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Audio Watermarks Could Pinpoint Film Pirates By Seat
Slatterz points out a brief mention at PC Authority of a story at Torrent freak about using watermarking embedded in movies' soundtracks to reveal the exact location of camera-wielding bootleggers in a theater; the inventors (here's an abstract of their paper) claim it's accurate to within 44 centimeters.
And once it's publicized, is it really all that hard to throw a couple of wireless microphones out there under others' seats to "mix things up?" It would work if no one knew about it, but once it's out...
Pretty much a moot idea.
For this to be useful, the theatre would have to identify who's in which seat, which means
a. showing ID when you buy tickets (and retaining the seating data for weeks or months)
b. assigned seating.
It's almost as if they don't want people to go to the movie theatre any more.
If you don't know who sat in which seat on what showing on what date, knowing which seat a video was shot from isn't going to help you.
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I've always wondered why the movie studios care about catching these people. These bootlegs are the worst quality you can find and anyone who would knowingly buy them would never be a customer anyway.
Am I going to get treated like I do by the airlines every time I want to watch a movie?
In order for this to track us at all, we'd need an ID to buy a ticket, need to show ID to get into the theater, have assigned seats, and they would have to change the audio slightly on every showing.
Maybe I'll just stay home and download them instead...
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If you know what seat they are in days after they filmed it and released it, what good does it really do you? Ive never seen a theater with assigned seating before.
This might be useful for tracking down unauthorized recordings obtained during pre-release screenings.
They will still not know in which cinema or exactly when the film was recorded.
They will if the watermarking equipment creates a unique signature with each playback.
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That would be counter-productive and would drive away customers from an already troubled industry.
That argument never stopped RIAA and MPAA before.
[red dots]...which are probably very easily removable with a good video editing package.
Now which theater did that camcorder copy come from?
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If this isnt an example of total insanity on behalf of intellectual property interests, I don't know what is. Going this far to catch cammers? im thinking straight jackets and ambulances for all of IP business interests that have completely lost track of all reality.
Which is ironic, since it's still useless because it provides the info well after the fact. What good does knowing where the bootlegger sat if you find the video online or at a flea-market a week later? The person isn't going to sit in the same seat every time. If they're really worried, just get the movie theater ushers to check the seats in the middle. (Which should be obvious.) Anyhow, in-theater bootlegs are considered bit ghetto-ish nowadays since much better can be had as a direct conversion from leaked or recently released digital media. (And those are likely to be from friends/family of the actual people that do movie reviews, or those folks doing janitorial or mailroom work at press-related offices. What, you think those press-release DVDs actually get destroyed?) Nobody really wants the in-theater copy with the commentary and noise of the people around the bootlegger or see someone in front getting up for popcorn. Such recordings are only for people desperate for a quick movie fix or for those without access (direct or indirectly via friends) to a good internet connection.
Thats just the first step.
Visible video watermark is easily removable *if* you take the time to do it. I didnt noticed "red dots" yet, so I'm assuming its fairly unobtrusive and one would need to watch the whole movie a couple of time very carefully to make sure you removed all the watermarks.
They are betting it will discourage enough people, or that somebody will be sloppy and get caught and made a good example of...
The next step for the pirates would be to have an automated process to detect and remove the marks.
Then the studios would try to produce more subtle marks, that are more difficult to detect and remove, and you would get into an race between the pirates and the studios...
But keep in mind that, assuming the studios can indeed come up with always better technologies, it will be much more risky for the pirates to know they are safe.
On the copy protection/DRM side, its always easy and safe for the hackers: They know when they succeeded. Where the studio never know where the next exploitable flaws in their system is going to be.
Now for watermark: the pirates will probably never really know if they succeeded in removing the watermarks because the studio will keep the technology and the detectors secrets until they have to publish them for court cases.
Obviously, it remains to be seen if any video/audio watermark system is robust enough to survive the basic trans-coding algorithm that are usually applied by the pirates, and also if they are robust enough to be admissible in courts.
But then again, if you knew that your dvds or camcorded movies were watermarked with information that could eventually be linked to you, would you take the effort and risk to share it on bittorrent ? If you were in it for the money, I'm sure you will take some risks, but if you were doing it just for the heck of it ?
I think thats what the studio are thinking: "If they think we have the technology to track them, or if its just good enough that we can catch just one of them and make an example of it, that will be a string deterrent..."
But all in all I would not be too worried...