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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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While this sounds cool from a technical perspective, it would be easy to circumvent by plugging a remote microphone into the camera.
Also, wouldn't the accuracy of this depend on the theater's dimensions and acoustics as well as the layout/calibration of the speaker system?
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.
Most cinemas that I've been to lately have micro-power FM transmitters that broadcast the audio in each screening room, for the benefit of people with hearing impairment who bring their own radios and listen on headphones. If the pirates were to use audio from this FM feed, the camera could be anywhere in the room and nobody would know.
Well, outside of Oscar season the percentage of early-run pirated movies which are from in-theater cameras approaches 100%.
CAM shots (normally hand-held camera and the camera's microphone (which is what this procedure would target)) are often first, and I have seen plenty of bootleg DVDs which are this.
TeleSyncs often (but not always) come second. (Sometimes they hit the scene first.) They are normally tripod-mounted cameras and patch-in for the audio (hard of hearing feed, or direct feed if in the projection booth.) These would also qualify as in-theater cameras, though this technology presumably would not affect them, as the time-delay measurement-from-known-speaker-positions-technique would not apply.
Again, I have seen plenty of bootleg DVDs which are from this source.
It is true that DVD rips are the gold standard of "pirated" movies, but it is quite common for those to be the third or fourth release (after TeleCines or R5s or Screeners sometimes.)
I guess my point is that in-theater-camera releases may not be the most popular on bittorrent sites, but they are very prevalent, in my experience, on the streets of Pacific nations.
I have copies of Bolt and Quantum of Solace. Neither are out on DVD yet. Yes, I admit that they are pirated copies acquired through less than noble means. I had no intention of ever seeing either movie, and frankly, the rating on Bolt is a pretty big fuckup.
Neither are cam copies - they are rips of the copies sent by the studio to the Oscars for consideration. (QoS has the subtitle "For your consideration"; Bolt has "property of Disney - do not copy".)
I'm not sure why the studios are ripping their own movies and putting them in... places, but they sure aren't cam copies.
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All the cameras and watermarks in the universe will not catch a man with a hidden videocamera paying cash to see movies at large theaters in large cities.
The whole "taping-in-the-theater" thing is sooooo 1999. Now we have good samaritans who are willing to leak the movie beforehand and save us the trouble of a trip!
Prerelease screenings are complete clusterfucks. I've seen security people come up into the projection booth to make sure you're not telesyncing, and security people with hand held metal dectectors for video cameras, etc but there's absolutely no assigned seating, except maybe the first or second rows of the stadium seating (below that are the nosebleed floorseating) for the director and PR people. Most tickets are free and to top that off, most (modern) movie theaters don't even have seat numbers. Hell ask a theater employee and you're lucky if they can tell you within 100 seats how many people each theater seats.
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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.
They've been doing that for quite a while, actually. Ever seen a bunch of red dots flash onscreen for a frame a couple times during a movie? (if not, you will now - sorry) Those are to determine what theatre a leaked cam copy came from.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Citation please.
This smacks of someone just making up crap to support their viewpoint.
He is exactly right, and there is no citation for what goes on in the scene and the street.
If you have spent any time in the scene, even as a leech, you will know that there is fierce competition
to be the FIRST. The timeline is exactly as he said: cams first, telecine and r5's next,
then DVD screeners and finally official releases. If you are the group with a first in any
of these categories, you win. Cams are usually made in the first week of release, and make
it to the street very shortly thereafter.
The street follows the scene. If there is a cam out on the scene, you will see it on the street.
DVD Screener hits the scene, expect it on the street less than a week later. I live in new york
city and they sell boots everywhere, and they cost next to nothing. They sell them in the subway,
laid out on sheets in the street, guys with duffel bags walk around selling them, etc etc.
There is no shortage of bootleg everything here, starting with mass media, i.e. music software and movies.
music lover since 1969
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...