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Anti-Piracy Dog Uncovers Huge Cache of Discs
sgt scrub writes "I've never thought about sniffing my CDs before buying them but that is all about to change. According to this Yahoo! news article, dogs can be trained to tell the difference between a legit copy of a DVD and one from those pesky pirates. From the article, 'A DVD-sniffing anti-piracy dog named Paddy has uncovered a huge cache of 35,000 discs in Malaysian warehouses, many destined for export to Singapore, industry officials said on Wednesday. Paddy was given to Malaysia by the MPA to help close down piracy syndicates, which churn out vast quantities of illegal DVDs. The dog is specially trained to detect chemicals in the discs.'" We ran a story about anti-piracy dogs being trained in Ireland a few years ago.
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Now the blind won't have to worry so much about being sold pirated copies of their favorite movi... oh... nevermind.
False dilemma. We can do both.
I plan to coat all of my real DVD's in steak, that should distract 'em!
instead of training dogs to help guide handicapped people
They are; the heads of organisations like the MPA clearly have learning difficulties.
Blank until
So the dog go off on any dvd-r so it will go off even on blank disks?
How about just data only disks with no movies on them?
...to scare the kids.
So apparently recording agencies are able to do anything except record good music. They can bribe judges, hire lawyers, buy congress, complain, make commercials and now train dogs. You would think that with all this money they could come up with a working business model other then abusing the legal system.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Who knew that the evil bit had a smell?
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
On the rare occasion that a pirated DVD winds up in my house, the smell is very distinctive pretty quickly.
Mainly because it spins once as fast as it can be ripped and then stinks of burned plastic when it comes out of the microwave.
That dog would have no problem finding my house.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Yes, because clearly if the police didn't train them for this, they'd be out training dogs for the handicapped. Society obviously works this way. As a species we're incapable of doing two things at once. Troll.
Just keep the dog away from my "backups".
Hi,
Has probably something to do with detecting watermarks.... At least they're fond to set new "watermarks" everywhere.
Yours, Martin
Does anyone have information on how the dog distinguishes between the CDs physically? I would assume that there is some chemical difference in the materials that the CDs are composed of. Does anyone have a link or info on this?
that hop into bed with the RIAA and MPAA, but i dont see china or other countries allowing this anytime soon.
we're also assuming there is readable evidence on the disks which is not, say, encrypted by GPG.
i thought we all used torrents these days anyway?
Good people go to bed earlier.
If they train a dog to sniff out Bittorrent packets, I'll be truly impressed.
Some of the movies made recently reek so bad I would worry about them permanently damaging the poor dogs nose.
If everyone stops buying and producing pirated DVDs, the dogs will no longer be useful and MPA will kill them to save on dog food.
The dogs don't smell the bits on the discs and determine if they spell out "Pirate!" or "Legit.". The dogs smell out optical discs and thats it. Then they take the dogs and go to a shipment/warehouse/whatever that isn't supposed to have any discs in it, and let the dog loose. If they find discs, chances are the discs are illegal in some way. And it turns out that people who smuggle pirated copies don't have them clearly marked on their manifest.
So yeah, the dogs find discs. Officials check to see if there are supposed to be discs here. If not, they probably just sniffed out illegal discs. You know, because if they were legal discs, you'd just put them on the manifest.
Every time I hear of copyright infringement being called theft or piracy it just bugs me. If you think it is, you're wrong and the law backs up the "slashdot accepted definition" perfectly. The piracy that is most targetted are illegal copies FOR SALE. These are the same illegal copies that the DVD CSS does not prevent. These are the same illegal copies that never needed the DMCA.
This story illustrates precisely what piracy is when it comes to copyrighted media.
25,000 copies of BOLT.
7,500 copies of Lady and the Tramp
2,500 copies of Reservoir Dogs
I guess it's time to pack discs in coffee grounds.
And for the pirates....to buy shitloads of blanks and place them all over to throw the sniffing dogs off their trail.
I think the MPA is just barking up the wrong tree here
No, the dog cannot smell the difference between copyright infringement, and regular baked CDs. (Often mistaken with piracy, despite the lack of taking ships with the use of force and the lack of raping.) This looks like they just made a premise to allow them police to search any house which happens to have written to rw cds/dvds, however, the bbc story implies that these dogs are for searching for more mass-production of cd/dvd writing.
Success! We've trained this dog to sniff out bombs and counterfeit DVDs. Unfortunatly, all he can do now is detect fake copies of Uwe Boll films...
Are Irish Labrador good seeing eye dogs?
So breeds aren't very good at the job
The reason the dogs can tell the difference is because pressed and burnt dvd's aren't made the same. Pressed uses less layers and different materials. Burnable uses inks that is what probably gives them away as "pirated."
:P
That and being a pirate/biker myself (pirate by blood, my great grandfather was a Spanish pirate in Campeche!) we stink. So apparently we need to improve our hygiene! BTW have you seen Anakata lately? Now do you believe me about hygiene...
My abilities are only limited by my imagination
All you need is a black Sharpie marker and it throws the dogs off.
...aren't these the guys we _want_ the MPAA/RIAA to go after? These are the commercial infringers who are operating outside of the law for profit. I'll be happy to argue with you guys (i.e. - on your side) all day about personal use not being an infringing act, but this - imho - is exactly what the copyright laws are written for.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Ey, so why are you wasting time on Slashdot when you could be helping the blind or something equally useful?
Also, I hope you're posting from a library computer or something because if you bought your own instead of buying one for a school or something then you're going to hell!
They're just local cache for TPB!
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
The story doesn't say the dogs can tell the difference between a legit DVD and an illegal copy. I'd guess the dogs are trained to find DVDs, period. If said DVDs are in crates stacked in some warehouse where they shouldn't be, then the dog has found some pirated DVDs.
But really, what legitimate reason do you guys have for disliking this - other than a general hatred of the MPA? Unlike many/most of the tactics used by that organization and its spawn, this seems reasonable. But so far in this discussion I've seen a lot of silliness and/or venom being contributed, but very little intelligent thought.
#DeleteChrome
I just opened a spool of CD-R's, DVD-Rs, and compared them to Pressed DVD/CD's. The burned disks are QUITE STRONG in oder and its EASY to tell the difference even between CD-R and DVD-R at least with the disks I'm smelling. While they may have trained the dogs to smell for all of it, the dogs nose is WAY more sensitive than mine and I can easily distinguish after smelling a few.
Dogs would have ZERO problem telling them apart. It should be fairly trivial to give dogs a sampling of various burned media and then have them sniff them out.
I'm surprised people even think this is even far fetched. Sound pretty straight forward to me. But, then again i'm practical and the first thing I tried was smelling a bunch of media...
That's funny, because my dog's trained to sniff out bullshit. She's getting really yappy right about now, too.
The last thing I'd want in my possession is 35,000 DVDs of data would appear to be encrypted to my captors, and being completely unable to prove otherwise.
Well, the title says "Anti-Piracy Dog" so it must have a means of smelling the contents of the disk
That's not the only thing misleading about the title - 35,000 is not exactly a "huge" number of discs.
According to Amazon, a 10-pack of slim-line discs measures 3x6x5 inches. That's 90sqin, or 9sqin per disk. Multiply by 35,000, and you get 315,000sqin. Sounds like a lot, but that's only 180 square feet. The entire stash would sit neatly on two pallets (stacked 6.5' high) or in 1/15 of a standard shipping container.
The same number of disks stored on 100-pack spindles would fit in a 4'x4'x3' stack, or slightly more than the cargo area of a Yaris. So, kudos to the dog for finding such a small target but deduct points for the overly-enthusiastic headline.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
That sounds like a name of a mascot/fake_superhero the MPAA uses to explain copyright to children.
Jimmy: "Have you seen the new OMG Ponies movie?"
Jane: "No. Hey, let's download it!"
Jimmy: "Yeah!"
[Whooshing noise]
Jimmy and Jane in unison: "Anti-Piracy Dog!"
Anti-Piracy Dog: "Hi kids. You were about to download a movie. Every time you do that, a pirate throws a puppy into a wood-chipper."
Jimmy: "Is it the cute kind of puppy?"
Jane (nearly in tears): "That's the only kind of puppy there is! Oh no! I don't want cute puppies to die! What are we going to do?"
Jimmy (gravely): "We'll have to buy our movies, and only from authorized resellers."
Anti-Piracy Dog: "That's right, kids. So remember, don't pirate those movies."
Jane and Jimmy in unison, overflowing with cheer: "Thanks, Anti-Piracy Dog!"
Anti-Piracy Dog: "Up, up, and away!"
[Whooshing noise]
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
next to my vast DVD collection.
It may be a waste of money... but you gotta admit some of those cars are pretty amazing
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
I don't know what's funnier, your comment or the +4 Informative.
Only on slashdot.
Since when does idiocy get modded interesting?
They dogs are not sniffing out DVD-R discs, they are sniffing out Pirated DVD's... mass produced in nearly the same way as legit DVD's, with the intent of being sold to large numbers of end consumers, either as a cheaper alternative, or because the real thing is not available in that region yet, often because they are new theater releases.
So you can put away the tin foil, your "Pirated", and then burnt to DVD-R copy of The Hannah Montana Movie is safe from the dogs.
just great, instead of training dogs to help guide handicapped people, they use them for useless stuff like this.
Way to go, humanity!
Tell me why the geek thinks that no one but a geek can multi-task.
Hasn't the skill.
Hasn't the resources.
Service animals have been performing jobs like these for ten thousand years.
The nomad tracking game. The canary in the mine.
What has changed is our appreciation of the animal's senses.
His intelligence.
But the truth, of course, is that the geek only trots out this argument when the nose points towards him.
The nose knows.
FIX YOUR FUCKIN' CODE
I can't get Slashdot to display pages consistently in a single session.
It's definitely a downer.
The geekiest - most FOSS and standards-obsessed site on the web - can't do plain text against a colored background and get it right.
Hmmm. I wonder what imaginary property smells like... ;-)
Success! We've trained this dog to sniff out bombs and counterfeit DVDs. Unfortunatly, all he can do now is detect fake copies of Uwe Boll films...
Uwe Boll films are all bombs, so I don't see where the contradiction lies...
Comment of the year
in related news,
a blind person was killed Tuesday night with two bullet wounds on his head. Watts Witham, 32, was found dead near a suspected pirated CD factory. His guide dog, Serpico, apparently was guiding him for an evening stroll when it sniffed the pirated CD chemicals emanating out of the factory. Unbeknownst to Mr. Witham, Serpico followed the scent and as the pirates found out of Mr. Witham's presence, they murdered him and dumped his body nearby.
This was the second incident after an Anonymous Coward suggested on an internet forum that "we can do both" train dogs as sniffing agents and guide dogs.
Pirating is a bit of an issue in Malaysia. A couple of years ago I took a bus from my wife's home city of Ipoh to the airport in Kuala Lumpur. The bus had a DVD player and they had The War of the Worlds playing. The problem was that the audio track was in Russian and the English subtitles appeared to have been imperfectly translated from the imperfectly translated Audio.
I was certain that we had a problem there when I watched Tom Cruise running from the aliens yelling my elephant has gone to Europe!
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It's only a false dilemma if training dogs takes zero resources. The resources to train this DVD-sniffing dog *could* have been used to train this dog to do something benificial.
Property is theft.
Trust me, seeing the movie that way was a improvement over the original.
Actually I had a buddy that was a county mountie and worked with the K9 unit. He said dealers would spread a little strong coke/crank mix around crappy loads they didn't give much of a care about. They would give those loads to some dumb junkie that didn't know jack and when the K9 unit smelled around the load the coke/crank mix would burn out the dogs nose. Then the next load that came through had a better chance of making it as the dog's nose was basically anesthetized from the coke/crank mix.
That is why he said most of the local K9 dogs ended up only working for a year or two before they ended up a cop's pet. They would get done that way several times and their noses would just keep getting less accurate until they weren't any better at smelling the dope than you or I. When they'd suspect the dog was suffering "burn out" they would give him a few tests to see how well he hit and if he failed some cop got a new pet. But considering the price to train these dogs I bet that isn't very good on the police budget, which is of course why the MPA is breaking out the checkbook. Because I can't see these Asian police forces giving enough of a crap over bootlegs of "The Dark Knight" to spend the cash needed to train and replace the dogs.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The sad thing is originals (esp of Japanese anime) in Malaysia often have crappy translations too and it's hard to tell. Even worse, in a multi DVD set, the first DVD could be OK, but really bad in the second DVD (e.g. Britannia in the first DVD and Bu-Li-Ta-Ni-Ya in the second).
;).
Another annoying thing is the originals often have ads you can't skip past on an ordinary DVD player. You seldom get that sort of BS with the pirate versions.
Anyway, despite what the _summary_ says I doubt the dogs can normally tell the difference between pirate and original DVDs.
The originals and "unauthorized" editions could even come from the same factory for all you know.
The dogs are just used to find where the huge stashes of DVDs are. If you have a lot of DVDs stored somewhere with no legit paper trail or good explanation then it gets rather suspicious
But does it actually displace dogs trained for the blind? Is there a shortage of appropriate dogs or trainers that would stop both kinds of dogs being trained, if the money was available? Because otherwise, it is not displacing dogs for the blind any more than any other kind of spending would. In fact, there might be economies of scale in dog training establishments.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.