Slashdot Mirror
Warner Bros. Accused of Pirating Anti-Pirating Tech
psycho12345 writes "German firm Medien Patent Verwaltung claims that in 2003, it revealed a new kind of anti-piracy technology to Warner Bros. that marks films with specific codes so pirated copies can be traced back to their theaters of origin. But like a great, hilariously ironic DRM Ouroborus, the company claims that Warner began using the system throughout Europe in 2004 but hasn't actually paid a dime for it."
not as I do.
http://ayakofansubs.info/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/1267146748914.jpg :)
They are all pirates. Evolutionis abount copying and improving. It is wrong to try to stop evolution.
I'm not sure this is anything new. Map makers include fake streets. I believe a similar technique - making seemingly identical but subtly different documents - has been used in counter-spying to find the source of leaks.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Really, I hope this turns into one of those messy public court snafu's that really grab public attention and cause a real raucus.
This can only benefit from all the publicity it can generate.
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
That the company couldn't get the patent information right in its lawsuit or press release
What exactly are they 'pirating'? I see no mention that they are using any copyrighted material without permission. All I see is that they are supposedly using PATENTED technology (software). In Europe. Isn't the slashdot rallying cry 'you can't patent software in Europe and anywhere that lets you patent software is retarded'? So what is the story?
From the sounds of it this isn't copyright abuse at all. The German company has a patent on some DRM technology in Europe. I suspect they didn't file the patent with the US patent office so Warner Bros. did the only thing a rational corporation would do and develop their own DRM using the technology on the cheap. Although I would like to see Warner Bros. get ruined for other things they have done. I kinda have to side with them because of my extreme dislike of software patents and the sensationalism the article is trying to work with.
Development of a anti-pirating, anti-pirating technology, so the watcher's can watch the watcher's.
anti-anti-piracy-piracy solutions.
There was an old woman who swallowed a fly...
I wouldn't pay a dime for it also.
take ur meds d00d
Dear Warner Brothers Your computer was scanned to contain illegal copyrighted material. Please pay an immediate fine of 2,000,000$ or legal action to the fullest extent of the law shall be engaged against you.
YES, this IS ironic. Look it up.
I remember reading years ago that governments and business would create versions of a document for distribution that had minor differences. It would make it easier to identify the source of the document when there was a leak. In my less than humble opinion they re purposed that idea to do the same thing electronically.
1. Wouldn't it have been easier to mark up a random frame somewhere in the movie with information about the distribution point and then track it that way?
2. Minor edits on the credits would also have been an option. It would take more time and effort, but, it would be part of the movie and no one would know the difference.
Panic now, beat the rush!
(Cue loud music, set chapter to be un-skippable)
Hey, WB:
You wouldn't snatch a purse.
You wouldn't steal a car.
So don't don't illedally download ... er, steal others intellectual property.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
http://techdirt.com/articles/20100521/1529489535.shtml
Has a couple of interesting tidbits.
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
"Medien Patent Verwaltung" translates to the English "Media Patent Administration". They don't even concatenate it to one word, as one would expect from normal German grammar - looks like it came straight out of translate.google.com.
Now I wonder what the German word for "patent troll" would be.... Hmmm, the German wikipedia article has various translations, I like "Patentparasit" best.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
"Medien Patent Verwaltung originally claimed that Warner was infringing on patent 7,187,633, called "Motion Picture and Anti-Piracy Coding," but as The Hollywood Reporter discovered, the patent going by that particular name actually bears a different number and is held by none other than Warner Bros. MPV's attorney in New York acknowledged the error and said that the suit will be refiled with the proper information."
Is this funny that MPV's attorney mixed up patent name, or pathetic that MVP's attorney can't keep the patent name straight?
Or both?
If it were me, I would have a backup lawyer. Just in case. Not an auspicious start.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Per-incident Harm at $1M each?
I bet they used it billions of times since 2004.
Move along... **** why did we have to do this?"
Watermarking should've never been patented! It is a very broad and well known technique!
TFP (The Fine Patent) doesn't address the effects of passing their coding through a lossy codec (or any codec for that matter). It appears to be a fairly simplistic way of marking prints with unique identifiers. No mention is made of file sharing as something they're trying to address.
Warner Brothers and other studios paid good money for those Congressmen, it's hardly fair that they should turn around and make laws that could be used *against* the studios. I may be old, but I remember a time when Congress used to respect its bribes.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It appears the answer is British Petroleum
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
The cue here is the fact that mankind slowly but surely approaches that deciding point in time where everyone owes everyone else, directly or indirectly, money, but is unable to pay. Just look at U.S. - trillions in debt, everything is just promised back in promises themselves. Everything is in a perpetual state of "I owe you" . That's hardly news, since, ironically, the very natural state of existence is owing eachother. The problem is converting this into real value, and demanding it back. That's the difference part.
Likewise, by virtue of unberable capitalism economy, where you need to maximize your profits at any cost to survive, it was only a matter of time before it came to this - the fight against piracy is so acute that even pirating anti-piracy IP becomes an option. The lesson to learn here is - if you can't live by your own rules, don't impose them on others.
Media producers aren't in love with the idea of copyrights, they're in love with money. They just promote the concept of copyright when it benefits them to gain more money. If somehow copyrights were getting in the way of them getting paid, you'd see their lobbyists 24-7 trying to do away with them.
Business is in business to make money. Think of a large business as an amoeba that assimilates money. It doesn't have a conscience, just a rudimentary intelligence that drives it to move towards the money and acquire it. That's why they do these moves that are seemingly at cross purposes, like backing copyright and then ignoring copyright. Money is the underlying motive. Whatever gets a business more cash is good, much in the same way an amoeba gets food. Ethics don't enter into it - that's reserved for higher life forms.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
See subject.
Yo we heard you don't like Pirates:
So we Pirated your Anti-Pirate so we can get those Pirates!
I'm well aware of this and it causes me a lot of grief. I have a cottage out in the boondocks. Whenever I have visitors I give them explicit directions to the place. I also tell them not to rely on electronic maps because of this practice. The visitors that heed my warnings have no trouble finding my cottage. The ones that download maps and instructions on their own or use GPS and map data invariably have big problems. The map makers put fictitious roads and show roads connecting when no connections exist.
Just as a followup to your point, The Straight Dope had a good article about the "copyright traps" that map makers use:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1058/do-maps-have-copyright-traps-to-permit-detection-of-unauthorized-copies
He made the point that in addition to the copyright traps, some of the errors are a result of maps including "paper streets," streets that were planned but never actually built. And some errors are just pranks. From the article:
"Of course, when it comes to map errors, you can't overlook the possibility of a little good-natured sabotage. Monmonier mentions two prank towns appearing in an official map of Michigan, the edge of which showed portions of the neighboring state of Ohio. Some diehard Wolverine fan in the mapmaking department decided that would be a good place to put the nonexistent towns of "goblu" (Go Blue, get it?) and "beatosu," referring to the University of Michigan's traditional rival Ohio State. If you had to spend all day staring at squiggly lines and benday dots, you'd need some way to let off steam, too."
This is absolutely shocking coming from an industry founded on violating IP laws in order to avoid paying licensing fees for patented technology.
-illumina+us "I put on my robe and wizard hat..."
WB gets a meeting with some company trying to sell them some technology. WB doesn't like the price. Somebody else offers them a better deal. They buy it.
Whiny first company says "OMG WE'RE NOT GETTING THE MONEY" and sues.
Then Slashdot pops in and hypocritically lambastes WB for...things Slashdot normally argues against in the first place.
You, the little people, have to do whatever we tell you to do. We are going to take your crops and your land and whatever else we feel like taking. You owe us everything. We're the landowners. We're the powerful, and the power we have was taken from you and we use it to take more power from you. Okay? That's how it works. You bottom, We Top. Got it?
There are NO rational arguments. You can spin them all day if you want. Point out our hypocrisies, call for legal action. We don't care. Hell, we encourage it! It keeps you idiots occupied, living under the illusion that this is some kind of level playing field. Ha ha! Yeah, go right on thinking that. -Believe that if you work hard enough that you too can be wealthy. Ha ha! Yeah, about that. . , truth is we only let a couple of people up that lottery ladder to keep you idiots mollified, and they're only the psychopaths and other favored sons who know how to play ball. And even they don't get into the inner circles. Now way! Obama and Gates and fucking Schwarzenegger are clowns in the court of the truly wealthy, (who, by the way were, the same families who really WERE stealing your crops a few hundred years ago). Those court jesters are there just to keep you retards happily taking the shit end of the stick. Ha ha! The serfs love their stupid little lotteries. What a bunch of inferior assholes you are! Ha ha!
Now where were we. . ?
Oh yeah. We can do whatever we want, steal, rape and pillage and you can do NOTHING. Got it?
Good. I'm glad we could cut through this bullshit. Have a rotten day.
-The Mgt.
http://thresq.hollywoodreporter.com/2010/05/warner-bros-sued-for-pirating-antipiracy-technology.html
The escapist magazine summarized it from the above link, and slashdot summarized it from their article. Why not just use the original summery.
There are many things that identify things about the camera you use. As previously mentioned the EXIF data, though that can be easily removed. If they have access to multiple images from the same camera they can figure out the Noise Signature and link it back to your camera. Smudges on the lens. Some of these are talked about in the link below.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Avoiding-Camera-Noise-Signatures/
Also the capture pattern and compression artifacts can give away the manufacturer and usually model of camera used to take the picture. Some of these marking survive re-compression, but mostly disappear with resizing down.
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
See, WB is a HUGE corporate empire; so they can do what they want. Piracy laws don't apply to them, they make the laws, they don't have to follow them - that's the American way.
In all seriousness though, it;s funny because when they had their campaign that was trying to equate downloading with theft and lost sales (everyone with half a brain who has looked at the situation knows that downloading does not correlate to lost sales; there's no 1-1 relationship, there's not even a 50-1 I am guessing......Yet, what they are actually doing comes a lot closer to being theft...
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=45+5F+E1+04+22+CA+29+C4+93+3F+95+05+2B+79+2A+B2
All "content" is based on common ideas and techniques. Be they musical, lyrical, dramatic, or technological ideas and techniques, they come from us, the general populace, and the previous authors, musicians etc.
They pure _hubris_ of the "content industry" is that _their_ incremental changes are "worth more" than the total body of work and understanding their particular content is based on.
So they are in the habit of, to apply their own terms to their own actions, "stealing" and "pirating" from the common man to produce their content.
But just as there is no anti-smoking advocate as loud as an ex smoker, and nobody is as fearful of being stolen from as a thief, the "content producers", knowing fully well that 99% of their content comes from someone else, demand some way to protect "their work" from being used by the next guy.
The ideal of DRM is, in its own right, the idea of building a wall around a public good. It should not surprise _anyone_ that the DRM happy thieves are willing to steal the DRM techniques as readily as they stole story ideas and plot points.
I cry a river for any company that produces DRM, or just DRM _ideas_, and has it "stolen". Just as I cried when my next door neighbor, who had motion sensor lights all over his house and had locked fences and a specially built lockable out-building, was busted by the feds for selling ill-gotten merchandise on ebay.
Its a huge "no duh, what did you honestly expect?"
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Excellent; I fully a $13,000 per-incident judgement for every time they used the software without consent of the maker, every time they identified a user with one of their videos online.
I'm not sure this is anything new. Map makers include fake streets.
And fake towns out in the middle of nowhere.
This is one of the reasons that you should NEVER trust your GPS navigation system to plot a route through potentially hazardous rural areas. A number of people have been killed by doing this. (James Kim among them.)
GPS nav systems will send you:
- to the fake town (where you expected to get gas),
- to the seasonal town that's only open in, say, the hunting season),
- to the old mining town that's been abandoned for decades,
- down roads that have been abandoned for years, are not maintained or patrolled in the winter (and snowed shut for months at a time), or only suitable for four wheel drive vehicles with an emergency winch or high-lift jack,
etc.
Latest example from my experience: Friend visiting us in Nevada wanted to visit the Bodie ghost town state park, which is at 8,379 feet in the Seirras. Rather than routing her on paved roads the nav system in her Prius computed a slightly shorter route, mostly on the 4WD, open-part-year, through-the-mountain-pass back road.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Well most corporations are there to make money at any cost. They have no morals, no conscience, and will lie, cheat, steal, spy on, screw workers, damage the environment, and anything else if we let them, or they feel they wont get caught. Warner probably thought they wouldn't get caught.
Soon all GPS units will come with a big red label: "Warning! Only to be used in conjunction with common sense!"
And nobody will read it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
They stole the amulet of theft prevention from Honest Bob's Really Truly Genuine Magic Shop?
I am an author and I am seeking to make money from my work. I am not, however, seeking to DRM said work because I know that my unique combination of the facts and ideas, combined with my original thought is essentially a public good. That is, kept private it serves nobody including myself, and in the long run (if its any good anyway) it should outlive me. How do I know that "most" of my novel is "stolen"? I am not an idiot, I have been to tvtropes, I have read homer (well in part, it was an assignment in a terribly boring class that killed my love of mythology), I have read the bible, in general I am aware of the impossibility of thought and expression in a vacuum of common ideas and symbolism. In short, I am an author.
I am more-so a programmer and technologist, since these are the fields where I regularly earn my pay. My tenure in these fields goes far beyond the windows and mac and linux stuff. I remember when mainframes were delivered chock full of software from IBM and along with the runtime images of the copyrighted software came source tapes because IBM knew that you would find bugs and need to make changes and so on.
So none of your reductio ad absurdum "extensions" to my reasoning are what they are.
I used the scare quotes for "thieves" not because I am a troll, but because I don't actually buy into the terms.
So you conflate my pure and utter distain for DRM into a "you must be against copyright" argument, and then you seek to defeat _that_ instead of my point. This is a classic and tiresome example of the straw man technique. [I am utterly against software patents, as software is clearly a matter for copyright not patents, since software is _written_ etc. but I am not against "the patent system" as a whole, since properly used by practicing entities and true inventors it has value.]
Copyright doesn't try to steal back the content you buy by letting the purchaser revoke your keys, or simply decide to not renew some certificate. Copyright does not prevent fair use. Copyright does not tie content to the means of delivery so that 50 years from now what is being made today will essentially become lost. Copyright doesn't let Amazon suck a public domain work off the Kindle under the specious claims of a glorified electronic typesetter. Copyright doesn't require that everybody be connected to some leash server on the internet in order to access "content".
These are all crimes of DRM.
Now go take a course in basic reasoning. Learn to read the arguments presented. Check out Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit. Generally grow up. Then re-read my post and respond to it instead of your own presumptions.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press