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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.
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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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."
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?
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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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.
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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