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Startup Tries Watermarking Instead of DRM
Loosehead Prop writes "A U.K. startup called Streamburst has a novel idea: selling downloadable video with watermarks instead of DRM. The system works by adding a 5-second intro to each download that shows the name of the person who bought the movie along with something like a watermark: 'it's not technically a watermark in the usual sense of that term, but the encoding process does strip out a unique series of bits from the file. The missing information is a minuscule portion of the overall file that does not affect video quality, according to Bjarnason, but does allow the company to discover who purchased a particular file.' The goal is to 'make people accountable for their actions without artificially restricting those actions.'"
Solution: re-encode the movie, I prefer 2 pass xvid
Could the missing bits affect the movie and be detectable?
From TFA:
I'll assume the people working on Streamburst are clever; but I wonder how susceptible the ghost-stream is to translation and recompression: whether it's possible to corrupt the signature-stream while retaining watchable quality.
So, people who pay for a movie from these guys won't be able to share it via Kazaa or bittorrent or whatever is popular right now. I don't think that many people who pay to download a movie really do so with the intent of putting it on a filesharing network. I mean, why the hell would you do that? The people I know who do the whole illegal filesharing thing, don't pay for media they can get for free, and the people I know who buy digital download media, don't use illegal filesharing sites. Buying something legally kinda defeats the purpose of using a filesharing site, amirite?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
I suspect this would be fairly easy to circumvent, but I love the idea!
I have always thought that piracy should be solved through law enforcement, not technology. Much like traffic law enforcement.
DRM is the equivalent to putting a 70 mph speed cap on all cars. This watermarking is sort of like requiring cars to have a license plate.
If they can find a way to make this work I'd be overjoyed.
So much for selling old movies at a yard sale.
First you have to know where to filter. As it is, the company should be able to spread the information across a number of frames and still not have it be seen. Interestingly, they can even do it up right so that the various transcoders will still show important info. Overall this is a pretty good idea.
As to the theft vs. giving it away, well, there are some easy answers to this. Once a person is a "person of interest", then allow them to keep going, but track them closely. Most ppl will be found to give away the film. It is when it hits the net and is spread wildly, that the issues come in. I would guess that fewer than 1% of all film/music owners are at the core of thefts.
This is overall a win/win.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I don't think that's what he meant. Imagine you buy a movie off of this service. One day, the MPAA is browsing Kazaa and finds a copy of the movie with your watermark on it. But, you never put it there. How do they know that the file wasn't stolen from you, then shared by the thief?
1-Buy 2 or more files from them
2-do a bit comparison
3-modify a copy to reflect a random profile of all removed info
this would make any compairson hard.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Better yet, steal a credit card number, "buy" a copy, and some other guy gets blamed for it.
At some point I did a scetch of a somewhat similar idea in some net forum. Though I would not remove bits, rather I'd do an encoding with slightly increased quality in a few random places. (That way I would hope to prevent people bitching about reduced quality). And how much the watermarking costs in terms of extra space could be computed exactly. I haven't done any calculations on the extra space, but I would expect a few KB for a full movie.
To explain what my idea was I'll first give a short reminder of how jpeg works. Blocks of image data are transformed using something based on fourier transformations. The resulting coefficients are then rounded to different scales. For high frequency components a scale with larger steps can be used as errors in these components are not easilly noticed. There is a table of standard steps to be used for each combination of horisontal and vertical frequency. (I left out the part about how to handle colour components, which is not relevant for the following idea).
Making a minor change to one of the step sizes is not going to cause a major difference in the size of the compression or the quality. By picking some of the entries at random and reducing the step size you are going to increase the quality of random parts of the picture. Now what I want to do is to make a redundant encoding of a signature on the text from the watermark and use those bits to choose places to increase the quality. The signed text itself is included in the begining of the file.
First of all removing the signature would means you couldn't compute the step sizes, and thus you couldn't correctly decode the file. And if the file was reencoded, you might still be able to extract the watermark by comparing with the original uncompressed movie. You would just have to find enough of the places where quality was increased. (And enough is a lot less than all of them).
The signature used in the encoding should be performed using the buyer's private key. In addition to this, I would sign the entire encoded movie using the seller's private key to be able to detect if a file is corrupted (as a service for the users). The part about the user signing something could be replaced with just using a hash of the text, but that might weaken the proof of origin of a particular movie a bit.
Now all of this could be combined with features to prevent users from accidentially losing a copy to a cracker/pirate. Since this is not intended to prevent users from intentionally copying the file, it could be a lot better and less intrusive than DRM.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Quick correction, MPAA, not the RIAA. It is easy to confuse your media giant defenders of.. er... themselves, I know.
I'm not sure if I agree or disagree with this, though. I do like it better than nasty DRM, but it seems... Underdone, and perhaps still a step in the wrong direction. I think the various **AAs should learn that the problem isn't piracy, but that piracy is the symptom of a larger underlying problem, that their business model is outdated and self-defeating (may I add draconian?), and their prices are unfair.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Indeed. This is a good thing because it is not there to prevent deliberate piracy, it is there to treat paying customers decently. That seems to have fallen out of favor, so I say bravo to them.
More music, fewer hits
I'm a much bigger fan of this than streaming solutions or DRM solutions because here I own my copy and can do whatever I want with it quite legally.
So what happens if you decide you no longer like the movie, and sell it to someone on ebay who then decides to upload it on a torrent site? Are you still responsible? What if you sell it for cash to some kid down the street? What if THEY sell it again and the third person then uploads it? Are you liable?
http://www.eire.com/2005/04/15/irish-bank-launche
If it isn't widespread now, it certainly will become so.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
"DRM is doomed to failure and addresses the wrong problem, but watermarking addresses the Social problem in making it less desirable to share with the Internet at large."
What makes you think that technological solutions can solve social problems. DRM didn't, and watermarking is an even weaker technology. The honest have no need for any solution, and the dishonest will always escape them. The solution is hard, not because they require an engineer to develop, but because they require changing the human heart. And humanism so far hasn't come up with a good way to do that.
Actually, you can take watermarking to more advanced levels by, say, tweaking the color profile of each bought copy just a bit. Nothing serious, and nothing that would be noticed, but just enough to distinguish between copies. It still won't foil pirates, but I don't think anything really will.
My new blog
First you have to know where to filter.
That's easy: Obtain two or more copies and compare them. The watermarks MUST be different, so the bits that are different tell you where they are.
Assuming the watermarks are statistically similar to a fixed number of random bit-flips, two copies identify half of them, three identify 3/4ths, four identify 7/8ths, etc.
Of course with a few samples you might be able to crack the system. If the watermark is a set of redundant copies of something you can identify, from then on it only takes two (the second being to be sure they haven't changed the system or added another.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Or just remove the bits altogether.
I considered (as I'm sure many did) this exact same digital watermarking idea a couple of years ago for movies, images and audio files. Thought it might make a decent idea for a startup. However, within a few hours of researching the topic, it became pretty clear that it wouldn't work without additional DRM. The watermark is destroyed the moment you re-encode the file into a different format format. The DRM was required to prevent the re-encoding, and let's face it, once you introduce DRM, the watermarking becomes a bit pointless.
Bjarnason and Co.'s argument seems to be that this is too much hassle. Since people have proven they are more than willing to spend the time ripping and compressing DVDs, or even sneaking into cinemas with video cameras, I don't think a little re-encoding is going to do much to prevent piracy. It only takes one person to create the non-watermarked version, and then this copy becomes the one which is distributed to thousands on P2P networks.
So unless this new company has found some incredible new way to create non-destructable watermarks, I can't see what they're offering.
Exactly I see this going horribly wrong. Heck I can see some annoying script kiddie make a worm that puts these files specifically on P2P networks. Actually that sounds like a great method to get around the scheme, just flood P2P networks with these files from tons of innocent people.
You just defeated your own argument. Yes, visual and audio entertainment is necessary for humans, but as you so nicely stated there are alternatives to recorded music, and movies. I think you're severely underestimating the human desire for entertainment, and overestimating the importance of mass media.
Passive hi-tech entertainment isn't the only thing we can do when wanting to have fun with little effort. There's always hobbies with low mental/phycial useage like; interaction with humans or pets, exercise (yoga, walking/jogging, sex/masturbation), various crafts (origami, woodcarving, whatnot), etc. It's... odd even as someone who is defined as a geek to see such a strong need for recorded entertainment.
As much as I like an alternative to DRMed files, and the 'idea' of moving over to social responsibility by having watermarked/named media, like others I'm still uneasy about the snowballing consequences if your media stash is compromised.