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Mpeg 7 To Include Per-Frame Content Identification
An anonymous reader writes "NEC has announced that its video content identification technology has been incorporated in the upcoming Mpeg 7 video standard, allowing for each video frame to have its own signature, meaning that even minute changes to the file such as adding subtitles, watermarks or dogtags, and of course cutting out adverts, will alter the overall signature of the video. According to NEC this will allow the owners of the video to automatically 'detect illegal copies' and 'prevent illegal upload of video content' without their consent. NEC also claims that its technology will do away with the current manual checking by members of the movie industry and ISPs to spot dodgy videos."
I think we should mandate legislatively that all video created should use this technology from now on. TV shows, documentaries, big hit movies, home movies, birthday parties, independent films, security cameras, everything. This way, we can clearly establish ownership of video content in all cases. Anyone who has digital video not maked per frame with ownership should be prosecuted immediately.
Furthermore, we should mandate that all hardware created in the future, including TVs and cable boxes, computers and everything capable of reading video - all of it should only be able to play video with the new "who owns this frame" technology - otherwise, people might play video that doesn't belong to them.
And we should include vetting of licensing terms into the hardware system; so that only with the correct license can the hardware play back the video in question.
And we should impose fully automated reporting systems in hardware that detects and reports tampering to the local authorities. Open up that computer case and put in a non-approved, black market video driver: the machine sends and email to law enforcement. Connect a pirate cable box to your TV, and then your TV immediately stops working, and broadcasts a wireless signal that only law enforcement can detect.
I think this technology for copyright enforcement should be placed into prosthetics that sits inside the eyeballs of everyone who wants permission to view video. These prosthetic devices could similarly verify the authenticity of videos frame by frame, check for an approved license, and send out signals to law enforcement if pirated video is detected. Approved prosthetics should be compulsory to obtaining permission to view all videos.
Finally, we should up the penalties for copyright infringement, to instant death - basically we should have our eyeball prosthetics simply explode when unverified video is detected. /s
Wouldn't that circumvent all this? There are other standards...
So it sounds like the easy way to upload "protected" content would be a quick transcode with a slightly different bitrate, thereby removing the per frame signature, causing it to be unrecognizable by the automated checker...
"The technology creates a signature that is compared against one from the original file to determine whether the video has been altered."
So how is this different from a CRC (or any other checksum you care to name)? Other than they claim it's blazingly fast?
Where the fuck did MPEG 7 come from? I refuse to accept that I, sitting here in front of my 4 screens with a laser mouse, grazing the internet for Roomba cat videos, have never heard of such a thing.
And next, MPEG is in the anti-piracy business now? What the fuck?
Hmmm only 2 expletives up there, good things come in threes. Fuck.
This does bupkiss to aid consumers.
This does very little to deter 'real' pirates who mockup fake merchandice.
This does very little to deter downloaders.
What it does do is try to provide a frame-by-frame signature of video, so if a video's been ripped, they know which copy it was.
Until, of course, those in part 2 and 3 above start detecting and scrubbing that data.
Meanwhile, you're going to charge your customers more for a product that's crippled, and therefore inferior to the pirated version.
It's honestly like you guys are determined to kill yourselves in the most expensive, controversial way possible. May I humbly recommend the Hutchins/Carradine route instead. It's a lot more pleasant and leaves a lot less mess.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
A new algorithm to crack, Math is Fun! (They don't realize that some of us do this as a passion, no I endorse fully supporting those companies that deserve it, but not everyone does this for piracy, its just a hella lotta fun to crack the reported "uncrackable".)
Just my take, I love math.
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
Not even a frickin' press release.
Is somebody just trying to generate a few cheap click-throughs? A few unique hits?
Considering the US feels that it's intellectual property is of immeasurable value, and since internet is becoming a huge force in the developing world, the ability to police online video will become very important. So whether the 3rd world countries use these kinds of chips or not (for now), this chip is exactly what the US & the Studios are looking for.
So yup - your content will be marked in the future - and showing it is pirated wont be so hard.
But the worse part will be the 'expiration' of such content. So in addition to content identification, this would allow expiration dates to be written into every frame. So even if you copy netflix's streaming video - it will be premarked to 'expire' within 1 hr.... so you will never be able to use the content.
This may sound impossible - but consider DVD content. There is so much legalese surrounding it - that numerous products have already been banned.
I'm afraid you're a bit late old chap.
Like is possible to stop a particular set of bits to move from network node A to network node B.
-Woof woof woof!
I RTFA, and I still wonder what, if anything, changes with this tech.
Short of some draconian player mandate, how could this possibly matter?
You can pry my NZB sourced mkv playing laptop from my cold dead hands.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
On the first sight, it looks like the stupidest idea ever. You can't use digital signatures to protect from the current considered dangers (piracy, re-use, ripping). People will happily remove all signatures and edit the media like the wish.
I think the real issue is what they are going to use MPEG 7 _with_. Expect heavy DRM and content access restrictions. _Then_ the signatures will play a vital role; you will not be able to play anything that was not signed.
Essentially what NEC wants to do is take Fair Use and dump it into the BP Oil Spill and set it on fire.
A parody of a sony movie or a review of the movie by a fan with a few seconds of coverage.
Well this frame has the signature of Sony it must be a violation of copyright. Lets all block it.
This is a clip of President ODAMA shot by CNN, protected by copyright law. Lets not let this blogger
show this image as part of his blog which thinks the view point expressed is fishy.
Finally, Hey lets block all bloggers as they use those magic alphabets of the English language !!!
If I share an MPEG 7 video, the copyright holder can see that it's their video. So I add one space to the Portuguese subtitles, the checksum changes and now they cannot easily see that it's their video. Was piracy stopped or aided?
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
What's the point of frame signature ? It's like saying puting MD5sums inside softwares will prevent sharing them.
1. If all the frames are modified, so does the signature, making identification technically really hard, if not impossible. Unless you construct a giant frame blacklist, in which case the video might just be streamed with random values, having no visible impact but altering the video signature continuously. ...) and the filtering become moot.
2. You'll also need a very good signature mechanism to prevent false positives. We talking about video frames here.
3. It might be possible to only check the signature of some frames only and creating P2P clients downloading only some parts and checking them, but this requires a way to identify the position of each frame, making it easily streamable in the process (See 1.). Also, this will only work for not modified streams.
4. On the fly checking will be far harder. You'll have to check every single packet for MPEG-7 frames containing signatures. If the streams are compressed in Zip files, you might need the entire file to uncompress and analyze the datas.
5. What prevents "rogue" players to read MPEG-7 files without signature data or invalid signature data ? Remember, you control nothing. Nor the player, nor the files streamed. Just put the signature of frames from videos legally available anywhere (Trailers, Creative Commons videos,
6. Like someone else said, re-encoding might ruin your protection.
So really, is there a point ? Can we just stop blowing money for this ?
Is that this changes absolutely nothing whatsoever.
Pirated videos? Invariably re-encoded into something smaller. Bam! Checksum completely obliterated!
Videos provided by the PR firm, placed on Youtube? Invariably re-encoded into something smaller. Bam! Checksum completely obliterated!
Videos ripped straight off the DVD or Blu-Ray disc, byte for byte, then redistributed? Data not changed! Bam! Checksum . . . completely intact!
So as I understand it, detecting an unauthorized video with MPEG 7 means you have to download it, determine what it's actually a video of if the checksum is utterly missing, and then, even if the checksum isn't missing, determine if it was authorized. This differs from the current approach, where you have to download it, determine what it's actually a video of no matter what, and then, despite the fact that it never had a checksum which would probably be gone now anyway, determine if it was authorized.
Can anyone out there describe a form of copyright infringement that this actually helps detect?
One that isn't invented for the sole purpose of being detected by this technique?
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
So you alter a small part of each frame and the signature changes. Or alter every single pixel like when you convert/compress to another format such as divx. So how will they track it? Use different human actors for each copy and then you have yourself a trackable system.
It's funny how they assume more signatures will change anything, the data stored inside a video format, no matter how restrictive and closed, will eventually be converted to a less restrictive format, stripped of all the unwanted stuff, this only adds yet another inceptive to do so, realtime packet inspection (how else would ISPs check signatures of video frames?) to determine what files are transmitted in realtime sounds nice on paper, until you factor in 8192 bit encryption and the fact you can make a video look like any other bit of random binary garbage data rather easily (I know, lets outlaw any files not whitelisted by the MPAA!!). The only thing this would effect (as usual) are people who obtain the video legally and something (minor disk write error, scratch on another medium etc) alters a single bit in the file, thus making the entire thing appear invalid to any player or system that would enforce this implementation.
For the technically curious, there's a high-level overview of the technology in an NEC media release here:
http://www.nec.com.au/News-Media/Media-Centre/Media-Releases/NEC-Develops-Video-Content-Identification-Technology-that-Detects-Illegal-Video-Copies-on-the-Internet-in-a-Matter-of-Seconds.html
I agree, a link to something like this or or this all of which came from a quick google and give some basic info on mpeg 7 and mention some content ID tech would be helpful as a real source of *something* on this new standard (that I just heard of today)! Damn it editors, do your jobs!
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
Does jack shit for piracy because everything usually goes through a new encoding pass before it's passed on to the downloaders anyway. At least with anime and most DVD/Blu-Ray rips this is nearly always the case.
MPEG-7 is not a video standard. MPEG-7 is a content description standard, developed starting in 2002, and without a phenomenal deployment. Having the ability to add metadata at the frame level would be a great boon to video editors, but from reading the article I have no clue what MPEG-7 has to do with their digital signature scheme, or why they think Yet Another Digital Signature Scheme will achieve what all of the previous Digital Signature Schemes have so obviously failed to.
The secret sauce proprietary algorithm in the (puff piece) TFA sounds like a file verification mechanism, in the vein of CRC, hash verification, and friends. Which is odd; because the problem of keeping digital data reasonably uncorrupt is a serious one for Big Storage type outfits, and archivists; but it hasn't been much of a concern for team content. What they've wanted is watermarks, "traitor tracing", and all that. Now, a good verification algorithm is a terrible watermark algorithm, and vice versa, period. Verification algorithms are supposed to freak out if so much as a single bit has been twiddled. Watermark algorithms are supposed to be robust against common forms of tampering and re-encoding.
So, what's the deal?
1. It could be that "PC Authority" has been handed an NEC press release, and can't even handle the challenge of regurgitating it properly. In which case, any speculation based on the details of TFA is pointless, if TFA is so much commercial word salad.
2. It could also be that PC Authority is reading the NEC release more or less correctly; but the release was just blitzed out by some PR flack, and they lack the context. This is, in fact, an integrity verification technology, designed to work quickly on video streams, that will be included in some future standard, as an obscure convenience to future editors and producers and archivists who will have to deal with 10,000 hours of MPEG7 video in OMG-4k-Super-def-3D, and need to know, fast, if any of it is getting munged. It would be a super boring, highly specific part of the spec, of basically no interest to the general public; but it could be more or less true as described.
3. And here's the sinister conspiracy theory: Where do file integrity verification and DRM come together? If, and only if, planned devices are "default deny, play signed content only". If your Blu-ray2 player simply refused to play anything that isn't a wholly unaltered copy of a commercial release, the otherwise absurd(as noted above) notion that an integrity check algorithm can serve as a piracy deterrent becomes true... It wouldn't stop cammer kiddies from playing altered copies on general purpose PCs, if those are still alive; but making "blessed only" a condition of the licencing agreement for future STB-type devices would basically kill the unsophisticated pirated disk market(barring hardware hacks on specific devices, or really stupid mistakes in media design).
I see a couple of scenarios:
1) They implement this crap on hardware to reject videos which does not add up, in which case it will just be seen as an addition to DRM, and will be silently ignored by anyone who's been able to google "ignore mpeg 7 checksums" for the last decade.
2) They use this crap to track pirated copies, in which case it will be completely ignored, or worked around by the ripping community.
3) They actually try to prosecute someone based on this crap, in which case the poor bastard can claim that the media file has degraded naturally since it's been passed through X steps of storage media, and apart from that he/she will be in the same boat as all other mortals are today.
Either way it's crap
Press release Let's see - 1000 hours of video = 3.6 million seconds = 108 million frames (30fps). Not 104 billion.
The signature is just 76 bytes. But a "home class PC" is 3GHz according a to a footnote. Perhaps the reporter could have read the original press release.
This stores the difference in luminance between subregions of frames. No idea why this needs to be encoded in the video itself. Seems that all a pirate needs to do is tweak things adequately so the signature changes. And I don't quite see how detecting changes is a feature. Surely you're trying to detect things remaining the same...
Can it detect me refusing to watch...and finding better things to do with my time than either listen to a bunch of anti-piracy propaganda, or risking 5 years in jail every time I circumvent it?
Keep freaking going. You wanna brainwash my kids? Well every anti-piracy disclaimer I have to sit through with my kids as they grow up, I'm going to explain that uncle Disney is so concerned with his cut that he's calling you a thief and making you wait 10 minutes and watch lies equating crimes to one another that are different. Every time they want to use a tune or video snippet in a school project I'm going to explain that we can't do that because it's not worth risking going to jail or selling our house to explain to a judge that we believed it was fair use or paying thousands of dollars in extortion money. Every time they hear about a film or tv show coming out overseas months before it does here in Australia, I'm going to point out that I'd love to buy them a copy but we can't break the law and the studio refuses to sell it to me until later and for much more money. Every time a DVD store rents us scratched DVDs I'm going to point out that no one is allowed to back up them up and that the reason that we can't have more is that the DVD store is too busy taking advantage of us to care about whether or not we can actually watch the DVDs (Seriously I just had 5 out of 10 childrens DVDs - weekly movies - scratched to hell and some with cracks on their spindle have major glitches, refuse to play etc and all the DVD store would do is buff the CDs and give the same broken DVDs back - of course they didn't play)
Keep going till you have no customers you greedy cheap exploitative pigs.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
If I'm recording / ripping, then I'm making my own original source. And I would imagine a re-encode to a codec like divx would strip the info. So what's the point?
The firm touts the efficiency of its algorithm, saying that a bog standard PC can search through 1,000 hours video in just one second. Quite what the firm's definition of a "home-class" PC would be interesting to know as we can't quite figure out how even a dual core 3GHz box can go through the 104 billion checks for 1,000 hours of video in a mere second.
1000 hours of video has close to 104 million frames; that would yield around 60 cycles per frame on a dual core (i.e. old) box.
The innumeracy of the author aside, what does this technology even do? Apparently altering the video, even minutely, will alter the "signature." Much like...CRC-32...very cutting-edge. We should name this startling development; I nominate the word "hash." Stupefied by the summary and the "article," I turned to the actual press release to find out what the technology really (purportedly) does.
1. Accurate detection of copied or altered video content Video signatures are extracted for each frame based on differences in the luminance between sets of sub-regions on a frame that are defined by a variety of locations, sizes, and shapes. Video signatures represent a unique fingerprint that can be individually detected frame by frame. This technology is capable of accurately detecting video content with that was created with such editing operations as analog capturing (*3), re-encoding (*4) and caption overlay (*5), which was conventionally very difficult to detect.
...
4. Compatibility with home PCs By designing a compact signature size of 76 bytes per frame, the storage memory required for the matching process is minimized. As a result, a home-class PC (*8) can match approximately 1,000 hours of video in 1 second.
It turns out that a home-class PC ("A single core CPU with 3GHz clock speed was used for testing purposes. Signatures were stored in the main memory.") is able to match 1000 hours that have already been hashed in a single second. No doubt it takes considerably longer to actually calculate the signatures. The power of the algorithm is that when the video is altered (in human-recognizable ways) the signature doesn't change much. Ah, things are starting to actually make sense. The truth is (surprise!) the opposite of the linked phrase in the summary.
This technology may allow automated, accurate matching of copyrighted video on youtube or other video sites...who cares? That is already being done, only less accurately. The law would have to change rather drastically for it to be mandated that everyone includes correct hashes in their MPEG-7 video. That is hardly necessary--I'm sure someone will spare the cycles to hash the videos and inform content owners. Like they do now...only better. Maybe next time we can all have fun panicking about the "FaceRecognition descriptor" (only the TOC/summary is free) instead. Really, the 76-byte signature is just an implementation of the metadata schema for MPEG-7. The algorithm should work for any format, however (otherwise it would be rather trivial to evade!).
The only interesting thing I have learned is that NEC's algorithm uses robust, compactly representable edge detection (maybe) to compare short clips of video with extremely high accuracy; yay, computer science. All of this escaped Lawrence Latif, author of TFA (such as it is), who didn't see fit to RTFA himself before he started blogging his paranoid fantasies as fact. I wonder just who the "anonymous reader" that submitted the summary was?
When I look around and count the number of my peers going to law school, observe the burgeoning size of the US government, talk to 'corporate communications executives', etc., I wonder if something sociological isn't going on. It's like there's just not enough productive work out there (or it's too difficult to figure out what productive work _is_) for everybody to be doing something useful, and bullshit like this is the result. I guess Ayn Rand ought to be rotating in her grave, or something.
I mean, who comes up with this crap? Why wasn't this idea ridiculed into oblivion? Somebody is actually paying good money for this?! There's a million things wrong with this idea, but at the least I guess you could say: "There are many, many ineffectual ways to deter copyright infringement. Altering your encoding format is probably near the top of that list." Bad ideas get tossed around all the time, but this one is a little disturbing.
Maybe I'm just missing something, but it seems that this is a technological idea that demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of technology. The fact that there have been so many of its ilk proposed lately is cause for concern:
I understand that there are CEOs and 'media executives' whom are out to make their shareholders (and themselves) money, and will try just about anything that stands a chance of forwarding that goal. I presume that this is ultimately where this kind of bad idea comes from. That's capitalism, and I'm O.K. with that. The thing is, given the salaries that such individuals are paid, they ought to be highly informed experts in their business... or at least not _more_ ignorant than the average individual.
It's one thing to be overpaid-- That's fine. I can live with that. It's another thing to be overpaid, under-qualified, non-productive, and prolific. That's a real problem.
i stopped buying things 10 years ago, do they think i will start buying now?
So, 76 bytes of identifying info is encoded into EVERY frame via some form of watermarking? Mpeg-7 is supposedly an XML / ID3 type of specification, but if the identifier can survive a digital to analogue conversion, it has to be a fairly strong form of stenography, maybe with some type of Hamming code for good measure. The MPAA lawyers might like this, but I'm not sure film directors would be thrilled with the idea of having new artifacts deliberately added to their movies after post production.
Much more informative article here.
At what point is a work a new derived work. If I were to alter every single frame with my own signature, does that mean it is a new work?
It's like dealing with fractals. How long is a coastline/how much is original work. You could say that since every single frame has changed it is new. Or you could say that since only 1 percent of each frame has changed it is original.
For the curious one, go here and start hacking MPEG-7...
Until the skies turn blue...
Until the air of freedom strikes us...
Do they even know who they are? I give MPEG-7 5-days at the most
"Whats in it for the customers?"
Does this mean that when I make a backup copy of a DVD to a web-based storage system (which should be perfectly legal imho), that my ISP will block me automatically?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Without going all conspiracy theory, what if this is used by film editors? This would allow them to automatically track changes to any frame in the video being edited. Allowing multiple people to work on the same filmstrip. It may have nothing to do with what gets released to the public.
[Intentionally left blank]
Not saying that Hollywood will not love this crap but the inventors are Japanese and a Japanese Mega Corp.
Putting the anti-piracy people aside (who annoy us all so much)
This seems like a pretty useful idea if I'm understanding it correctly... as a way to compare videos quickly, or even portions of videos - in other words, think customized search engine that works based on variable comparison of this "checksum" type data.
Imagine finding a small portion of video... not knowing what it is, and how to find the full length using word based search... instead you could search with this frame-based checksum type data.
In the hands of anti-piracy organizations all this means is that the sites they have influence over (i.e. youtube) are able to sift through thousands of hours of video quickly and determine it's similarity to certain copyrighted works.... it doesn't stop you from distributing video in whatever format via means that they do not control i.e. P2P... that's called copy protection, and that doesn't work.
Stick your DRM music, video, game, application bullshit where the sun doesn't shine. I've had enough of broken "protection" systems and restrictions on what I can do with what I own, and yes I do own that copy of the movie which I bought.
I'm off to read a book.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Despite their Orwellian wishful thinking, open standards like OGG will always be around. Even if vendor-specific hardware won't support it, I sure as hell will.
So, basically they listened to Hitler's rant in this video (~1:32) and decided to implement it in order to prevent future Hitler parodies from being created?
I think the word 'pirate' is so dramatic, it's similar to calling a 'jaywalker' a 'reckless person'. For gods sake people, it's just a movie or song, there are REAL crimes out there you know. I would care more if actors/performers got paid like everyone else... 20 million for 1 movie or song... oh poor them. Try making a 16 year old guilty when they work at Mc Donalds for $6 per hour...
Anyway, look the thing is, it won't take much for people to do things different.. Using Signatures or 'watermarks' only works if people send open data and or use some crippled goody goody media player. People who download movies properly -all the time don't bother with p2p, they use private servers, file dumping places, hacked servers, even rapidshare with encryped data with random filenames. Don't forget encryption and VPN's stuff ISP's from snooping...
In Australia no one bothered much with VPN until this idiot conroy in politics started pandering to the dieing christian naieve fools to censor the internet - LIVE content... yeah right, like trying to tell a crowd of people not to sware or prevent them. So my point is, once people could be 'bothered' they find new ways to do things...
In the end some new thing like twitter will pop up to make filesharing easier and encrypted and IP's routed around some russian server.. even the basic stuff such as private VPN's etc.
China might be our friend, they love selling their warez, I bet they can't wait for crippled MPEG7 NEC/SONY/PANASONIC etc boxes to show up and they just sell their 'generic media player' box that plays anything.. Remember the DVD Region thing lol.
Hmm, If the media houses just listened to people and sold full HD movies online for $2 and songs for 20c to a worldwide customerbase, most people would just pay for it and be done with it!
They think this will somehow stop or deter video piracy. They're so cute, thinking they're humans and all....
So every video using this will be bigger for no useful reason to the consumer, due to adding a repeating bunch of useless information.
Within hours of its release, someone will find a way to render the identifying attributes moot. Resampling the film to a slightly slower of higher frame rate. Shaving a few pixels off the top/bottom, or the sides, of the movie and re-stretching the remaining image to fill the space. Tweaking the color saturation (and the addition of a second watermark at 1% opacity). Adding a modulating white-noise pitch above 30kHz (inaudible to us, but it changes the audio signature as surely as having a foghorn blare for two hours to a computer). Or a combination of some of the above, which doesn't detract from our perception of the film but which changes its fingerprint for analysis purposes.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys...
Two reasons:
1) It is a special effects extravaganza. Even if you think the plot is completely retarded (and boy is it), the movie can be a lot of fun to watch because it is just visually impressive. I mean there are a lot of different reasons to enjoy a movie, and pure visuals can be one of them. In particular when seen in 3D with a good projector it almost looks like someone just cut a hole in the wall and you are looking in to another world. So you can enjoy it is mindless, but very pretty, fun. People like that.
2) It is a stupid, sappy, "Good guys win against incompetent evil," plot. People like that too. What's more, it pretends to be far more deep. So you get the benefit of being rather simple and silly, but seeming like it is complex. Many people eat that shit up.
allowing for each video frame to have its own signature,
...and they do this because they think Ogg video container has wayyyyyyy too huge overhead to be practically used for streaming. Glad that someone's telling those hobbyists how real pros design video containers!
Pedobear has multiple accounts with mod points. I'm pretty sure kdawson is his primary account - only a 4chan deity could mass-troll us for years, get away with it, and not raise suspicion.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Technically there has been very little DRM (if any?) that is impervious. Methinks that bogus salespeople and lawyers are duping a lot of companies to BELIEVE that what they are selling actually works. They KNOW that the content holders are looking for a magic bullet to solve their "perceived" piracy problems (and I say "perceived" because I'm sure that's what the CEO's would like to be the problem because then they don't have to consider lowering prices). It's the same with companies making money saying they can do ANYTHING about P2P traffic. They can't do anything that seriously makes an impact and they know it, but knowing that record labels and movie film giants are loath to reduce prices they bait them into buying their product for $$$. It's a matter of the greedy bastards scamming greedy bastards.
The fundamental problem with watermarking is that if someone wants to get rid of it, they can. If they are aware it is there and can target it, they can figure out a way to take it out. The only real way to fight against that is to make the watermark more resilient so that damaging it also damages the source. Problem is that means making said watermark more visible/audible. For example if an audio watermark is encoded in the LSB of the data, or in a specific frequency range, or using special time encodings, that can be easily blotted out with little to no audible difference. Add low level white noise, notch out those frequencies, or zero the samples in question. Watermark scrambled, impact is not very noticeable. Well you can make the watermark much higher level, cover a larger range, etc to make the removal noticeable, but then it'll make the presence noticeable too.
So they may well be able to design a watermark that survives normal transcoding. However that doesn't really gain them anything IMO. People will just make a watermark remover, and then you are back to having to check the content itself.
If DRM tools read these signatures properly, it should be possible to avoid some of the issues now where you can't copy your own videos, or play a DVD you made of your own band on a DVD player, etc.
I'm hopeful there is a signature type of "unsigned" or "Creative Commons" or other ways of saying, "Yes, darn it! Copy me!"
On the other hand, it's more likely that media players will be created that won't play anything that doesn't have a valid signature
I don't see this -- in the long run -- increasing the (cough) security of the media providers. Re-encoding an entire vid with new signatures, after pirating, bowdlerizing, excising, parodying, etc. will just be an annoying step in the process.
Here's the fun part: wait until a network finds they can't trim language, nudity, blood, etc. out of a movie they want to air in prime time, and half the TVs refuse to air it because it's been edited!
Design for Use, not Construction!
... even minute changes to the file such as adding subtitles, watermarks or dogtags, and of course cutting out adverts, will alter the overall signature of the video. According to NEC this will allow the owners of the video to automatically 'detect illegal copies' ...
Couldn't they have simply used HMAC-SHA-1?
According to NEC this will allow the owners of the video to automatically 'detect illegal copies' and 'prevent illegal upload of video content' without their consent.
If I bought it, that owner is me.
Reply to That ||
The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers...
I like the fact that they declare that this will be a defacto standard.
No one in his/her right mind will use it, and the Industries that do will have it defeated.
I guess the whole brouhaha employs a lot of techs so maybe this fight is good for the economy....
End of Line.
So...What happens when someone ZIPs/RARs/TARs the file and then uploads? How would this stop the file from begin distributed? Just a thought...
Looks like another overkill device. Have they ever heard of file checksums, etc??
Okay, so how about encryption? I imagine that no amount of so-called "resiliency" will survive a good symmetric-key cipher. All a ripping group would have to do is run their encode through GPG and set it to use AES-256, then publish the passphrase in the torrent detail page. Sure it wouldn't stop industry insiders from downloading and decrypting the file, but it would stop dead any attempts to analyze file hashes at the ISP level and automate takedowns. Or am I missing something?
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Every video player will verify all those signatures, and if the signature doesn't verify, no play. So pirates will be forced, forced I say, to only upload the original with signatures intact. And those will be easy to detect automatically.
Unless video players are modified. Or unless the pirates re-encode to another standard without the signatures.
"Unbreakable" DRM with some obvious holes a 5-year old could see and a blind man could drive a truck through, sideways? No way!
This is just the death rattle of mass media control of thought.
Seastead this.
Or you can simply use my wonderful open source library called pHash.
Vote with your wallet. Most DRM-protected content is mass-market pop culture shit you should despise anyway.
So how do I find a grocery store or other place of business open to the public that doesn't play "mass-market pop culture shit you should despise anyway" over its loudspeakers?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
So now I'll be able to tell which files are "official" with DRM, FBI warning, unskippable trailers, and other nonsense intact, and which are cleaned up and ready to watch. All thanks to this Content ID scheme!!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I have to admit. This was the best I'd seen in a while. I get a vivid mental picture of the invisible man bitch slapping a conference room table full of confused movie execs... Priceless.
This way, we can clearly establish ownership of video content in all cases.
I'll consider your proposal once you demonstrate that a computer can reliably analyze such ownership under fair use and other applicable exceptions to copyright, as well as bankruptcy sales of copyright ownership that occurred after a given copy was made. For example, who owns the copyright in the various "All Your Base" videos? Some say they're a criticism of the poor translation (hence fair use), and the original game developer Toaplan no longer exists (hence bankruptcy sales). In other words, good luck with that.
oh no-es .. NEC? really?
NEC is, or used to be anyway, synonymous with l33t gear *sniff*.
next up:
u.s. robotics unveils modem that sends all your surfing data to {insert ev1l cookie tracking company}.
Apparently NEC's standards are not as high as their own customers standards are.
Mpeg 7 cost too much. In a commercial video recorded in Mpeg 7 everybody has to pay. From the producer to the viewer, everybody is liable to Mpeg 7. Even if you convert it to something else.
I would imagine that when this comes out, people who are adverse to the protections/annoyances will just ensure they encode or download their videos with different codecs. One can only hope that a system like this would cause many more problems for broadcasters when a frame is dropped or corrupted and customers start missing legal content from their glitch induced "illegal stream".