Mpeg 7 To Include Per-Frame Content Identification 273
Posted
by
timothy
from the you're-watching-us-and-vice-versa dept.
from the you're-watching-us-and-vice-versa dept.
An anonymous reader writes "NEC has announced that its video content identification technology has been incorporated in the upcoming Mpeg 7 video standard, allowing for each video frame to have its own signature, meaning that even minute changes to the file such as adding subtitles, watermarks or dogtags, and of course cutting out adverts, will alter the overall signature of the video. According to NEC this will allow the owners of the video to automatically 'detect illegal copies' and 'prevent illegal upload of video content' without their consent. NEC also claims that its technology will do away with the current manual checking by members of the movie industry and ISPs to spot dodgy videos."
Re-encoding? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wouldn't that circumvent all this? There are other standards...
Re:Re-encoding? (Score:3, Insightful)
Even the thought of re-encoding will result in the subject being terminated. Move along and continue consuming, citizen.
"You just KEEP missing the target!" (Score:5, Insightful)
This does bupkiss to aid consumers.
This does very little to deter 'real' pirates who mockup fake merchandice.
This does very little to deter downloaders.
What it does do is try to provide a frame-by-frame signature of video, so if a video's been ripped, they know which copy it was.
Until, of course, those in part 2 and 3 above start detecting and scrubbing that data.
Meanwhile, you're going to charge your customers more for a product that's crippled, and therefore inferior to the pirated version.
It's honestly like you guys are determined to kill yourselves in the most expensive, controversial way possible. May I humbly recommend the Hutchins/Carradine route instead. It's a lot more pleasant and leaves a lot less mess.
The opposite effect? (Score:3, Insightful)
Is there a point ? (Score:1, Insightful)
What's the point of frame signature ? It's like saying puting MD5sums inside softwares will prevent sharing them.
1. If all the frames are modified, so does the signature, making identification technically really hard, if not impossible. Unless you construct a giant frame blacklist, in which case the video might just be streamed with random values, having no visible impact but altering the video signature continuously. ...) and the filtering become moot.
2. You'll also need a very good signature mechanism to prevent false positives. We talking about video frames here.
3. It might be possible to only check the signature of some frames only and creating P2P clients downloading only some parts and checking them, but this requires a way to identify the position of each frame, making it easily streamable in the process (See 1.). Also, this will only work for not modified streams.
4. On the fly checking will be far harder. You'll have to check every single packet for MPEG-7 frames containing signatures. If the streams are compressed in Zip files, you might need the entire file to uncompress and analyze the datas.
5. What prevents "rogue" players to read MPEG-7 files without signature data or invalid signature data ? Remember, you control nothing. Nor the player, nor the files streamed. Just put the signature of frames from videos legally available anywhere (Trailers, Creative Commons videos,
6. Like someone else said, re-encoding might ruin your protection.
So really, is there a point ? Can we just stop blowing money for this ?
Re:modest proposal (Score:3, Insightful)
Finally, we should up the penalties for copyright infringement, to instant death - basically we should have our eyeball prosthetics simply explode when unverified video is detected.
Hollywood is already way ahead of you - they've already developed "Dreck Technology" incorporated into many modern films, which can result in eyeballs exploding without the need for any prosthetics.
Of course, they didn't do it deliberately...
The best part (Score:5, Insightful)
Is that this changes absolutely nothing whatsoever.
Pirated videos? Invariably re-encoded into something smaller. Bam! Checksum completely obliterated!
Videos provided by the PR firm, placed on Youtube? Invariably re-encoded into something smaller. Bam! Checksum completely obliterated!
Videos ripped straight off the DVD or Blu-Ray disc, byte for byte, then redistributed? Data not changed! Bam! Checksum . . . completely intact!
So as I understand it, detecting an unauthorized video with MPEG 7 means you have to download it, determine what it's actually a video of if the checksum is utterly missing, and then, even if the checksum isn't missing, determine if it was authorized. This differs from the current approach, where you have to download it, determine what it's actually a video of no matter what, and then, despite the fact that it never had a checksum which would probably be gone now anyway, determine if it was authorized.
Can anyone out there describe a form of copyright infringement that this actually helps detect?
One that isn't invented for the sole purpose of being detected by this technique?
Re:Re-encoding? (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, the people that are uploading cams and DVD rips to the Internet now are still going to be breaking copyright laws whatever happens, so it's not like the situation is going to change in practice, is it?
Keep going till you have no customers (Score:5, Insightful)
Can it detect me refusing to watch...and finding better things to do with my time than either listen to a bunch of anti-piracy propaganda, or risking 5 years in jail every time I circumvent it?
Keep freaking going. You wanna brainwash my kids? Well every anti-piracy disclaimer I have to sit through with my kids as they grow up, I'm going to explain that uncle Disney is so concerned with his cut that he's calling you a thief and making you wait 10 minutes and watch lies equating crimes to one another that are different. Every time they want to use a tune or video snippet in a school project I'm going to explain that we can't do that because it's not worth risking going to jail or selling our house to explain to a judge that we believed it was fair use or paying thousands of dollars in extortion money. Every time they hear about a film or tv show coming out overseas months before it does here in Australia, I'm going to point out that I'd love to buy them a copy but we can't break the law and the studio refuses to sell it to me until later and for much more money. Every time a DVD store rents us scratched DVDs I'm going to point out that no one is allowed to back up them up and that the reason that we can't have more is that the DVD store is too busy taking advantage of us to care about whether or not we can actually watch the DVDs (Seriously I just had 5 out of 10 childrens DVDs - weekly movies - scratched to hell and some with cracks on their spindle have major glitches, refuse to play etc and all the DVD store would do is buff the CDs and give the same broken DVDs back - of course they didn't play)
Keep going till you have no customers you greedy cheap exploitative pigs.
Re:"You just KEEP missing the target!" (Score:2, Insightful)
"In related news, the Chairman of Box Networks is being prosecuted for Copyright Infringement. The release of "Last Blockbuster" to P2P networks from team XYZ had the Digital Rights Information of the Chairman imprinted in every frame."
Would be awesome that the crackers found a way to alter the information in those frames (I realize that it would be encrypted, but a man can dream...).
Re:modest proposal (Score:3, Insightful)
Hollywood is already way ahead of you - they've already developed "Dreck Technology" incorporated into many modern films, which can result in eyeballs exploding without the need for any prosthetics.
Of course, they didn't do it deliberately...
And amazingly, it didn't result in box office losses - Avatar made the most money of any film in history. *shrug*
Re:Re-encoding? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm confused... or this is super sinister. (Score:3, Insightful)
The secret sauce actually fingerprints video frames in a way that is invariant against most common alterations
Finally, a post that actually informed me of something, with a decent link.
OTOH, the system seems too fragile to resist any simple attack directed towards it. So if this ever gets enough attention, several tools will be created to specifically destroy the blueprint.
Re:modest proposal (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't worry. That's actually a digital haircut.
Re:Re-encoding? (Score:4, Insightful)
I was more thinking in the line of privacy: if every frame can have a signature added, then every single copy can be "watermarked" and tracked to an individual.
Otoh, they talk about adding subtitles etc to "completely change the signature of the video". How is that different from the current situation? Thinking of "signature" as MD5 hash or something equivalent. Any change to the file will change it's hash. This part is nothing new.
Re: 'prevent illegal upload of video content' (Score:3, Insightful)
No, this won't detect anything any faster than before. As has been stated above, the metadata will just be removed (probably automatically) as part of the ripping process. Transcoding would destroy it entirely, so it would have only worked on bit for bit rips of the original stream anyway.
It's simply another astoundingly stupid and completely ineffective idea for the media companies to waste their money on.
Re:modest proposal (Score:5, Insightful)
Shut up. I watch kiddie porn, and I don't want to be compared to this pirating bastard.
Re:Funny ? Or just a view of the future ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why bother? Why not just strip out everything but the actual video, and remux it into a different container like mp4/mkv/...?
That's what everyone has available now, isn't it?
Re:modest proposal (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't miss the sarcasm. I just think it's time for consumers to start making some demands of our own.
Outlaw every single DRM measure! Outlaw copy protection, region encoding, viewing restrictions (like the annoying mandatory ads on DVDs).
All these things are just hurting the honest paying customer, while the pirates actually get the better product.
Also, think of the children! They can be easily influenced by scrupulous advertisers and shouldn't be forced to sit through any commercials at all (while we're at it, let's outlaw all commercials during day time programming).
Re:modest proposal (Score:5, Insightful)
Me thinks then that a case could be made against Bestbuy and any one else who makes such a claim in advertisements.