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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."
I'm assuming that the particular math used to encode the fingerprint in such a way that it doesn't die a horrible death the second it hits a lossy codec(which is pretty much assured before it hits the intertubes) or somebody get ahold of two distinct leaks and diffs them is probably substantially more novel than the basic idea of "add artificial differences to discover leaks".
Whether it is, or ought to be, patentable is not something I can really comment on; but I would strongly suspect that the actual method being employed is considerably different than historical examples in the same broad conceptual vein.
I believe a similar technique - making seemingly identical but subtly different documents - has been used in counter-spying to find the source of leaks.
Serial numbers are printed on currency & bonds, and appear on labels on most types of consumer electronics, automobiles, etc. This is the same basic concept. Uniquely identifying something isn't new or nefarious. I'm pretty sure all color printers 'hide' something in each print, and I wouldn't be surprised if digital cameras did too.
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?
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.
If it goes to court WB will probably have to open up their claims & records on piracy, counterfeiting, etc to examination and scrutiny. This could be a valuable crack in their "pandora's box" of exaggerated statistics.
"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.
The answer is that you put in some crappy little 1-block dead-end streets here and there.
There's sometimes entire towns that only exist on paper.
Someone even wrote a book about that.
You can't take the sky from me...