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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...
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?
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
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.
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
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).
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
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?
Credit card numbers are a bad example as they're a piece of information which is generally transferred securely between two parties who have motive for them to remain private. If credit card numbers were a product which was distributed to many people even one of whom fails to keep them private you would be able to access them on node B.
Furthermore, if node B has internet access and it's user be sufficiently lacking in morals and know where to look, it's entirely possible that credit card numbers could be found from there ( as far as I understand, buyable in large batches ) and it would currently not be possible for the network to recognise and stop the movement of these bits.
No, this won't detect anything any faster than before. As has been stated above, the metadata will just be removed (probably automatically) as part of the ripping process. Transcoding would destroy it entirely, so it would have only worked on bit for bit rips of the original stream anyway.
It's simply another astoundingly stupid and completely ineffective idea for the media companies to waste their money on.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
Why bother? Why not just strip out everything but the actual video, and remux it into a different container like mp4/mkv/...?
That's what everyone has available now, isn't it?
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.
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