless Disney wants to set up and maintain a secure duplication facility somewhere, staffed only by trusted individuals who are constantly monitored for theft, there will always be those who "make a few copies for their friends."
Disney isn't about to do this because Disney is in the filmmaking and entertainment business, not the mass duplication and standards-conversion business. And it is from those facilities that the content leaks out. Try as they might, unless they spend a whole lot of money that, on its face does not please their shareholders, they're pretty much stuck with these inside jobs.
As to the high-quality bootleg copies, that tends to be the result of running an "extra" master of the film transfer and is either an organized crime issue or "yet another inside job."
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
...I was sent a Cinea player by a film studio 12 months ago for the same purpose. It's standard practice for the screeners to have some distinguishing mark to prevent copying - I've seen one off DVD-Rs being sent with unique serial numbers, watermarks and the like, and the Cinea system. Of course, one might also view it as extended bribary, given that the Cinea DVD player they supply does function as a normal player (although you do have to register it first...)
This distribution method is for distributing unpublished films to reviewers and contest judges; it is not for the mass distribution of the films.
The studios have a strong desire incentive to get the reviewers and judges to watch the film and form a favorable opinion of it. I believe that the studios need to ask themselves the question "Will a reviewer or judge be prejudiced in their opinion of the film if they are required to install and use a special video player to watch the film?" I believe that the same question should be asked regarding the use of any intrusive or distracting attempt at preventing duplication of these copies of the films.
A film reviewer has an incentive to watch the film even if it uses intrusive copy protection means because his job is to produce a review based upon actually watching the film. There isn't really any way for the person reading the review to know if the film received three stars instead of three and a half stars because the reviewer was pissed off by the copy protection scheme. A contest judge on the other hand has no particular incentive to even watch a film that won't play in whatever DVD player he wishes to use.
Over a period of time, those half-star reductions in reviews and judges electing not to watch films with intrusive copy protection schemes could seriously impact a studio's bottom line.
...for about 25 independent films a year (I work for a mid-size festival), I can tell you that they're almost all crippled in some way.
It's generally nothing sophisticated: small distributors send out tapes and DVDs that have time codes, or a large band or box reading "PROPERTY OF ________", or that are deliberately given a mediocre transfer, or some other low-tech measure that degrades quality.
If they would adopt something visually unobtrusive that made it hard or undesirable to pirate the film, that would improve my job immensely. Requiring special hardware would make matters worse, and surely the independents are a long way from being willing or able to watermark copies for individuals. But if distributors and producers could send out screeners confident that some underling at a festival wasn't going to be tempted to upload high-quality DivX copies, life would be much better.
So, Disney's move looks like a mixed bag to me. If it's invisible, that's an improvement. Since it requires special hardware, it's unlikely to catch on in the wider world of screener copies used by everyone who needs to preview films for various reasons. So I guess we'll wait for something better...and watch crappy screeners in the meantime.
This will really help to prevent that one single copy of a movie that needs to be made for the bittorrent/emule/whatever crowd.
Yes, one single copy. I guess thats too hard to understand. They can add all the protection mechanisms they want, once a single copy is made somehow (and there are people that LIVE just for removing those mechanisms) it will be out on the net and that is that.
It's only 2005 though, can't expect them to give up their analog mindset just yet.
I'm not sure who all required this, but I installed one of these for a client on the academy committee back in January for the last Academy awards. Basically it was like a DSS where you had to register it with the company once you got it put in. Each unit had a serial ID that was then tied to a user. I didn't try any of the screeners to see if there was a watermark or anything. The unit I saw back at the beginning of the year was pretty crappy looking, I'd rank it with an Apex or Oritron, for build quality and video output.
//:P
;
$company_name=strip_tags($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'])
$trollgen=<<<TROLL
$company_name has recently made a number of people very, very angry, including me. However, as anger serves no function in a successful rebuttal, I will simply state objectively that $company_name's brethren have an almost identical mentality, as if they all had been cloned from a single insufferable prototype. I would like to start by discussing $company_name's press releases, mainly because they scare me. The thing I'm the most frightened about is that the question that's on everyone's mind these days is, "Will the world ever be free of negligent, disgraceful doofuses like $company_name?" After days of agonized pondering and reflection, I finally came to the conclusion that $company_name has planted its worshippers everywhere. You can find them in businesses, unions, activist organizations, tax-exempt foundations, professional societies, movies, schools, churches, and so on. Not only does this subversive approach enhance $company_name's ability to destroy that which is the envy of -- and model for -- the entire civilized world but it also provides irrefutable evidence that I frequently wish to tell it that its witticisms serve no purpose other than to declare a national emergency, round up everyone who disagrees with it, and put them in concentration camps. But being a generally genteel person, however, I always bite my tongue.
$company_name's morals leave me with several unanswered questions: Why do we put up with it? And what in perdition does it think it's doing? These are difficult questions to answer, because it is always prating about how all major world powers are controlled by a covert group of "insiders". (It used to say that human beings should be appraised by the number of things and the amount of money they possess instead of by their internal value and achievements, but the evidence is too contrary, so it's given up on that score.) In particular, $company_name says that it has mystical powers of divination and prophecy. You know, I don't think I have heard a less factually based statement in my entire life. $company_name can't help it; it just loves to keep us perennially behind the eight ball. $company_name extricates itself from difficulty by intrigue, by chicanery, by dissimulation, by trimming, by an untruth, by an injustice.
Even by $company_name's own account, if you think you can escape from its harebrained indiscretions, then good-bye and good luck. To the rest of you I suggest that we must reveal the truth about $company_name's pranks. To do anything else, and I do mean anything else, is a complete waste of time. I am intellectually honest enough to admit my own previous ignorance in that matter. I only wish that $company_name had the same intellectual honesty. If one dares to criticize even a single tenet of $company_name's revenge fantasies, one is promptly condemned as egocentric, repugnant, biggety, or whatever epithet $company_name deems most appropriate, usually without much explanation. Something that I have heard repeated several times from various sources -- a sort of "tag line" for $company_name -- is, "We should go out and make empty promises. And when we're done with that, we'll all tear down everything that can possibly be regarded as a support of cultural elevation." This is not a direct quote, nor have I heard it from $company_name's lips directly, but several sources have paraphrased the content to me in near-enough ways that I feel fairly confident it actually was said. And to be honest, I have no trouble believing it.
As a matter of policy, sniffish insincere-types should not bar people from partaking in activities that cannot be monitored and controlled, but this has never stopped $company_name. The impact of $company_name's balmy, overbearing put-downs is exactly that predicted by the Book of Revelation. Evil will preside over the land. Injustice will triumph over justice, chaos over order, futility over purpose, superstition over reason,
Remember, Disney led the charge on non-skippable trailers on DVDs. They are basically pure evil in Corporate form.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
How about this: Don't send the movies to screeners. If they want to see it, let them go to the theater like everyone else has to.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Definitely a sure-fire strategy of saying "Hey, we'd appreciate your vote!"
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Another way the other studios could identify where a copy came from would be to randomly position the black/white scenes in the screeners and have a database of who has what sequence of black/white scenes.
Of course a dedicated "pirate" would try to stitch 2 or 3 such screeners together but getting their hands on 2 or 3 would be quite a bit harder. Plus, the studio could make it so that the b/w sequences overlap quite a bit. If they got a mathematician to work out the spacing of the b/w sequences they could possibly make it so that even if a pirate had 3 or 4 different screeners, the studio could still idenitify the particular screeners that were ripped.
If you have anything to do with DVD/VHS creation and intend to use this idea/scheme you acknowledge that this IS my idea and hence MY copyright. If you still want to use it, you agree to donate half of the proceeds from any SciFi movie to the advancement of science and space exploration.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
An open letter to those who don't like the Disney policy:
The solution you need is at hand today. Please just make the free and voluntary choice to follow the steps I lay out here:
1) Don't buy any Disney products. Nobody is forcing you to put money in their pockets. You make a free and voluntary choice everytime you do.
2) Make your own successful feature film. Hire some big stars and make sure it's good enough that everyone will want to see it. Then, as the producer, you can make the free and voluntary choice to release your film without DRM.
If enough people do this then Disney will change or whither away. We don't need any other means. Everything we need it at hand today.
What if you could get your hands on 2, or maybe even 3 copies? With 2, you could compare them frame-by-frame, and try to remove the watermarking that way, if you can tell which frame is watermarked and which one isn't. With 3 copies, you could probably use a 2-out-of-3 vote for every single pixel. The watermarks must ofcourse be different for every copy, which can be used against them by removing all differences between separate copies.
I don't really see a problem with this. Pre-release copies should be DRM'd. Retail should not.
It's a symbolic effort, nothing more. All that they are doing is using a CSS key specific to a particular player. They already know that CSS is worthless as an encryption method. It costs money and involves effort to make encryption that's "precocious-norwegian-teen-proof". A much more sensible solution, given the very small targeted audience for these copies is to ship them letter boxed with dark grey text in the letter-box area that says something like: "fyo screener Joe Schmoe, disk F00-84R" and maybe encode a hidden identifier in the audio or video stream on top of that. Even then, there's simply no practical way to prevent a determined individual from duplicating the film.
Hollywood could save itself a lot of grief by switching to watermarked network streams instead of physical DVDs. But it won't, because Hollywood always gets to the right technology after exhausting all the alternatives. Maybe if the competition switched to streams, Hollywood would see the light.
--
make install -not war
It's occured to me that we might move to a future when DVD's are burned at the store you buy them with your credit card number encoded (or some other form of identification) as a watermark and it's encrypted to work only with your DVD player at home which would provide you with a public key on a supplied USB stick (or something) you would take to the store.
Basically you would give your public key to the store attendant, they would stick it in a kiosk type device which would burn the encrypted copy of the DVD with watermark for the customer.
Sounds draconian but with the speed and cost of DVD burners it probably would not be that hard to do.
Good. When the industry as a whole makes a move with regard to DRM it's generally bad news for the end user. I like hearing that there are different opinions - both fracturing the steamroller approach and (maybe) encouraging the other publishers to think how their customers will view this draconian attempt.
I have just directed my first short film and it is now in post production. I plan to release it online next year for free, once it has completed the festival circuit.
However, that said, the concern I have is early, unfinished copies of the film getting out, or rushes, or other intermediate stuff that would diminish the enjoyment of the final product by being released early.
So I have an elegant an unobtrusive solution to track the few copies that people are working with as a matter of necessity:
My watermark is done per copy so it is unique, and involves changing three to four pixels only on one frame of the film in minor ways so they are not easily visible to the human eye when watching. Shift the colour of some pixels by only a couple of points, such that they are damn close to the real thing, but obvious if you know which frame to check and where, when blown up to 500% or so of original size.
Then simply keep a database of the "security dots" and where they are in each copy, eg:
45332 700 431 0 0 8
The above is frame 45332, X position 700, Y position 431, and the colour in RGB format. Three or four of those and a list of who has that copy, and I'm 100% able to figure out who leaked without degrading the picture in any visible way.
It isn't intrusive like CAP codes, and keeps everyone involved in working on the project from leaking copies as they know it can be traced back to them.
Why can't Hollywood studios do it the same way?
Visceral Psyche Films
Does Vivid need anyone to screen their movies?
No matter where you go, there you are.
Am I the first one to notice that this story has been posted three times already?
Here
Here
and
Here
Come on slashdot... this is ridiculous!
So how do you go about becoming a reviewer for the Academy? I've always wondered how you join, how you get to see the good and the bad before everyone else?
I'm a big-time movie slut. I'll watch anything once. Heck, I even watched that turd, History of Violence. There was a movie that left you wanting, wanting your money back.
I used to work for the shipper of promo materials for Universal. Envelopes out the butt would come thru our terminal in Kansas City. Every once in a while, one would get caught on a conveyor belt and rip open, spilling glamour shots of stars of the movie. They may have sent the movies, but I never saw them. I taped up the semi-damaged envelopes and sent them on.
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
So what keeps people from recording the output and distributing that?
Plain and simple common sense. After all, who would, in his 5 senses, record and distribute a... (shudder) Disney movie?
Disney plans on encrypting their screener DVDs. Umm, last time I checked Disney didn't have anything good to pirate. Nothing remotely good has come out of them in years with the exception of distrubtion for Pixar and Ghili-Films.
To me this is like putting a dog turd in a wall safe.
Watermarks are generally useless when considering the N+1 algorithm. If you suspect a watermark, get a second person to leak it. Do a binary comparison between the two. Wherever they differ, change those bytes to a value that is neither one nor the other. Get a third leaker. If any new locations show up, repeat and get a fourth leaker. Otherwise, you're done.
"N+1" refers to how you are defeating a cross-tagging system against N people by having N+1 collaborate. For simple per-person tagging, N=1, so you need 2 people to collaborate to remove the tag. The third person is only there to prove that there are no more tags.
There are two ways you can try to defeat this. One is to make N quite large, for example by putting tags that identify pairs of viewers, triples of viewers, etc. that would catch people collaborating.
The other way is to make the tag part of the encoding process, such that (almost) the whole disk changes for each viewer. The problem with this is that MPEG2 encoding takes many hours, and would have to be done for each viewer individually. Also, it would need to be sophisticated, as it would have to survive recompression. The pirates would be able to spot this, however, and do a frame-by-frame (+/- a few frames to thwart frame addition/deletion) comparison and randomize or average anything that changes.
Personally, if I were a recipient of such screeners *and* I wanted to pirate them, I would give the disk to someone and stage a break-in of my house.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Consider that the members of the MPAA pay dues specifically allocated to counter piracy. If these members see nothing being done, then their millions in dues can be reasonably argued to be just a waste. Apparently, NBC/GE/Universal threatened to withdraw membership a year ago over this very issue and the article mentions that NBC/GE/Universal isn't interested in this measure either - perhaps they're playing hardball with the MPAA, I don't know.
Following up on your comment (Better use for money), the MPAA anti-piracy group has to spend the money on something/anything. You keep encountering these attempts from the industry for partially political reasons, not wholly economic ones.
This is not my sig.
As usual Slashdot gets it wrong. Cinea (who brought us DIVX) are the makers of these players.
Oh, so their DVD's are basically as useful as the CD's you get from AOL.
Cant even wipe your ass with them.
So my question is: Hey, do this things play regular DVD's too? If so w00t -- free DVD player for me!
Of course, is that bribery? Payola? Or just Disney being The Mouse?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
You're missing the point, which is that Disney hopes to make anon duplication more of a hassle than recipients would think it worth attempting. I'm sure that on Disney's end, the creation process, including the insertion of identifying data, is largely automated.
Luke, help me take this mask off
More than ever, each one of us is constantly pounded by advertising trying to convince us that we need to buy this product or go see that movie. Then a high proportion of that advertising, especially for popular music, is aimed at teenagers and the under 25s - an age group that is very receptive to advertising but that also has limited spending power. It therefore seems perfectly logical to me that those same people are going to want to get as much of that product free of charge.
I don't support piracy but I'm in my 40s and listen to more music & watch more movies than I ever have done. Some of that has to do with having reasonable disposable income but it's mainly due to the fact that I'm more discerning in my tastes these days - I hunt down the cheapest prices for CDs and movies that I *know* are worth my spending the money on. No more do I buy a DVD of a just "reasonable" movie or a CD where I just like one song, consequently I thoroughly enjoy *every* film I see and every CD I listen to.
With movies, I read every review I can & with CDs, I'll hunt Usenet for them first, download and listen to them, then either buy the CD because I like it or delete the downloads because they're not worth the diskspace.
My point here is that piracy is giving the media companies their "just desserts" for their constant lies to the public in overhyping substandard products through advertising. But even better would be the "sheeple" in our world not falling for the "must have" messages in advertising but instead to only buy *good* value-priced products - if we all did that, prices would have to come down and quality of product would have to increase.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Actually, as someone who is familiar with this 'technology', you couldn't be more wrong.
Take the DVD, encode it to 80kbs (mpeg4 or whatever), back to vhs, back to 80kbs (divx or whatever), run a wipe and eliminate over 50% of the picture.
If you do that, forensically it can still be identified. Multiple images in EVERY frame. Potentially unique to every disc.
It is trackable back to the source.
And you got modded up to 3 ???? Wow. Did any of your comments come from facts? or did you just make it all up ?
Meatplow
really nice set of lies. what magical bits do they use that transmit from the analog world to the digital world?
as a guy that knows how that crap works, you are really making up some wild lies.
it does not work that well. the studios can NOT identify what movie theatre a highly compressed mpeg4 release was from.