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."

Comments

I'm not buying.

[Harmonious Botch]

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.

Re:I'm not buying.

[cduffy]

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.

Huh? This isn't reporting you when you put a black-market DVD into your hardware; it's allowing a mechanism for investigation when you put a movie or show this hardware rips up on BitTorrent or YouTube.

Personally, I think this is an outstanding compromise; it leaves legitimate fair use rights in place, but provides a means for large-scale-distribution violations to be prosecuted. It's certainly a far better deal than mandatory DRM, which in all seriousness is the other contender. I'll take watermarks over DRM any day.

Re:I'm not buying.

[garcia]

It's certainly a far better deal than mandatory DRM, which in all seriousness is the other contender. I'll take watermarks over DRM any day.

Since when is it up to anyone except the owner of the content to protect their interests? There is only one reason that a third party would want to get involved with this bullshit -- kickbacks from the MPAA and other media conglomerates.

Re:I'm not buying.

[Fulcrum of Evil]

it leaves legitimate fair use rights in place, but provides a means for large-scale-distribution violations to be prosecuted

Yeah right. It allows the OP's scenario to result in his bankruptcy while doing fuckall to stop real pirates, since they just rip the DVD and copy the cover art (or make more DVDs in the same factory). This is only good for harrassing morons who upload dvd clips to youtube and the people they live with.

Re:I'm not buying.

[Score Whore]

Do you not see the perfectly logical conclusion in your post? The content producers want to protect their interests so they pay a third party to provide a harware solution. Duh. You do know it's completely legal for a company to do business with another company? "Kick backs" my ass.

Re:I'm not buying.

[mrchaotica]

Personally, I think this is an outstanding compromise

Compromise?! Who decided the copyright cartel deserves even that?

I'll take watermarks over DRM any day.

And I'll continue to demand neither, thankyouverymuch!

Re:I'm not buying.

[dgatwood]

But the courts have already ruled repeatedly and conclusively that manufacturers of VCRs cannot be held liable for contributory infringement. I fail to see how "on a digital device" should suddenly change the way the law handles things, and if it does, the law should be changed. Contributory infringement is no more valid for a PVR than "on the internet" patents are for common everyday activities, and for precisely the same reason.

Re:I'm not buying.

[cduffy]

That's not a problem with watermarking; rather, that's a problem with the courts, and properly a legislative issue. In some cases SLAPP laws might be used to counter any such baseless assertions of infringement -- they can make bringing a lawsuit against a private individual very expensive indeed.

Way to kill your sales, bitches!

[LibertineR]

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!

Well, it'll give the hackers something to do.

[glittalogik]

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.

Re:Well, it'll give the hackers something to do.

[IamTheRealMike]

Why would the general public care? Firstly, outside of the Slashdot RDF, most people don't seem to care about DRM. They bought DVDs before CSS was cracked, they buy songs from iTunes, and so on.

Secondly, the only legitimate reason for the "general public" to be annoyed by protection technologies is if it interferes with their fair use rights under law. Uploading shit to P2P networks is not a part of those rights, but it's what this is designed to discourage. So there can be no legitimate reason for annoyance. If you are annoyed the only logical conclusion I can come to is that you like being able to rip people off without being caught, and don't want to see that come to an end.

Can we

[iminplaya]

just wrap the file in a zip archive or similar?

This is *ALMOST* the right thing

[zappepcs]

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!

A better solution than DRM

[for_usenet]

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.

You people are absurd

[mr_matticus]

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.

Re:You people are absurd

[Fulcrum of Evil]

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.

If they want to sell anything at all, they'll listen to congress - all we have to do is fight for our rights. Compromising with these people will only result in them coming back later asking for another compromise that pushes the line further in our direction. What we need is legislation explicitly protecting our rights to enrich the public domain. No fair use, no copyright.

Re:You people are absurd

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a few words from a "privacy nutjob". If the Internet was presented to the public in its current form back when it was new, it would fail miserably, just as every other marketing-inspired controlled network and data service did before it. It became popular BECAUSE people like the idea of being able to do what they want, when they want.

Corporations love the internet because it is, for the most part, free to them. At least, it's several orders of magnitude below the what the cost would be if they actually had to pay for their own infrastructure to send packets around the planet. Those of us unfortunate to live in towns with taxpayer-funded stadiums know full well that a corporation will gladly get someone else to pay for their fixed costs. It's no different with the Internet. They didn't build it, didn't think of it, and didn't think much of it when it came into popular use. So, they were late to the party and now they want to write the rules. They put up insecure e-commerce apps and complained when they got hacked. It wouldn't be possible for "hackers" (their definition) to cause "damage" to corporate assets if they didn't connect those assets to an inherently insecure network in the first damned place! Well, fuck them! Ditto for government, which does at least deserve credit for laying the foundation for the Internet. However, then it occurred to them the "damage" that can be done by people sharing information freely. (I'm not talking about pirated DVDs, either. I don't steal or even buy movies or music because it's all such crap these days it's not worth paying attention to.) Now government does everything they can to discourage anonymity, to make people think they're constantly being watched, and to generally discourage anything but online shopping also. Oh, and be sure to pay your taxes online so some corporation can charge you a "convenience fee", while we're at it.

Well, when the net is turned into a safe, locked down haven for commerce and everyone watches what's sent to them for their montly content subscription fees and nobody can do anything they're not "supposed" to do, people will get bored and drop off. Hackers, real ones, will have moved on to more interesting things anyway. Want to stop this? How about mandatory data destruction laws? ISPs should be able to retain logs only for a brief period of time and then only for the purpose of network maintenance and security. They should be prohibited by law from sharing this information with anybody without a court order. How about laws that put the same kinds of protections on your private messages that corporations bought and paid for concerning their "intellectual property"? This isn't about what's technically possible, it's about what's legal. That your government (pick one, they're all doing it) is currently trying to go the exact opposite direction shows what they think of you. Remember that well.

Oh, and never use frequent shopper cards. If you don't have a choice, at least never use them with your actual name and address on them.

Re:yawn

[cduffy]

The article title is sorely misleading; this isn't about DSL gateways; rather, it's about settop boxes, "home media routers" and the like.

They aren't trying to take on Linksys, Netgear or D-Link -- at least, not with the products in question.

Re:I give it a month, tops.

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Seriously, what ever happened to making stuff people actually want?

Re:Watermarking cannot work this way

[darkreaper00]

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. ...
This one is not even clever. You mean to tell me you expect to rip from two sources and the only difference will be the watermark? You are dreaming more than the company hawking the technology.
 
If their watermark is something persistent in every frame, seems like it would be trivial to remove, but I wonder how clever they actually are. My guess is that it won't be visible to the eye, and it'll be dynamic -- the bits they're adding might be in different locations throughout the feed (so that you can't just add a bit of your own noise of a similar sort to muck it up).

This is actually similar to the "invisible spots" made by your inkjet printers.

Anyway, I'm sure some of the geeks employed to implement this stuff are smart enough to deserve a bit of credit.

Re:Brilliant!

[TubeSteak]

Thomson sells its gateways and STBs to network operators -- one of its biggest customers is Orange, the Internet access subsidiary of France Telecom, which packages the devices as the LiveBox, an all-in-one terminal for telephony, television, Wi-Fi and Internet access.

Orange is giving the LiveBox away with service.

Thomson &/or the MPAA (or their euro equivalents) can pressure/bribe the big network operators into only giving out free watermarking sets.

What a coup that would be for them. Each media company offers exclusive content to a network operator for whatever conditions they usually agree upon + the requirement that the network operator only offers/gives away hardware with Thomson's NexGuard chip.

The media companies win, the network operators win, Thomson wins, and the consumers win, in that they get access to their ISP's exclusive content. The only people who lose are those who use the freebie hardware & care about the NexGuard chip.

Re:Why Pirate?

[croddy]

When you were growing up, making durable, faithful copies of an audio or video signal was a technically difficult and impressive service. It was a source of value, and the market rewards a service with value by exchanging other things of value for it. Today, making perfect copies of an audio or video signal is something with a material and skill cost so negligible it is practically nothing. The market does not support the sale of a service which has no value.

I am more than happy to pay a musician to play a show, or a theater to project a film. The fact that making copies of media is no longer a service with economic value does not threaten the livelihood of a musician who can give a performance or a director who can create a film that is worth going out to see on a 50 foot screen. It only threatens the livelihood of professional copyists, whose business is now no longer worth anything.

That's what technology does. It put the thesis typesetters, buggy-whip makers, and telegraphers out of business. I do not see anything special about it having eliminated the need for media middlemen.

Yes, it's about control.

[twitter]

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.