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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.'"
Sounds reasonable. But then how does the copyright holder distinguish between the purchaser engaging in illegal distribution vs being the victim of theft? The article never covers that. I think I can guess how the **AA will react to any watermarked file floating around the net with Joe User's name/account reference embedded in it. They'll call a SWAT team and have Joe's house raided. No proof. Sorry, Joe, for the mess. We're on to harassing the next person we vaguely suspect of illegal distribution.
Then hex diff it, find the missing bits add them, and then.... profit!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
I do like this idea, we all say that we can be sensible and will pay for things so long as its in a form that is acceptable so we can use it (ie. without DRM). This would also give you your full fair use rights and would be able to fall into the public domain when the ownership had expired (another great benifit)...
In fact the only thing that I worry about is how much info they will keep on me to verify at a later point that it was me (or that it wasn't me) who put the file on Kazaa or torrent or whatever... will it be credit card info, linked to your address? will it just be a name and e-mail... and how secure are their systems it?
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
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.
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This sounds perfect. As they say, it makes *me* responsible for the file; I can make millions of copies as backup. Of course I wont give it away, to do so is at my own risk.
The authentication will be a problem of course; it means I will not be able to make an anonymous purchase on the web - something that people are quite reasonably concerned about being able to do. What will it be signed with? My DNA? What about identity theft?
A heck, I give up. I was wrong. It's another stupid idea.
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ssand,
Did you read even the summary? Removing the beginning does not remove the unique signature formed by bit removal.
Of course bit removal or any sort of water mark can also be mucked with.
Still, this would be more user friendly than "hard" DRM.
Real pirates probably already have the originals anyway.
Besides, this appears aimed more to stop casual file swapping by scaring the non-tech-savvy than it is at real pirates.
In principle, I like this idea. I don't really see a problem with it.
However, they already do something similar in theaters. Every so often in theatrical movies you will notice a weird pattern of "cigarette burns" that appears for a brief moment. (Yes, to my eyes at least, they are visible and sort of distracting.) The pattern is different for each copy of the film shipped. The idea is that, if someone sneaks into a movie theater and makes a cam of a first-run movie, the producers of the movie can analyze the video and figure out which theater it came from. That helps them put more pressure on theater owners to enforce bans on video cameras, etc.
But does it seem like there are fewer cam bootlegs out there since they started doing this? They started it maybe five years ago.
Breakfast served all day!
The "watermark" is throughout the video. The first five seconds is just a "header" if you will, for the naked eye to see. The watermark however, could not be removed so easily.
Starmen.net
I take it you didn't even read the summary, let alone the article. Hint: your solution won't work.
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.
You thought this was something intended to defeat deliberate large scale pirates? Why would you think that? I mean none of the DRM crap stops them either, so why should this? :)
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http://www.broadcastpapers.com/whitepapers/Content %20Technology-05-2006-046-048.pdf
r ticle.html
The Thompson system for watermarking video and there's also a Fraunhofer Institute system:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,124676-page,1/a
These are all good ideas IMHO. As long as
1. The watermark isn't easy to remove
2. There is uncertainty as to whether the mark is removed
3. It isn't used to apply DRM
1 is obvious, 2 is there because the pirate has to be uncertain if their copy still has the idea, and 3. because the advantages of the system over DRM are lost if they use it for DRM!
Imagine you can freely buy and use the media you use however you like, but if it shows up on p2p, the ID can be pulled and traced back to you.
Since the DRM doesn't work, (not a single piece of media has successfully been locked up by DRM yet, a 100% failure rate). And since the DRM is already so restrictive that it puts off genuine sales, and is causing competition problems as inter operation is non existent. Then watermarking scheme will take over.
This one, I'm not so keen on, since the watermark is too easy to remove compared to the more mathematical approaches. The key point of any watermark approach is the mark must be difficult to remove and there must be uncertainty that the mark has been successfully removed.
My 2 cents.
I see a future with millions of movie files on the P2P networks that are watermarked "Blockbuster Video".
Sweet informative mod.
You can do almost anything, including while (1) { fork(); } but it's logged, so the sysadmin can ask you not to do that ever again (;-))
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Please disregard previous post. In true /. form, I just now actually read the summary.
Sweet informative mod.
I realize there are several problems with it in practice- and that pirates taking the effort to do so can break this. However, this leaves us with a copyright protection scheme that: A. Isn't a hassle (it doesn't restrict the customer) B. Is at least as effective at discouraging piracy as anything else they've thought of. This means that it is the best Protection racket^H Scheme people have come up with yet. There is the danger of the MPAA sueing some innocent people, but I doubt they'll sue anymore innocents than they already do.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
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."
from TFA-
"Because of its design, the watermark even survives most editing changes and format shifts"
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?
A good watermarking solution is resistant to many kinds of processing, including re-encoding.
Thats the whole challenge.
Off course the watermark might not be resistant to extremely destructive transformation such as downscaling from HD to QCIF, but then who cares about pirated QCIF video ? But certainly a very accurate transcoding would not affect the watermark.
Current watermarking technologies are very much dependant on proprietary algorithm.
The truth is anybody can break into your house at anytime. They don't because there's some risk, however slight, that somebody will notice and they'll get caught. Same logic here. It's not going to prevent somebody from pirating but it will discourage the lesser crimes.
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I think that the point isnt that this is unbreakable or that they may not even look to go after the author, rather they are relying on a couple of points:
1. Its just too much work to crack/reencode etc... Not impossible, just a pain in the ass (probably more of a pain in the ass then running a disc through DVD Shrink)
2. If something has your name on it, they hope that you will be more likely to keep everything honest. They don't have to come after me, or even threaten to, because if I see a file with my name floating around I might be worried what others think etc... This doesn't mean that no one will distribute, but many would think about it twice. They are basically saying that if you are the only one using it then you have nothing to worry about
Any Crypto-based DRM can be bypassed. RIAA/MPAA give the person the DRM'ed data and give them the key to play it, and then they tell them they are not allowed to copy it. I have news, if you can play it you can read it. Period. Failure guaranteed. The problem is that by making it unusable by DRM'ing it they actually ensure that someone will be pissed-off enough to put it out on a p2p share.
Watermarking on the other hand addresses the Social issue and is only a deterrence to sharing the file, not to using it anywhere or anytime the purchaser chooses. The drawback is that one takes a chance of the media getting into the wrong hands and then getting blamed for willingly violating the copyright laws. Yes, you can easily remove or destroy a simple watermark, however the watermark can be done in such a way that when repeated with several variations of bit flips during encoding the water mark can still be recovered, much like using parity bits to correct a memory storage error. The question the p2p sharer will have to face is whether they have sufficiently removed the redundant copies well enough to prevent the recovery process from revealing their identity. Of course you can buy it under false pretenses/name and then its all a moot point. Just being a deterrence to keep the honest person from sharing without suffering undue problems during its use is definitely a step in the right direction.
The dark side of this is that DRM could be added in such a way that the player would refuse to play without a second watermark being present. If you destroy the first then the second won't allow the media to be used. Thats only a speed bump for a true geek. You can count on the MPAA/RIAA to jump on that band wagon before long, and we will see more of the same until they come to their senses. They don't learn very quickly after all.
EZTakes is already doing the same thing in the US. A brief intro before the film shows who purchased it. I've tried ripping the disc just using selected titles (as the "watermark" intro is just a title on the DVD) to remove my name, but they've anticipated that also. I haven't got a good rip yet without the watermarked intro.
Not that I wanted to rip them off or anything. I just took it as more of a technical challenge as to whether I could remove the watermark on the otherwise non-DRM'ed DVD.
Pretty cool service, although you won't find any blockbusters in their selections quite yet. But for my taste in '70s cult films, I've found a few that I've downloaded for the fair price of $2.99. Not bad, not bad at all.
:q!
It's a nice idea, but the content providers will never go for it. They want to use DRM to limit fair use so they can sell you the same content in different formats. They can make themselves sound very self-righteous banging on about preventing piracy, but they are at least as interested (if not much more so) in preventing our fair use.
Are my legal rights when it comes to First Sale doctrine? Once I own a copy, I can do with that ONE copy whatever I want (except copy it).
The watermarking system disallows my LEGAL right of selling that object to somebody else.
Now, what would be interesting would be an online database of all the media conglomerates coming together to create a Ownership Library, in which one can buy a copy right, so that downloading it would be legal. Simply verifying if requested downloader has a copy provided to them could potentially make users on p2p legal.
For example, I'd like to download a new album. I'd go to the ownership library, buy a copy "right", then download from any source I wish (legit provider, or piratebay..). To keep these shares legit, it would potentially request that I have a copy right to access that file share, and after checking that I can own it, allows download. It could keep the users AND sharers from turning into copyright violators.
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.)
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Perhaps, yea, I can see that being done, but I don't understand why people would pay money for the capacity to watermark their content when it doesn't do anything to protect their copyrights in court. Recognition, perhaps? OR, perhaps, as you say, there are other practical uses.
But the world contains billions of people, millions of computers, and I guess I'm just used to the idea that - one way or another - eventually the content is just going to leak.
Being first to provide the content or being well-organized about making it available in the long-haul, and with full legal sanction, (like libraries and movie rental stores) is the best strategy to living in the world where piracy occurs. Fighting it directly just doesn't strike me as a practical element of the content business model. I guess they might be hoping for enough deterrance, or perceived deterrance, to deter.
Perhaps that's just enough, in most cases, to give them what they [seem to] want: The appearance that some additional enforcement could be linked to the person who copies & distributes content.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
I'd really like to believe this, but I just can't.
Whether or not people are "fundamentally" good or evil isn't an argument worth having, in a way, because it's impossible (or nearly so) to take a person completely out of their environment and away from the threat or fear of consequences. However, I suspect that if you gave the 'average Joe' a Ring of Gyges, that he wouldn't help himself to the contents of the local bank/liquor-store/etc. (at least until the novelty of being able to possess anything wore off).
While you, in fact, may be so constrained by morality -- and if that is the case, I salute you -- but to assume that most people are, seems a bit of a stretch. Most people don't commit crimes, because the perceived risk/reward doesn't work out in their favor. I could go out tonight and hold up the 7-11 on the corner, but I'm not going to; the few hundred bucks it might gain me (at best) wouldn't be worth the strong possibility of spending the next decade or so in prison. However, to someone who was poorer, or strung out on crack, that equation might come out differently; the possibility of a small amount of cash might be more than enough to make the risk worthwhile.
We can argue about the fundamental nature of humanity all day -- after all, if it was good enough a subject for Plato, it's good enough for me -- but in the end, what matters is whether your philosophy produces a model that predicts how people actually act, rather than how they wish they acted, or how they justify their own actions to themselves. The risk/reward model does this fairly well, at least with economic and property crimes, and therefore seems far more likely.
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I'm not sure all the "Oh noes this is taking away my resale rights" have a point.
As distribution becomes entirely free of physical media it was going to be hard to resell your copies anyway. What did you want to do - have people that popped over to your garage sale stick a usb drive in your computer and mv the copy over??? On the one hand we want physical media to die so that we can time shift and format shift to our hearts content, and on the other hand we want to maintain resale rights. I'd say be reasonable.
Resale rights have been dying for a while. A lot of new computer games come with cd keys that get linked to online accounts ala steam. You could try to resell them, but the guy at the other end would be buying a limited copy. Try reselling your itunes downloads recently? http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5072842.html. Old record stores were my favourite way of getting old music because you couldn't waltz into Tower records and buy it. Then emusic came along and I switched.
Availability of older material won't be so much of an issue if you have distribution thats free of physical media. That itself reduced the value of your resale rights in a way. Digital distribution with watermarking will very effectively kill the resale market. This will probably lead to nasty pricing issues with older material. But the point is they were bound to die ever since I could make a copy of a CD and sell the original at a garage sale. Or borrow a dvd from blockbuster and burn a couple of thousand copies with dvd decrypter and resell them in paper envelopes. In the process though I get dirt simple format, place and time shifting.
Now digital watermarking is a much more consumer friendly approach than DRM. You get a copy, do what you like with it except distribute it and if that means you effectively can't resell it then c'est la vie. Nothing by the way prevents you from reselling it - just the risk of getting hauled to court. Sort of what you'd expect in a world where you can keep a copy and make an infinite number of resales anyway.
DRM controls you much more. You cannot format shift easily (and frequently not without loss). Worse how you could use your content were more strongly controlled. I can imagine a world where if you wanted your iTunes to play on your iPod and your mac you'd need a different a different version for both. Or one where you couldn't buy a copy and only lease one on a pay for play. If any company gets a monopoly on online content distribution this will likely happen.
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Why don't you just subtract the watermark from itself?
How do you know that the watermark is in the color domain? More likely, it'll be in the frequency domain because it holds better when the file is analog copied. Plus, the watermark will be in a random place or somewhere determined by a encyption scheme. It could even be like using a public key! I seriously doubt that you could break a well designed watermark scheme. It is NOTHING like DRM.
Cheers
Ben