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.

Comments

This would be cool

[Skuld-Chan]

If the latest "Hollywood Movies" were worth watching...

Re:This would be cool

[thegarbz]

Yeah there's nothing worth watching. Certainly not something like Guardians of the Galaxy 2 which 90% of audiences really like and critics well and truly stand behind which has already made over $700million at the box office. Certainly not beauty and the beast which is similarly acclaimed and has made $1.2bn at the box office.

I mean sure only a majority of people enjoyed Alien Covenant, the The Fate of the Furious seems to cater to fan service. But who would see those? Surely no one. I mean it's not like the latter brought in $1.16bn at the box office. There's nothing good out there, nothing original. No horror movie that challenges tropes like the critically acclaimed Get Out, not the hilarious and well written light hearted Lego Batman movie, and definitely not the historical comedy Their Finest which has a comical piss take on the propaganda during the war.

Given that something either critically acclaimed, and well watched by many people, has come out in pretty much every genre available this year alone, maybe the reason you don't think anything is "worth watching" is because you're a bore who doesn't like movies. In the meantime Hollywood is doing just fine entertaining billions of people around the world, regardless of your assertion.

Re:This would be cool

[shaitand]

"critically acclaimed, and well watched by many people"

If this is the low bar you set then you probably like a lot of movies. The Fate of the Furious? The Fast and the Furious part 4 zillion is what you list as original? The first one sucked let alone the sequels.

Guardians of the Galaxy and the other comic book movies are pretty much the only good content being produced right now and that is because of good writing in the base material combined with one thing hollywood does well which is effects. Hollywood spent a generation trying to get rid of big stars and they mostly succeeded. The few names you'll pick out if you don't pay attention to all their names are mostly talent less and replaceable.

Good luck with that

[dlleigh]

Especially since filing patents publicly telegraphs your defensive strategy to the people who want to subvert it.

Re:Good luck with that

[thegarbz]

No this is a good thing. By patenting those he'll ensure that other services don't introduce similar garbage.

LOL

[sexconker]

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.

Re:LOL

[Jamu]

Not necessarily. This only works if the watermarks are completely different. You might still leave watermarks that indicate groups of customers. So if the pair are unique within a particular group, for example, they would be identifiable. If not, you've still narrowed the number of suspects. Change the groups in future movies and you might be able to identify the customers eventually.

Re:LOL

[ezdiy]

Traitor tracing could be made legally binding. Considering the ridiculous lengths copyright monopolies go into, this could work pretty well.

then all a pirate needs is a couple of accounts to compare the streams and identify the watermark.

Heavy duty traitor tracing systems are far more sophisticated than that. Watermarks are low frequency and spread spectrum (both resolution and temporal). Meaning each receiver gets their own, dedicated encoded stream. The tracing system will simply identify *all* the accounts used to combine the signal. In layman terms, its like mixing signals of different frequency - you can separate those out again if you know what to look for, though in practice fancy number/coding theory methods are used for reasons below.

If you attempt to extract common component, from a small number of signals, you *still* can identify the sources from the supposedly "common" signal you get, because what you get actually isn't a baseline, you'll still include all the unique marks of all the accounts they had in common. This is possible because despite the low bandwidth, the steganographic bandwidth as a whole is fairly high (millions of bits per minute), and you need to interpose just few to get a match.

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Presumably most people still assume that anything they can't see in a video is invisible to everyone else as well. Real video watermarking today is more like security pens: you can barely see what they write normally, but under a UV light it becomes clear as day, and getting rid of all traces is surprisingly difficult.

Since most people don't have the mathematical equivalent of a UV light, they'd unaware that the watermark is even there, but tracing a leak would be pretty easy if the originator found a copy on something like a P2P network unless the quality of the signal was compromised so much that the video itself had become almost useless anyway.

Re:LOL

[ezdiy]

Let me repeat some grade school set theory:
The true signal is made of 2 4 6 components. Signal A is 1 2 3 4 6 and signal B is 2 3 4 5 6. The common "pirate" set you get by "substracting" is 2 3 4 6. The problem is, 3 now identifies you as a set union. This scheme is run on *hundreds of millions of bits*, and can easily identify unique copies and arbitrary combinations of copies to very high degree. Not only the result remains watermarked, but you can determine the precise set intersections.

Boycott this

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

History repeats itself

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Not the big challenge

[Kjella]

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.

Reasons why this will never fly:

[Rick Schumann]

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.

Re:Reasons why this will never fly:

[Registered Coward v2]

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.

That's the real killer - who wants to pay $50 for a movie; even if yo have a nice theatre setup? Sure, some people may but I doubt it will be enough to be profitable. Merely making the movie available at the same time doesn't replicate the theater experience.And before commenters get all snarky about people talking, texting, etc. in theaters do you think it will better at home?

File all the patents you want, buddy, it'll get you nowhere.

Yup.

Re:Reasons why this will never fly:

[Rick Schumann]

These patent submissions make it seem like they're trying to count the number of viewers in the room, so they can charge "admission" for them.

Yep. And if they had their way and had the technology to do so, after some time had passed they'd wipe your memory of having seen a movie at all, so you'd have to pay to see it again and again and again. And they wonder why piracy is such a Thing like it is. They want to bleed everyone dry for goddamned entertainment, preferably screwing the actual content creators in the process. Yeah, this guy who wants to do this? He can go eff himself. All his 'patents' are going to end up about as useful and valuable as the DivX 'rental' system (look that one up).

Wow gall of some people.

[coolmoe2]

"Napster co-founder Sean Parker"

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".

Re: Sounds familiar...

[thundercattt]

Latest Blu-ray ripper defeats Cinavia

Sounds like a pain in the ass for non-pirates

[Cajun Hell]

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.

Interesting

[organgtool]

I've never heard of Screening Room. What is it, some kind of Kodi add-on?