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Sean Parker Is Going To Great Lengths To Ensure 'Screening Room' Is Piracy Free, Patents Reveal (torrentfreak.com)
Napster co-founder Sean Parker has been working on his new service called Screening Room, which when becomes reality, could allow people to watch the latest Hollywood blockbusters in their living room as soon as they premiere at the box office. This week we get a glimpse at the kind of technologies Parker is using to ensure that the movies don't get distributed easily. From a report: Over the past several weeks, Screening Room Media, Inc. has submitted no less than eight patent applications related to its plans, all with some sort of anti-piracy angle. For example, a patent titled "Presenting Sonic Signals to Prevent Digital Content Misuse" describes a technology where acoustic signals are regularly sent to mobile devices, to confirm that the user is near the set-top box and is authorized to play the content. Similarly, the "Monitoring Nearby Mobile Computing Devices to Prevent Digital Content Misuse" patent, describes a system that detects the number of mobile devices near the client-side device, to make sure that too many people aren't tuning in. The general technology outlined in the patents also includes forensic watermarking and a "P2P polluter." The watermarking technology can be used to detect when pirated content spreads outside of the protected network onto the public Internet. "At this point, the member's movie accessing system will be shut off and quarantined. If the abuse or illicit activity is confirmed, the member and the household will be banned from the content distribution network," the patent reads. [...] Screening Room's system also comes with a wide range of other anti-piracy scans built in. Among other things, it regularly scans the Wi-Fi network to see which devices are connected, and Bluetooth is used to check what other devices are near.
If the latest "Hollywood Movies" were worth watching...
Especially since filing patents publicly telegraphs your defensive strategy to the people who want to subvert it.
Seems like Sean Parker needs to be forced to live in a glass house.
Someone will beat it even, if it's implemented. But really i wouldn't touch that tech with my bosses usb stick.
Watermarking? Really? That doesn't stop anyone but the dumbest of the dumb. And if you're supplying unique watermarks to each customer, then all a pirate needs is a couple of accounts to compare the streams and identify the watermark.
These are very invasive anti-piracy measures. Consumers need to push back and say that enough is enough. The only way to do that is boycott this and boycott the theaters. Hollywood and the MPAA are way out of control.
and less expensive than defense. This is true with military systems.
I was recently looking into the digital watermarking problem, and it's a fascinating bit of computer science. It's really tricky to sneak into a video with subtly adjusted pixels or audio information in such a way that it reveals the originator of the video. Many of them can be defeated just by doing a lossy compression. Getting something that survives that while not being distracting the viewer; ideally not even being visible is a fun little challenge to tackle.
This sounds an awful lot like Cinavia. From what I remember it's extremely difficult to defeat because of the way the watermark is hidden in the audio and it always survives being muxed or converted.
Sony: Bluray has advanced encryption that cant be cracked.
World: Here's the crack.
Sony: We've updated our encryption, all of your old bluray players are useless.
World: Here's the crack.
Denuvo: Use us, our games can't be cracked.
World: Took us a while, but Here's the crack.
Sean Parker: Look at this anti piracy tech.
World: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Cinemas are a protectionist business, if you don't give them a time limited exclusivity they refuse to show it at all. Since by far most movies can't survive without box office sales, they win. Don't expect that to change unless a collective Hollywood threatens to give them the finger.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Guys... Some people are going to watch your shit without paying for it, or they're NOT going to watch it at all. Calling it "piracy" is sophistry. REAL, ACTUAL piracy deprives someone of the possession or use of a thing. So-called "piracy" on the other hand, only deprives the "rights-owner" of income he/she/THEY could have realized, if he, she, or they'd managed to get people to pay for it. This is NOT the same thing. If it WERE, REALLY the same thing, they could also argue that anyone offering a competing thing to spend money on is ALSO, similarly depriving them of potential income.
Authors, book and magazine publishers, etc., would under this nonsense theory, be able to sue makers and sellers of movies, because people read a LOT more when going to the movies, or watching movies in a theater was either not an option, either due to poverty, or the fact that at that time, they simply didn't exist yet.
This is nothing but a shallow attempt to ensure they get PAID for what is usually minimal work, training, etc., without generally doing something that actually benefits people DIRECTLY, who aren't immediately connected with the end-product in question.
Getting a taste of his own medicine
1. Hollywood/MPAA will never go for it.
2. Theatre industry will fight it tooth and nail.
Assuming he manages to get past #1 and #2:
3. His 'anti-piracy' ideas are HIGHLY invasive of people's privacy.
3a. Who the bloody hell told him it's his business how many friends and family I have over to watch a goddamned movie!? Bugger off!
4. All you'd need to pirate a movie in your house is an HD movie camera. His 'watermarking' can be defeated like all other anti-piracy can be deafeated.
5. After you've pirated a copy with your HD movie camera, you use Tor to upload it or bittorrent it to others, which makes it pretty much untraceable to you.
6. #4 is just for the technological neophytes. The more talented pirates will break all his anti-piracy tech and make direct digital copies anyway, then #5 happens.
7. If he manages to get past all the above unscathed: the cost per movie view will likely be higher than a theatre because of #1 and #2; who the hell wants to pay that for a movie shot to be seen on a theatre-sized screen? Sounds like a ripoff.
File all the patents you want, buddy, it'll get you nowhere.
...but what is the benefit to me, the consumer, in this service? With all this effort put into monitoring devices and otherwise being a nanny-device, stopping by my local Alamo Drafthouse never looked better and less restrictive...
Are you fuckin kidding me you start a p2p music app more less based on pirated material and now you swung the complete opposite way on this project.
There's no nice way to put this but "Fuck you Sean".
Nah, nobody would DREAM of misusing THAT data or Technology... LoL!
Investors beware.
It costs $50 to get access to a movie, and banning the pirate's account doesn't magically delete the ripped video file from the internet. Even if it's never cracked (and even if the pirate doesn't have any stolen credit cards to use), $50 plus the hassle of setting up a burner account doesn't seem like all that much of a barrier.
So...wrap it in a small Faraday cage with one phone with their app on it. Got it.
See, people are delusional. They imagine that, because something was viewed, you'd absolutely paying for this thing above other priorities.
Which is wrong, lots of people watch content because the movie was available, either they torrented it, a friend has it, it's on netflix and someone has a sub.
They imagine that every individual who views that movie, would totally pay for their service if they couldn't get it elsewhere.
This is where their dreams are going to die. There are plenty of things I've watched because someone had the movie or it happens to be on netflix (Which more than just me uses) but if I had to PAY like 3$ to see the movie or something, a lot of these movies I'd never watch. Yes, it's actually not worth my 3$, I'd rather buy a loaf of bread.
Period.
I think the number of people who would rather go buy a few beers then pay for that movie are significantly higher than they can imagine. They're chasing money that was never going to be theirs in the first place and it still won't.
Think anyone wants to see a movie that bad?
Ive been told that it gets much better after "phantom menace" but i cant be bothered to find out.
Did anyone tell this guy that you can work around all his patents by leaving your phone at home?
So, you know this will definitely become a thing now.
Why pay these guys for a movie that has lots of ways to break, most of them totally unrelated to piracy attempts? Save yourself some hassle and just download a pirate copy. Not only will you be able to watch the whole movie (a feature unavailable to most paying customers), but get this: it's also FREE!!
Face it, Sean Parker is still a pirate. He is creating a service whose entire purpose is to further encourage piracy and educate the public that piracy is the only convenient and reasonable way to get to see movies. I hope MPAA's members falls for it. They're just the kind of people who are dumb enough to.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Pirate could also just defeat random subscribers' security, download [to subscriber device] whatever the subscribers have access to or can afford, transfer it to Pirate's computer, then publish without caring much about the watermarks (except perhaps to avoid creating too obvious a pattern which can be traced back to the Pirate).
1. Buy system.
2. Install system inside Faraday cage.
3. Profit.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
Most of these technologies sound terminally ominous to say the least.
Monitoring other devices? P2P pollution? Ultrasonic scans of the livingroom?
Even BEFORE we get into the guaranteed abuse and privacy rape, these already - for DRM alone - sound horribly twisted.
Well, in all fairness, it's quite likely that the guy would never be able to close deals with any studios if he didn't go overboard in showing how many measures against piracy he's doing NOW... xD
Why he's even trying, that's an entire other question.
Sean Parker building DRM. The irony, oh the irony.
All you need is to get enough leakers that combining copies of their videostreams with automated analysis subverts the watermarking they are looking for.
If it is too obvious it is easy to subvert. If it is too vague, it is easy to lose if 3 or more copies are merged via whatever anti-watermarking techniques you choose to use.
Glad to know that Sean Parker has flipped sides though! I always thought he was a little self-serving shit.
Make a smash brass mesh basket to drop over the mobile device sensor, suddenly no mobile devices in range.
I've never heard of Screening Room. What is it, some kind of Kodi add-on?
For one movie as soon as the pirated version hit the streets they zoomed into the theater that did the taping almost instantly. The distributor punched a hole in the film reel, at different locations for each set of reels. They stepped through the pirated video, and found the fame with a large white circle in the middle of the scene. It flashes by in 1/24th of a second, so nobody would notice it. But these people could identify the reel that leaked and track it to the theater that got the reel set.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This sounds like something where I will have to pay for a physical piece of hardware.
And it will spy on me continuously, whether I am using the pay-per-view or not?
And I'll probably have to pay for a monthly 'base' subscription?
Where do I sign up? I'll take three!
$ echo "Screening Room" | sed 's/n/w/g'
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
It's essentially flaw is the more it catches on. It's will be trivial to infect home users and eventually copy the stream only to re transmit it to the pirates later. The watermark essentially becomes worthless.
A hacker subscribes to the service and finds a flaw to copy the stream. He then uploads a stream grabber to a botnet of thousands of subscribers.
Alternatively someone can use stolen credit cards and subscribe for more than a year before simply using a video camera pointed to a screen and simply capturing audio with a microphone if they have to.
Blocking torrents? If it could have been done it already would have. All it takes is one site that lists known good magnetic links. One can even publish magnet lists as torrents themselves and simply sign them.
And only criminals will want to be your customers.
What the effing fsck?!?
will scare away the customers.
With high enough bandwidth and low enough number of copies, you can assign unique labels to every pair (identical in 2 specific copies, differing from all others) and even every triple (same for 3 specific copies). The scheme quickly grows infeasible (as number of k-combinations) but for screening copies, which are not too many in total and not easily obtainable from 4+ sources at once, it just might work.
CAPTCHA: arrests :)))
...Split the video cable, as well as the audio cable. Now hook them to a recording device... They can't really be that serious, this won't happen no matter how hard he tries to sell this to studios. Overall, the trend is to amp up the theater experience and the reduce the lag time to blueray/streaming release.
I don't read AC
This service will never see the inside of my house. Good luck to them with everyone else.
As intrusive as this sounds, constantly monitoring your network, Bluetooth etc it would be the perfect Trojan horse,