Slashdot Mirror
DSL Gateways to Fight Piracy by Marking Video
Stony Stevenson wrote with an article about home gateway devices being set up to identify video pirates. The article reads: "Home gateway manufacturer Thomson SA plans to incorporate video watermarking technology into future set-top boxes and other video devices. The watermarks, unique to each device, will make it possible for investigators to identify the source of pirated videos. By letting consumers know the watermarks are there, even if they can't see them, Thomson hopes to discourage piracy without putting up obstacles to activities widely considered fair use, such as copying video for use on another device in the home or while traveling to work."
Suppose I recieve a DVD that I honestly believe is legit. And - due to my error, or someone else's error or someone else's falsehood - it is not. Or the baby- or pet- sitter makes a few copies on my machine while we're away.
So copies go out with my ID attached? No, thanks. I'll buy brand X. Or Y. But not Thompson.
A tool is supposed to do things my way. Not the manufacturer's way.
If Thompson wants to help prevent copyright infringement, there are better ways to do it, such as financial support for civil lawsuits against pirates.
End of story.
Is a watermark that's so insignificant that you can't see it likely to be preserved in any useful form by DivX/XVid encoding?
I don't typically steal, but I also don't typically buy products that worry that I might be a thief either. Hell, stealing might become the 'in' thing someday!
Brilliant! Just Brilliant!
Now all those nasty, evil video pirates will suddenly be forced to... to...
Buy someone else's gateway???
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
That is assuming of course, that enough of these devices get sold for anyone to care about stripping the watermarking.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
How long until someone writes a small app to scan each video frame for the watermark?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
How hard is it to understand that if your product does something your customers don't like, they'll either circumvent it, or go elsewhere?
Way to alienate the general public, guys.
just wrap the file in a zip archive or similar?
What?
It's unclear to me from the article whether these devices would be watermarking video provided by the ISP, cable company (or other TV broadcaster), etc. so that they would know, for example, that you're retransmitting video broadcast to your set. Or does this mean that if you transfer a video file (which might or might not be something that you own the copyright for), and it happens to pass through the wrong DSL modem, the modem will alter the bits in the file to embed the watermark. If it is the second, I can't imagine why I would want to buy or use such a device. I expect my network equipment to pass my data unaltered. It has no idea what I'm actually sending, and altering my files is essentially causing data corruption!
Suppose that I send my family home video. Does it watermark that? What if I send a large file of important non-video data that it thinks is video. Does it corrupt my file?
...won't that defeat any snooping and manipulation by the gateway?
Assuming they can do this, couldn't they make all information non-anonymous?
I am honestly quit shocked.... I always assumed that something along these lines was done. Not only to digital set top boxes but with audio/video processing software as well as cd/dvd burners. Not that it altered my behavior one way or the other. This may be new tech but it's hardly high tech. While I believed it was being done it certainly was a bit silly. It ranks up there with the asinine counterproductive drm schemes. What man makes, man can break.
The trouble comes when someone 'borrows' your recording and then puts a copy of it on the Internet... there is still no accountability in the correct manner.
When you buy a car (yes, car analogies might not be perfect) you have a title and registration that you keep with the car for proof of ownership. When you buy a CD, you have the physical media as proof. The entertainment industries need to have something as simple, and usable as these examples.
Sure, as an idea there are holes in it, but the premise is good. DRM is not a registration that works as it is too limiting, just as the EU! When someone steals your CD, you just go without it and have to buy another one unless you have insurance that covers it. If they steal your car, same again. If either is used to commit a crime, you are not complicit but that is not how the current music industry is looking at things.
Individual watermarks in the content might sound good, but they can be stolen, and if its anything like DRM, it will get cracked in no time. The only sound answer is to make it not worth pirating by making the cost reasonable, the usefulness of the media robust, and the ease of use to the consumer no more difficult than toasting bread in an electric toaster.
Time again to mention that a CD sharing club of you and 20 of your friends can pirate music and videos indefinitely without being caught in order to reduce the cost of music and videos to a level that is acceptable. Its the Internet part that gets people caught. The entertainment industry is hell bent on fscking the consumer, and those people will continue to take back from the industry as long as they are being ripped off, or feel that they are.
Even opportunistic piracy is going to continue, has always been around, and cannot be stopped. They only thing they can stop is the online wholesale piracy. This 'watermarking' won't stop you and your CD club from your activities as long as nobody posts a copy to the Internet and gets caught.
Until they get these criteria right, people will pirate music and videos because they have enough reason to dismiss the minor chance they will be caught. The 'industry' will simply have to figure out how to make money while providing what the consumer has overwhelmingly demonstrated that they want... or just go out of business.
Personally, I vote for them going out of business. Let newer, better business rise from the ashes of the current entertainment industry!
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
All this will do is catch the little guy. The pro's and geeks will just remove the water marks or not use their product.
---- aut viam inveniam aut faciam
Does it mean they'll let me capture video through the Firewire port on a cable TV set-top box free of 5C protection? I'd happily use something that watermarked the video I captured, since I only make legal use of the stuff I record from TV.
I'm guessing no, though, which means that this is just another example of the huge consumer electronics industry kissing the ass of the much smaller content cabal, while making meaningless overtures to consumers.
1. Steal somebody's decoder box.
2. Make and distribute pirated videos.
3. Profit !!
And there is a hidden benefit here. You know how Thomson is saying "if consumers know the watermark is there, they'll be disincented to pirate videos"? Well it works the same way in reverse. If media companies know the watermark is there, they'll be disincented to commit further acts of DRM.
Media companies have already demonstrated writ large that they are too stupid to grasp the implications of (and hackability of) software and media technology. So even though this Thomson scheme is obviously stupid to us, it may be enough to calm down the media companies.
Of course there's a price to be paid here. Like sacrificial lambs selected randomly from the herd, the occasional John Q. Couchpotato is going to get slammed by a MAFIAA lawsuit when his decoder's ID got cloned by a pirate. But hey, no more DRM!
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
I've wondered and bounced the idea off a couple of other people that would water-marking be a better solution than DRM ? With the watermark and no DRM, you can do as you please with your music/movie/media, and if it gets out onto the file-sharing networks - you'll be responsible ...
I know it's not a perfect solution - but I personally would not mind such a scheme, if it lets me do what I want (personally) with digital files I purchase and record.
Much of the video on the internets is highly compressed and would therefore destroy and kind of subtle watermarking technique, thinking that the watermark was just spurious noise that doesn't need to be recreated.
The .torrent file you use to start downloading a BitTorrent file has checksums for all chunks of the file. If a chunk is altered in transit, the BT clients receiving it will detect this and discard it (and intelligent trackers will eventually kick you out of the P2P cloud).
The only possible application for this is tagging files transferred as unencrypted streams, such as HTTP or FTP.
Fake watermark generator in 5... 4... 3... 2
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
After all the DRM warpaint and hysterical tirades about fair use, a company comes along and says "fine, we can protect our content without putting usage restrictions on it." What's the result: a handful of rabid Slashdotters attacking the idea.
Wake up and face the fact that fair use is dying, and if you want to save it, you've got to stop the tide before you can reverse it. All the fantasizing in the world about "starting from scratch" is never going to happen. If you continually indicate that you're not willing to work with content providers at all, then don't expect content providers to have any consideration for your interests. Of course, this is Slashdot, so maybe correcting problems is less desirable than bitching about them (but Slashdotter hypocrisy protects us from the same derision we give to politicians and executives for doing the same thing).
I know, I know, "they" started "it." Whatever. If you can't endorse someone taking a positive step toward a fair and equitable compromise between content providers and consumers, at least recognize the fact that one of those "evil corporations" is reaching out, even just a little.
And before the privacy nutjobs come out of the woodwork, do you think that your cable box and/or ISP don't already have the capacity to track what you do? Having watermarks is no more an invasion of privacy than having a Safeway club card or a commercial DVR. All that matters is what you DO with that information.
I hate it when the editorial team tries to sound smart but totally messes it up. This has nothing to do specifically with "DSL Gateways." It's about videos coming through your cable or slingbox-like set top box (STB) being watermarked as they are being played or displayed. So that if you attempt to record said video, it will go out with your box's personal watermark on it. This is to discourage people from uploading TV shows or stuff they get off cable. It won't do jack shit to stop you from bittorrenting DVD rips or files you've gotten from other people.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
"The idea is to slow down piracy without limiting the use of the consumer. They should not be upset about this unless they are widely redistributing content," said Pascal Marie, responsible for strategic marketing at the company's content security division.
Ahh yes, the old "If you aren't guilty, then you have nothing to worry about" excuse..
LOL, I hate to point this out to the Einsteins who are making this but all you would need to do is run two of these boxes on two different accounts and diff the resulting output of the two fixed length videos, eliminating any element that are not common to both. Wa la, no more watermark. It does not matter where they put the watermark. If you remove anything that is not the exactly same in both streams, it may still leave a sign a watermark was there but anything that is unique about them by definition must be removed so they will not know who it belonged to. Even if they modify the length of the videos each time it plays slightly, you will just need more copies. If the signal is digital it becomes so much easier. It is relatively simple to write a pattern recognition algorithm that will sync the videos, diff, and remove the watermarks perfectly. In addition if they do try to warp the videos in someway each time they play and you can watch them more than once you may not even need two boxes because The slight variance between to nearly identical copies means that if you watch the same file say three times you can purge it yourself as each version will have a watermark slightly out of sync with the other. This last method assumes no portion of the watermark is always fixed, but even if it was, the fact it is fixed would give you a target to be removed. What more each time this was done more and more information would be gathered about how they are watermarking it. In time you would be able to write an program that would detect and remove the watermark with no need to have multiple copies at all. Why this seems to be so hard for people to understand seems to be failure of understanding basic mathematics in the US. On a final note, the one thing this method would have trouble doing might be to remove any sign that some form of watermark had been on the video at some point. It would not say who did it but it might say it was done so it would tell the MPAA one thing, that this company's product was failing and exactly how often. Seems really bad for their business if you ask me.
AKA this is milarky, another company trying to make money off stupid movie industry execs. When will they get the fact they are being bilked by these guys. This one is not even clever.
How about making it legal to download copies? It would still be illegal to sell someone else's copyrighted material. However, in addition to making it legal to download copies, the government would make them a tax-exempt organization.
Now, tell me, would the companies supposedly losing money to piracy end up having more money if they were tax exempt as opposed to going around suing people (which makes them look like a bad guy) and such?
No way to get around that security, by golly.
Have gnu, will travel.
The DVD you got from Netflix has a watermark, so if it is pirated, we will KNOW that it is either you or one of the other 412 people who got the same disk!!!
The cake is a pie
Why is piracy so staunchly defended in the tech community? I know rationalizations like fair use are quoted but the truth is people want free movies and music. The piracy on this scale and technology are a recent thing. I know it was the stone age but when I was growing up people saved up for a record album, yes I mean vinyl records. If they couldn't aford it they just listened to the radio. There's nothing in the Constitution about free exchange of copyrighted material, if I record a song you don't own it I do. I know this is a troll post because it's not bashing copyright holders but at the core this is about people wanting to avoid paying for music and movies.
I don't know if he is right, but someone pleae mod him 'interesting', at least.
This country was not founded on the Articles of Confederation. It was not founded on the Constitution. It was founded on the Boston Tea Party. A bunch of guys went onto a ship carrying the wares of a state-enabled, repressive trade federation and threw their shit in the water.
You can call them hysterical too if you want but they gave birth to a great Republic with great ideals. I spend four hundred dollars a month to run the highest bandwidth Tor exit node I can. I don't filter BitTorrent. I know that this encourages piracy; this is why I do it. I consider it patriotic. I consider it as much my duty as an American as I consider gun ownership a duty. And I will continue to throw their fucking tea in the water, because it is the right thing to do.
Watermarking schemes are ludicrous, as is DRM. Their continued failure to read and comprehend the Microsoft Darknet paper is the only reason this scheme exists.
You know a few weeks ago at Blackhat in DC some guy from a RFID card company, HID, came out to tell the crowd why they had sued one of the presenters off the floor. He got up in front of a podium and told everyone that America is founded on patent law. Some funny little guy with glasses stood up and said "um, I'm from the ACLU, and I just want to say that, um, America is founded on freedom".
His approach was a bit lacking, it would have been better with a megaphone and a shotgun, but then the ACLU doesn't believe in gun rights. The point is that you can preach your corporate ankle-grabbing to people till your face turns blue. You won't stop people like me.
And we're going to keep dumping tea in the water.
Sorry, but he's talking about discouraging consumers from making copies by letting them know the watermarking is there. Consumers are not the same thing as pirates. Fuck them for constantly trying to portray every example of fair use or innocent sharing as some sort of fucking international mafia ring conspiracy to exploit their content for billions of dollars. Keep treating us like shit so I can enjoy it when I cancel my cable subscription forever.
"If Thompson wants to help prevent copyright infringement, there are better ways to do it, such as financial support for civil lawsuits against pirates."
Of course if Thompson REALLY wanted to help prevent copyright infringement, they could lobby to have copyright lessened or repealed. Repealing copyright would instantaneously stop 100% of copyright infringement.
No thanks. I don't want the electricity I'm paying for to be used in greater quantities than otherwise by an Internet router that is using the extra energy to work semiconductors harder to accomplish that which does not benefit me, only someone else (to wit, movie owners). If the MPAA wants to help pay my electric bill, however, I would be glad to adopt this new technological advance.
How does a file passing through one of these devices get tagged? I would assume that they would attempt to modify some of the bytes in the stream. This is going to be detected on one end by doing a md5sum and the hashes not matching up. Also, if they modify bytes in transit, they could mangle a file easily if done incorrectly. They may even be liable for damages by purposely selling broken hardware.
because we like free stuff. We are not going to buy everything we might like, not enough money for starters.
it's kind of like if you had a machine that could materialize food out of nothing, and then telling poor people they can't pirate the food.
same deal. digital data is infinitely reproducable at little to no cost. There is no moral grounds for hording it.
Watermarks can be broken. The same video from 2 different units can be analyzed to find the watermark signature and reverse engineer it. Suddenly you can put any watermark you want on the video to frame someone, or you can remove it. Or someone can reverse engineer the unit that adds the watermark.
You can't enforce with law something that can be forged. Its kind of like what they say about timecode in strange brew...those are very difficult to fake...
You replace all the FBI warnings, pre-movie adverts and anti-copying technology with a single screen which says in large letters:
"If you copy this, you are a poopy head."
The stigma alone has the power to stop ALL piracy worldwide, even in asia, because once you call someone a poopy head, there's no way you can save face...
Task Mangler
Since monitors can display more detail than the human eye can see, it is trivial to introduce lots of small random differences which a human won't notice but a diff will. You'll just end up discarding most of the video itself, and you won't even get rid of the entire watermark.
... does this mean that if you transfer a video file (which might or might not be something that you own the copyright for), and it happens to pass through the wrong DSL modem, the modem will alter the bits in the file to embed the watermark[?]
If it systematically alters the bits of a user's payload at all (especially if it's in a way that passes the usual redundancy checks) it's "data corruption".
I'd be interesting to see what happens if somebody sues an ISP who provides one of these modems with their service for willful failure to provide the advertised "internet service".
Meanwhile:
- I bet we're seeing a downside of ownership of ISPs by media conglomerates: The "content" section driving a degradation of the ISP section's services.
- Watch for tweaks to the transport protocols to detect this sort of tampering and abort it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Do you use a VCR? There's a show that you really want to watch, but you have another appointment. The broadcast flag is designed to prevent people from recording television shows for personal use. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_flag/ VCRs were declared legal by the Supreme Court, which the content providers want to overrule. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America _v._Universal_City_Studios%2C_Inc./ The purpose of this is to make you pay for the episode which you already paid your cable bill for. The cable company pays the television channel for access and you paid the cable company. This is even more warped in countries like the United Kingdom which have a television tax.
If I own a DVD, I think I should be able to rip the video from it so I can watch it on a portable device. I paid for the DVD, the company which made the movie received its cut. The DMCA prevents me from legally ripping the video. This is to make me pay for a second copy of the same movie.
The nature of mandatory DRM hurts open source audio/video players (read more about this in the broadcast flag link). This closes the market to companies with innovative ideas and makes manufacturers follow the draconian rules of the RIAA/MPAA. The heart of a free market is the ability of new competitors to enter a market.
This is very similar to treating every Arab as if they were a terrorist. Imagine if you wanted to watch a movie and a permanent record is kept on a corporate server. If it's porn, I hope you never want to run for public office. If it's about a medical condition you have, I hope your insurance company doesn't find out. Why would you want to give up your rights so that a few companies can continue to enforce their cartel?
As far as the economic damage of piracy, Microsoft has admitted that when someone pirates software, they hope that it's their software http://techdirt.com/articles/20070312/165448.shtml /. A pirated copy is compared to a demo copy which might lead to a future sale. Windows has been frequently pirated, has Microsoft gone out of business? Several of the richest men in the world (including the richest) have made their fortune from this company which has been "victimized" by piracy.
I believe that stiff efforts need to be in place to stop the selling of pirated material. I just don't want to be monitored, digitally handcuffed or otherwise screwed over because the RIAA/MPAA wants to blame a bad year on someone other than themselves.
1. Copy the original video stream to your hard drive.
2. Re-encode the video. There will be a small loss in quality, but the end result will be acceptable. The watermark will be altered or obliterated.
3. slashdot meme
4. Profit!
Keep in mind the names RCA and GE. I believe they're owned by Thomson.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Any data grabbed from the local DSL providers TV service that I legally subscribe to is multicast, I can capture the data straight from the DSL line, without it ever going through the "decoder box" and subsequent reencoding by the tv tuner ... as for would I put this stuff on the internet? Hells no, it's not full resolution.
Right
DSL(multicast IP, mpeg4)->PC (MPEG-4)
WRONG
DSL (multicast mpeg4)->Decoder box(Analog)->Capture card(Mpeg2)->Transcode to mpeg4 storage.
FYI, the TV boxes have nearly the same specs as the first gen xboxes.
"The more you tighten your grip Gov. Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers"
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
You know a few weeks ago at Blackhat in DC some guy from a RFID card company, HID, came out to tell the crowd why they had sued one of the presenters off the floor. He got up in front of a podium and told everyone that America is founded on patent law.
That's especially ludicrous since American industry was actually founded on the VIOLATION of English IP law - breaking the mercantilist system that attempted to limit the colonists to producing raw materials for, and buying finished products from, British companies.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This is exactly why once implemented in every gateway we will compress the videos and password protect them. We will then have web services or use shell to extract the videos using the password provided, thus bypassing the ability to watermark out videos we upload. Gee, this technology seems like a swing and a miss. Not that I would distribute pirated media.
I think you really mean "voila"
IP theft isn't going to stop, and all this will do is cause the mfg's product to become the hardware to avoid.
I strongly suspect this is merely a test baloon to see how roundly the idea is panned.
Once Thompson realizes that such a 'feature' is going to deal a death blow to their sales, they will shelve this nonsense and accept potential lawsuits as a cost of doing business.
This is fair in a way.
The RIAA et al have a legit bitch about people stealing their product.
The problem is that the media cartels have zero cred with the general public due to crap like the original $16/cd pricing that they promised (25 years ago)would come down 'in a few months,' and asshats like Garth Brooks trying to claim royalties from used cd sales, and the industry's steadfast refusal to stop clinging to 'cost of piracy' figures that everyone knows are utter bullshit.
They also have a long history of abuse of the artists they now claim to protect, as well as a pattern of bribery and corruption.
They have become a lightening rod for irritation and disgust at money-grubbing, out of touch, repressive overlords - whether or not that mantle is truly deserved.
Because there is so much deeply entrenched animosity against them, I find it difficult to believe that they will ever make a dent in piracy via a tech solution.
Perhaps they've realized this and have instead chosen a path of social engineering.
Too bad they chosen fud to implement it instead of making an honest effort to mend fences with their customer base.
Rare is the artist who will dance for your amusement while starving to death.
Actually, they dance for your amusement much more cheaply that way.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
> By letting consumers know the watermarks are there, even if they can't see them,
> Thomson hopes to discourage piracy without putting up obstacles to activities widely considered fair use,
"Wow! THIS SOUNDS GREAT! Where can I buy one."
In other news today Thomson's share price plunged in the face of sluggish set top box sales. "We're mystified", said the Thomson spokesliar, "but we're expecting great demand for our new screenless TV. It has no screen, so lets see those rat consumers watch pirated videos on that. Hah!"
Annoying -- being treated as criminals and all -- but, compared to DRM, a much better option.
-- Stanislav Shalunov
This isn't about watermarking everything; it's about watermarking content recorded using this "home gateway" device. If you record something with a camera you own (rather than recording it off the airwaves using your home gateway/media router), that's an entirely different deal -- so the home movie of your kids or the evidence of government malfeaseance is completely unimpacted.
I think the fear -- and I don't think it's a wholly irrational one -- is that once you get this watermarking technology built into STBs, then the *AAs are going to look around and see what methods are still lying around that can be used for piracy. (What, you thought they'd just declare victory and go home?)
The next logical place to go is consumer video recording equipment generally. The "analog hole," so to speak, whereby a person can just point their camcorder at the TV and get a (crappy) recording. Doing this isn't too hard; there's the issue of sync rates, sure, but it can be done.
Once you're manufacturing the watermarking chips in bulk, because they're already being put in everyone's cable boxes, it becomes a lot more likely that they'll just be put into every type of recording device, because the manufacturers will want to CMA, and the content producers will nudge them if they need additional motivation.
I could easily see this technology becoming one of those "hammers" where, to the one holding it, everything starts to look like a "nail" that just needs to be pounded. The solution to any kind of piracy will be 'watermark the recorder!' and there's no real end until anything that can create a digital file from any type of audio or visual source stamps a serial number onto it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
If a device sold to the user to perform non-threatening and legitimate activity can include something specifically designed to compromise user's privacy, then the device acts as an agent of copyright holder or of a government. This is fraud, police state or fascism, depending on how much government and companies are involved in exploiting the collected information.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Just post your video via tor. The Thompson router can't see the tunneled stream content. Problem solved.
Suppose that I send my family home video. Does it watermark that?
I imagine they can add their evil bits to whatever you do. The ISP is not going to ask you, they are just going to do it. When I say evil, I mean it.
This is not about "piracy", it's about control. Real copyright violations happen in places where people set up DVD printing presses and make exact copies of works. As soon as these devices are everywhere, the AAs will redefine "piracy" to get the pay per play they want out of you. Suckering you for entertainment cash should be the least of your concerns, though. Imagine a world where nothing can be done anonymously ever again. The modem is a computer and it can be programed to track your communications. Whistleblowers and activists, beware.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
With the watermark and no DRM, you can do as you please with your music/movie/media, and if it gets out onto the file-sharing networks - you'll be responsible ...
Don't be confused, this is just another means of implementing digital restrictions. It corrupts your files, removes anonymity from all your activities and sets you up for more of the same. DRM free means that and only that. Anything that identifies you is designed to enforce limits one way or another. One of the first things the bad guys will learn is how to remove and spoof the evil bits, so this technique is dead in the watermark and will only cause problems for honest people.
I personally would not mind such a scheme, if it lets me do what I want (personally) with digital files I purchase and record.
It won't.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I hardly think a single pirated copy of something traced back to a single device is going to trigger a lawsuit.
The issue for non-pirates here is anonymity. This technology causes anyone to expose their identity if they publish a video using the equipment. If you are an activist exposing some kind of sensitive stuff about your local tyrant, then you would do well to steer clear of these devices. The piracy industry is cashed up enough to get around this problem in the first place.
Another issue is that this technology is stupid, because these devices will be resold and resold and the owner will be untraceable in no time.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
Recent? Recent????? What are you, like, 12 years old, and spoon-fed too much propaganda pablum to understand actual history? Since when has copying and sharing been "recent"?
When I was in college we copied record albums onto audio casette tapes all the time, to share with our friends, or to play in the car. When VCRs came along, we all bought two of them so we could easily copy videotapes and share them around.
For that matter, my dad used to copy classical music concerts off the television set back in the 1950s and 60s onto 8mm tape (pointing his movie camera at the TV screen) so he could share them with his father and his brothers and sisters. That's right - he (and many geeks like him) was time-shifting (and geo-shifting) back in the 1950s, soon after his household first ever acquired a TV.
The only thing that is "recent" is this bizarre impulse by the **AA thugs to try to technologically interfere with human nature. The recency started with Macrovision-infected VCRs (you do know the original VCRs were not restricted, right?) and has continued from there.
If the system is well designed. I'm oversimplifying this but imagine that the watermark is a particular series of color variation on certain colors. You don't know the colors and you don't know the variations. Moreover, you don't know on which frames they appear.
Throw in a series of random variations in colors (who don't affect the visual perception in a sensitive way) and you have yourself a nice problem.
If done right, removing the watermark is really a decryption problem. Not impossible, but very very hard to crack and then computationally expensive: think about how long it takes to rip just one DVD now you are looking at at least 4-5 passes over this data (I'm being super optimistic here).
It would complicate things a great deal really if you really want to remove it.
Buy 10 of those box. Start saving data with same encoder, same hardware material same software. On each 10 box film the same 1 or 5 minutes sequence. Compare. Chance is , there will be slight diffference but they will be at random place, whereas the watermark will appear at the same place. I assume this will be something visual or auditive.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Excellent, Thompson, you've just given up a part of the market to Chinese/Taiwanese/South African manufacturers, who will make the exact same boxes except without the Watermarking misfeature.
This misfeature is something consumers won't want, in particular the Arrrh Matey pirates, therefore they wont buy.
Keep up the good work.
So I'm wondering how long it's going to take some enterprising hacker to write new software to flash to the modems and disable this "feature"?
Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts, Inc.
"Quality Custom Software and IT Services"
I think the thing that irks people is that such schemes are based on the fundamental idea of making your machine do something you, the owner, do not want it to do. As a programmer and a technophile, I am used to building, hacking, and modifying software and hardware, and making it do what I want. That's also why I run Linux - I can control all the software - all the source code is there.
Now, when hardware manufacturers start to embed watermarks, spyware, phone-home code, or who-knows-what into the chips, suddenly I, the lawful owner who shelled out my hard-earned money, cannot control what my property does. When I buy something, I want 100% - not 99.5%, not 99.9% - 100% control over what it does.
It's this corporate idea of "we'll do what we want with YOUR hardware" that seriously bugs technical professionals, hackers, and tinkerers.
A misunderstanding here - this actually has nothing at all to do with modifying IP packets, or untrustworthy routers inspecting everything that passes through for signs of a video to alter. The article could be better written, as the term 'home gateway' is ambiguous.
Its a STB technology. Thats all. Those cable and sat decoders made by Thompson will add a watermark to everything they output, unique to that device. Other devices will just ignore this, completly. Users really wont know its there. Its not actually a form of DRM, it doesn't try to restrict anything directly.
But when a user captures a film or program and puts it out on a p2p network, the watermark remains. The MPAAs hired enforcers pick it up, read the mark, and know from the first part of it which distribution company it was pirated from. A quick call to that company and the second part identifies the individual box, and thus subscriber, and thus target. Then the lawyers are sent in.
I expect it can be removed without much difficulty by a good pirate. It should certinly be removable if they have two differently-watermarked copies - a bit of playing with frame-averaging may do it. Its good for catching only those who are not aware of its presence. Once its tied in to the existing lawyerbot system, it will probably result in lawsuits against releasers with proof of infringment. Expect the content producers to be hard - no $5000 out-of-court settlements here, the releasers will be made into harsh examples.
Another advantage for the content producers is targetting. Once they have their list of infringers, they may be able to get details off the distribution companies, and thus avoid suing old ladies and little girls, starving families, struggling students barely able to pay their way through university... anyone who would result in serious bad publicity. They can instead concentrate on ruining the lives of those who will not attract so much public sympathy.
As for buying or not buying... people dont buy things like this. Distributors do. Whenever someone gets a new cable or sat service subscription - at least here in Europe - the company provides them with a decoder on loan for the duration of the subscription. Many of these services will be very eager to roll out the new technology - it assures them of greater cooperation from the media producers who supply their content. In many cases, the media producers are under the same ownership as the distributers. The Murdoch Empire, for example.
It doesn't prevent fair use as there are no technical way to stop copying. It is just a way to check if the terms of the contract between consumer and provider are followed.
For one thing, this means that it can be copied and distributed when the copyright have expired.
There are no risk for the user that the loss of some sort of encryption key would make his video collection unviewable.
It would probably also result in less support issues and aggreviated customers of both contents and hardware.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
YOU DON'T GET TO CHOOSE THE BOX. THE CABLE PROVIDER DOES ! This was what cablecard was about. I have a Sony HDD HD recorder-Sony and LG came up with full blown HD DVR's with cablecard input, and they were strangely taken out of production, with no North American Successors.
You can RENT a box in perpetuity from your cable provider, though. Just like the old Bell Tel Co, the rental of the equipment was a huge hidden source of profit.
Just Like the old Bell Tel, they don't want anyone else's "devices" in the network.
Except that in this case the technology is specifically designed to protect fair use rights whilst discouraging illegal sharing.
According to their definition, watermarks are supposed to insert identifying information in the video that the human eye cannot detect.
The goal of MPEG or any video compression is to save space by removing information that the human eye cannot detect.
So existing legitimate tools to do real-time MPEG compression will without special effort remove all artifacts of watermarking as part of doing their legitimate function.
There doesn't seem to be much of a real solution here that would impair anyone who truly intended to steal content, just potential privacy invasion of customers who had no intent to steal.
What I mean is wouldn't the watermark disappear when transcoding? Wouldn't the watermark only show up in the original captured format?
You don't need to remove the watermark, just scramble it sufficiently so it's unrecognisable.
I'm a firm believer in this kind of watermarking. Looking down the road, as more and more video distribution moves away from distributed bits of plastic and silicon and moves toward a downloaded for use model, you can see it being easier and easier to watermark an identifier into a data stream at the point of purchase.
With watermarking and an accompanying education campaign, you take a large portion of the casual piracy out of the equation. You make it easier for consumers to buy and use your products, but with a workable way to identify abusers. I seriously doubt that if a single pirated copy of something you download ends up on a pirate network that the lawsuits will follow - the idea that someone could have lost a copy or something will eventually prevail there. It does, however, allow those who put large libraries of things out there to be prosecuted.
Without making this a discussion on what should or should not be allowed under copyright law, so long as there is a copyright law being what it is, the use of watermarking is a much more sane approach compared with DRM. DRM prevents the adoption of these technologies as much as it enables it. It increases the complexity and failure rate of the technology, the hardware requirements of that technology, and the education level required to use the technology well. At the same time, it segments the market you can sell to into groups based on their chosen platform for viewing. All these are reasons why electronic distribution (The OTHER E.D) have been slower to take off than many of us would like.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
NERD!!!!!
DVD player registration? Like Xerox machine right? ... will have to be registered with the goverment? WELL FUCK THAT FASHIST CRAP
So next all printing presses, copy machines, dvd players, radios
The latter raising the question of, "If they don't know who you are, what value is the watermark?" i.e. What information is going into that watermark to make it useful? It's certainly not your name and address.
I suppose they could embed the system's serial number. If it's on the network, which is not at all unlikely, it could embed it's IP address. But that's only marginally useful since it could very well be a LAN IP (e.g. 192.168.1.X). Beyond that, it'd need to start being smart about probing the network around it to figure out what the WAN IP it's connecting through is.
Beyond these technical hurdles there are also the legal ones. As the popular RIAA .vs. Lindor case that we've all read about here is demonstrating, proving that a device actually corresponds to a person can be a bit tricky.
I don't care that I'm not doing anything wrong, i don't want my equipment keeping an eye on me and automatically snitching on me if it thinks i am doing something wrong. Its *MY* hardware, it should do my bidding, not the other way around.
Whats next, cars that call the police and cry for help if you exceed the speed limit? or cable guys that are just an extension of the law, looking for infractions in your home and get bonuses for turning people in?
Phfft.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If this becomes popular, then torrents and such could simply be encrypted for download (even on a per-download basis, to avoid spotting known encrypted versions).
The battle is hopeless for MPAA/RIAA/etc.. As long as light is being sent to our eyeballs, there will be someway to capture it, and share it. Make the prices reasonable, allow good fair use on any media for legitimate purchases, and you'll be surprised at how much money you'll make.
Movies and such are mass market commodities, just like bread or milk. Yes, I could buy a cow for milk, or make bread by hand, and "stick it to the man"; but it is actually *more* expensive, and *less* convenient to do so, when I can just pick them up for a buck or two each. Why would I bother rolling my own. (Well, I actually do make my own breads, but it's not for financial benefit, but other reasons, such as the joy of cooking, enjoying the freshness, etc.)
If people could get any movie they wanted for a buck or two in their home (not $7.95 for a single view), they wouldn't bother downloading; and if 10x or 15x or 100x as many people do it because the price is great, guess what? The sellers make *more* money than trying to restrict its use.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
1. Have you and your friend record the same video. Examine each frame, and locate the watermark. Then, hack the watermark on each frame. A software program to do this would be trivial.
2. Hack the box to change the "serial number" or whatever else it uses to identify itself. This is probably stored in a removable ROM of some type for production purposes (it's cheaper to make the parts all the same and then add in a ROM at the end). So, reverse engineer it and sell hacked ROMs on the net.
3. Find the spot in the code that inserts the watermark in the video stream. It's probably easy to find. Stuff a RETURN or a JUMP in there so it doesn't do it, and burn a new ROM.
The proposed solution just moves the problem; it doesn't eliminate it.
Get rid of everything Micro and Soft: Buy Viagra and/or Linux
right... so this very advanced hardware/software will watermark the video file... hum... ok... that's cool... ;-)
but wait! how in the hell it will do it if the file is cryptographed before the transfer?
Do you really think it is hard for P2P software to just "envelope" the file?
Its easy to watermark only if you know what you are watermarking... the dsl cables hardware cant analyze or decrypt the files withou being the ultimate Playstation Cell processor.
Well, maybe the software will just "guess" the file inside that bunch of criptographed bytes is a video, or like the Psych series, he will just "sense" it by looking a name with the ending wmv or avi...
Oh man... maybe the "enchanted" can help us!
Hmm, has anyone considered the problems this would cause to anything that uses hashes to check the validity of a download. This would screw over file-sharing software (and this doesn't even have to be illegal stuff) more than TFA mentions, because all the hashing that goes on would be screwed, plus there would be no way to download the "same file" from more than one source, as the software wouldn't be able to verify it was actually the same file.
OK, before you call me a troll, I genuinely think this is a reasonable compromise. If you are actually stealing your content, and you think this is perfectly OK, please stop reading now. We won't agree.
But if you are like me, and would like to keep your Fair Use rights completely intact, this seems like a good compromise. Of course, all other restrictions must be removed. But if I'm only interested in copying stuff for my own use, then I don't care if it's watermarked (assuming the watermark doesn't degrade the quality of the content). Even if I want to give a copy to a friend, I'm probably not bothered.
It's posting content for just anyone to download (or mass producing copies), which coincidently is what I think usually crosses the line, that becomes unattractive.
Someone above pointed out the potential for abuse, like if someone covertly takes some content with your watermark on it and distributes it illegally. But life is full of these types of risks. If someone steals your credit card info and anonymously contributes to Al Quaeda, you're going to get a visit from the Feds. But as with any other situation, a reasonable (I know, the **AA have not historically participated in anything "reasonable," but I hold out hope) investigation will almost always turn up the truth.
With this setup (and removal of the other mechanisms in place, like the DMCA), I could be archiving my favorite team's best games to watch later (in HD), something I can't do when they play on ESPN. I can buy DVDs from the UK and convert them to NTSC to watch. I can duplicate DVDs (and protect the originals) for use by my kids in the car. I can even give a copy of a video to a friend or family member that missed it.
This just seems like a good mid-ground between absolutely no protection and making me a criminal for trying to use my content the way I see fit.
Xesdeeni
Consider that you are trying to hide maybe a 16 byte watermark in a 30 minute show. You could simple switch the picture a pixel to the left or right every few seconds and you'd have easily enough room.
Obviously there are better techniques, but seeing as how most people want to download an entire TV show this seems like it would stop most copying.
And 35 seconds after it goes on sale... somebody works out how the watermark is implemented and releases a tool (patch, program etc. etc.) that replaces "your" device ID with a "known crap" device ID (all "0"s, the manufacturers test ID etc. etc.)
:)
Still it's entertaining watching the arms race
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
So they know a particular device created a particular file. And how do they know where that device is or who it belongs to? Somehow I seriously doubt Joe Pirate is the kind of person who dutifully fills out product registration cards, especially if his intent is to use the machine in some illicit way. This will do all of nothing to combat piracy, it's just another control for the sake of having another control. And how many sales did Thompson just cost themselves with this move? Clearly, in order to do business in this industry you must be some form of idiot.
Maybe I'm just missing your point - what right are we supposed to be fighting for here? The "Right To Give Away Free Copies Of The Artistic Property Of Others Because We Are Too Cheap To Pay, It's So Easy To Stea^H^H^H^HInfringe That We Cannot Be Expected To Stop, And Besides Those Guys Make Too Much Money Anyway"?
Posting content that you didn't create is not fair, nor is it even "Fair Use" ... it's the unlawful taking by you of the copyright owner's right to distribute as he/she/they wish. Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should, nor does it make it legal to do so.
Hmmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I seriously doubt it.
Isolating the watermark should be trivial -- encode a known video source using two or more pieces of hardware. Diff the output, and you've identified the watermark.
Even if the watermark data is itself encrypted, you don't have to be able to read it in order to be able to remove it or corrupt it enough to render it untracable. Removing extraneous data (AKA noise) from an image or a signal is a well-defined problem space with lots of good solutions. Existing denoising and color-correction filters will probably suffice to render the watermark illegible if not remove it completely. They're counting on people not bothering to do any post-processing to the video before sharing it.
It's analogous to a physical object with a bar-coded serial number. You don't have to be able to read the bar code in order file it off -- you just need to know where it is.
Even if they're using steganographic techniques to hide the watermark, you can still detect it's presence, and in all liklihood derive the encoding algorithm, with a large enough sample size and a known source. I seriously doubt steganography is being used, because that would not survive the digital->analog->digital round trip like they claim.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Yeah, you're missing the point. Copyright is a bargain - artists get a monopoly on their works for a time, and in return it enters the public domain after a while, thus enriching it. Corporations have been systematically removing the second part by extending copyright and also by building technology and laws that criminalize the process that allows us to preserve content - do you really think your DieHard dvd will be readable when it falls out of copyright?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Alright I guess it's time for me to finally make a /. account ;) Hi all!
As for the topic at hand, I find it humorous that everyone's underthings are getting so twisted into proverbial bunches. Obviously we'll be able to get around such a system if we want to so who cares if they implement it? It's only pirates with little technical knowledge that would get busted by this and it serves them right I say.
This issue touches on one I do care about quite a bit though, and that is copyrights and music. As a DJ, music lover and coder I feel quite strongly that artists and everyone in between SHOULD be ripped off.
I know, this sounds crazy at first but I firmly believe that money and music should have nothing to do with each other. In almost all music quality and profitability are mutually exclusive. The best music comes from starving artists and the shite being fed to the masses on the radio and MTV is largely garbage.
So, pirate away! If the whole music distribution system falls to pieces, what's left will be the cream of a very polluted crop.
Actually it should read
"Are you GAY?
Are you a NIGGER?
Are you a GAY NIGGER?
Are you a member of the GNAA?
If you answered "Yes" to all of the above questions, you should go find a cliff or a bridge somewhere, then take your entire fucktarded family. Have all of them jump off to their deaths, and after that jump to yours. Then there will be less fucktards in the gene pool."
The copyright system is designed as a carrot, not a stick - it encourages a desired behavior (making the artistic works available after a period of time) by offering a benefit (exclusive distribution rights during that period). No mechanism is included to punish an artist who chooses to remove their work from distribution before it becomes available for free. That may be because it was not previously possible to do so, it may be because Congress never contemplated an artist even wanting to do so, it may be because of any number of reasons. Nevertheless, it's true - content providers or their agents can legally game the system as it now stands.
The corollary is true as well, the content provider is not required to allow you to easily preserve content. Neither "Fair Use" nor copyright law require them to allow you to preserve their content for them at all - you can because there are tools to do so, not because a law allows it (quite the opposite). If 20th Century Fox (or whoever the current owners are) chooses to stop making new versions of their product 'Die Hard' as new formats are developed, then so be it - you cannot sue them to put it on Blu-Ray just because you want it that way.
Lastly, I don't expect that I personally will be able to play a current version DVD of 'Die Hard' (or any current DVD) when the copyright finally runs out - but I do expect that works of lasting quality (like 'Die Hard', though not the sequels) will continue to be available in some playable format. I will also bet that somebody out there will be offering to convert your $OLD_FORMAT stuff to $SHINY_NEW_FORMAT versions, just as they do today. If there's money in it, business follows.
Here's my question for you - are you willing to work on/with your Congresscritter to criminalize artists for not living up to the bargain?
Hmmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Once again, you are not removing the watermark except in the case of a digital diff where the watermark is the only difference. You are making the watermark generic. Why is this so hard for people to understand? They could change every single pixel in the video slightly. When you compare each frame and average the two it will erase whatever made them unique. It has to. No you will not remove a generic watermark. You will remove whatever made it unique to you. There is no discarding in this method at all.
From Wiki:
Underappreciated post. I have no points.
ther r others ways to check piracy than this. reduce the prices of stuff and u'll find more ppl buy it.300$ for an OS is too much a price to pay! if software videos movies and what not all cost something that all of us can EASILY afford, who'd want to pirate it neway?