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.

Good luck with that

[dlleigh]

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

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!

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.

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".

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.

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

[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.