Startup Tries Watermarking Instead of DRM 344
Loosehead Prop writes "A U.K. startup called Streamburst has a novel idea: selling downloadable video with watermarks instead of DRM. The system works by adding a 5-second intro to each download that shows the name of the person who bought the movie along with something like a watermark: 'it's not technically a watermark in the usual sense of that term, but the encoding process does strip out a unique series of bits from the file. The missing information is a minuscule portion of the overall file that does not affect video quality, according to Bjarnason, but does allow the company to discover who purchased a particular file.' The goal is to 'make people accountable for their actions without artificially restricting those actions.'"
re-encode the movie (Score:3, Interesting)
Could the missing bits affect the movie and be detectable?
Compression? (Score:3, Interesting)
From TFA:
I'll assume the people working on Streamburst are clever; but I wonder how susceptible the ghost-stream is to translation and recompression: whether it's possible to corrupt the signature-stream while retaining watchable quality.
Still doesn't solve the real problems (Score:5, Interesting)
Not To Bad (Score:3, Interesting)
I have always thought that piracy should be solved through law enforcement, not technology. Much like traffic law enforcement.
DRM is the equivalent to putting a 70 mph speed cap on all cars. This watermarking is sort of like requiring cars to have a license plate.
If they can find a way to make this work I'd be overjoyed.
Re:What's the enforcement mechanism? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:They already do this in theaters (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Compression? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What's the enforcement mechanism? (Score:4, Interesting)
As to the theft vs. giving it away, well, there are some easy answers to this. Once a person is a "person of interest", then allow them to keep going, but track them closely. Most ppl will be found to give away the film. It is when it hits the net and is spread wildly, that the issues come in. I would guess that fewer than 1% of all film/music owners are at the core of thefts.
This is overall a win/win.
Re:What's the enforcement mechanism? (Score:2, Interesting)
Simple work around (Score:4, Interesting)
2-do a bit comparison
3-modify a copy to reflect a random profile of all removed info
this would make any compairson hard.
Re:re-encode the movie (Score:5, Interesting)
The only way I could successfully remove the watermark without making the image unusable was by diff'ing the original with the watermarked. But where are you going to get the original?
Re:What's the enforcement mechanism? (Score:3, Interesting)
Better yet, steal a credit card number, "buy" a copy, and some other guy gets blamed for it.
I had a similar idea (Score:5, Interesting)
To explain what my idea was I'll first give a short reminder of how jpeg works. Blocks of image data are transformed using something based on fourier transformations. The resulting coefficients are then rounded to different scales. For high frequency components a scale with larger steps can be used as errors in these components are not easilly noticed. There is a table of standard steps to be used for each combination of horisontal and vertical frequency. (I left out the part about how to handle colour components, which is not relevant for the following idea).
Making a minor change to one of the step sizes is not going to cause a major difference in the size of the compression or the quality. By picking some of the entries at random and reducing the step size you are going to increase the quality of random parts of the picture. Now what I want to do is to make a redundant encoding of a signature on the text from the watermark and use those bits to choose places to increase the quality. The signed text itself is included in the begining of the file.
First of all removing the signature would means you couldn't compute the step sizes, and thus you couldn't correctly decode the file. And if the file was reencoded, you might still be able to extract the watermark by comparing with the original uncompressed movie. You would just have to find enough of the places where quality was increased. (And enough is a lot less than all of them).
The signature used in the encoding should be performed using the buyer's private key. In addition to this, I would sign the entire encoded movie using the seller's private key to be able to detect if a file is corrupted (as a service for the users). The part about the user signing something could be replaced with just using a hash of the text, but that might weaken the proof of origin of a particular movie a bit.
Now all of this could be combined with features to prevent users from accidentially losing a copy to a cracker/pirate. Since this is not intended to prevent users from intentionally copying the file, it could be a lot better and less intrusive than DRM.
Re:Ohhhhh... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure if I agree or disagree with this, though. I do like it better than nasty DRM, but it seems... Underdone, and perhaps still a step in the wrong direction. I think the various **AAs should learn that the problem isn't piracy, but that piracy is the symptom of a larger underlying problem, that their business model is outdated and self-defeating (may I add draconian?), and their prices are unfair.
Re:Ohhhhh... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What's the enforcement mechanism? (Score:3, Interesting)
So what happens if you decide you no longer like the movie, and sell it to someone on ebay who then decides to upload it on a torrent site? Are you still responsible? What if you sell it for cash to some kid down the street? What if THEY sell it again and the third person then uploads it? Are you liable?
Re:re-encode the movie (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Excellent (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.eire.com/2005/04/15/irish-bank-launche
If it isn't widespread now, it certainly will become so.
Theft is a problem that humanism can't solve (Score:1, Interesting)
What makes you think that technological solutions can solve social problems. DRM didn't, and watermarking is an even weaker technology. The honest have no need for any solution, and the dishonest will always escape them. The solution is hard, not because they require an engineer to develop, but because they require changing the human heart. And humanism so far hasn't come up with a good way to do that.
Re:What's the enforcement mechanism? (Score:3, Interesting)
That's easy: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's easy: Obtain two or more copies and compare them. The watermarks MUST be different, so the bits that are different tell you where they are.
Assuming the watermarks are statistically similar to a fixed number of random bit-flips, two copies identify half of them, three identify 3/4ths, four identify 7/8ths, etc.
Of course with a few samples you might be able to crack the system. If the watermark is a set of redundant copies of something you can identify, from then on it only takes two (the second being to be sure they haven't changed the system or added another.)
Re:What's the enforcement mechanism? (Score:3, Interesting)
I considered (as I'm sure many did) this exact same digital watermarking idea a couple of years ago for movies, images and audio files. Thought it might make a decent idea for a startup. However, within a few hours of researching the topic, it became pretty clear that it wouldn't work without additional DRM. The watermark is destroyed the moment you re-encode the file into a different format format. The DRM was required to prevent the re-encoding, and let's face it, once you introduce DRM, the watermarking becomes a bit pointless.
Bjarnason and Co.'s argument seems to be that this is too much hassle. Since people have proven they are more than willing to spend the time ripping and compressing DVDs, or even sneaking into cinemas with video cameras, I don't think a little re-encoding is going to do much to prevent piracy. It only takes one person to create the non-watermarked version, and then this copy becomes the one which is distributed to thousands on P2P networks.
So unless this new company has found some incredible new way to create non-destructable watermarks, I can't see what they're offering.
Re:What's the enforcement mechanism? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:That's easy: (Score:1, Interesting)
If we talk about a 500mb movie instead, the pirate needs 27 legal copies before being able to isolate the watermark bits.
In other words, the entire social circle you might feel compelled to share a watermark-free version with would already have had to buy the piece of media concerned, and risked giving you a copy, before you could isolate and remove the watermark.
No, it doesn't stop commercial pirates, but there isn't really anything that will. It does prevent people from using reasonable means to remove the watermarking however.
Regarding a "system", a system in (any half-decent) watermarking is simply a method of identifying low-impact bits within the piece of media format, it's not a reversable system, the bits to modify are chosen psuedo-randomly with limits to ensure format integrity and a bias towards bits that have less audible/visible impact. Cracking the "system" doesn't achieve anything, because the key to the psuedo-random function is the original piece of encoded media.
There are a variety of proposed alternative attacks focused on simply making it statisticaly likely that all the ids have been ruined by adding noise all over the biased bits, and of course the various noise-removal approaches etc, but it is not the trivial exercise many people seem to think it is to remove this kind of mark.
Re:Ohhhhh... (Score:2, Interesting)
Passive hi-tech entertainment isn't the only thing we can do when wanting to have fun with little effort. There's always hobbies with low mental/phycial useage like; interaction with humans or pets, exercise (yoga, walking/jogging, sex/masturbation), various crafts (origami, woodcarving, whatnot), etc. It's... odd even as someone who is defined as a geek to see such a strong need for recorded entertainment.
Re:What's the enforcement mechanism? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Simple work around (Score:2, Interesting)
Naa, you could just use a private key with a public encryption/decryption algorithm.
In fact, if you're clever enough, I sure you could build a watermark system which has a public key to verify that the watermark exists and is "correct" but only a private key would allow to you locate the watermark...
Not sure though,
Ben