What's to stop the intended recipient of the movie from intentionally and unabashedly claiming the bitcoins for themselves.
Custos is using Bitcoin to turn digital pirates against each other
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Re: Custos is using Bitcoin to turn digital pirates against each other
#12What's to stop the intended recipient of the movie from intentionally and unabashedly claiming the bitcoins for themselves.
1) It marks them as a "leaker"
2) If you keep claiming the bitcoins, you are going to stop getting videos sent to you. This could have professional implications.
Re: Custos is using Bitcoin to turn digital pirates against each other
#13This is neat, but I can't help but feel it's not going to work. It would work if you encounter a movie that you wanted to watch, decide you want the money instead, and you report to Custos. This is not how piracy works. Instead, a pirate knows the value of the good they have. They know it's worth more to their reputation in the community than $5-10 dollars. By setting a bounty on it, you'll just have others willing t…
The pirates aren't going to claim the bitcoin, it's the people who download the pirated files.
Re: Custos is using Bitcoin to turn digital pirates against each other
#14This is neat, but I can't help but feel it's not going to work. It would work if you encounter a movie that you wanted to watch, decide you want the money instead, and you report to Custos. This is not how piracy works. Instead, a pirate knows the value of the good they have. They know it's worth more to their reputation in the community than $5-10 dollars. By setting a bounty on it, you'll just have others willing t…
I think the idea is that the original pirate takes on more risk, since whoever they pass the copy around to may trigger the alarm by getting the $5-10. The real question is how easily can this private key be removed from the content?
Or embed your own bounty so the leaker knows if he is being betrayed.
Re: Custos is using Bitcoin to turn digital pirates against each other
#15I looked around their web page but I couldn't find the "freely available bounty hunter tool" they are talking about. Does it exist somewhere or is this not actually launched yet? They are saying that individuals in pirate circles are already hunting bounties with this tool...?
Re: Custos is using Bitcoin to turn digital pirates against each other
#16This is neat, but I can't help but feel it's not going to work. It would work if you encounter a movie that you wanted to watch, decide you want the money instead, and you report to Custos. This is not how piracy works. Instead, a pirate knows the value of the good they have. They know it's worth more to their reputation in the community than $5-10 dollars. By setting a bounty on it, you'll just have others willing t…
You don't "report" to CustOS directly, rather you simply move the money from one of the CustOS "bounty" private keys into one of your own. Effectively it does the same thing but I think psychologically it's pretty different. For one thing you know that the bitcoin transaction will be very hard to trace (you can't be betrayed by your IP address or something like that) and you don't really rat anybody, you're just movi…
If I were a pirate/leaker/sharer, I would be very tempted to just paste the key on some completely unrelated forum to lay down a false trail.
Re: Custos is using Bitcoin to turn digital pirates against each other
#17What's to stop the intended recipient of the movie from intentionally and unabashedly claiming the bitcoins for themselves.
1) It marks them as a "leaker" 2) If you keep claiming the bitcoins, you are going to stop getting videos sent to you. This could have professional implications.
You can claim the bounty without leaking the film, though as you point out, this could prevent you from being sent films in the future.
Re: Custos is using Bitcoin to turn digital pirates against each other
#18The big disadvantage with this scheme is that the publisher needs to pay the reward in advance for every copy they want to protect. That‘s why the rewards can‘t be big. (The publisher could of course keep the private keys and redeem unclaimed rewards themselves after some time, only risking currency fluctuations)
How many advance copies do they send out? Paying a thousand dollars on advance copies of a big blockbuster estimated to earn millions is nothing.
Re: Custos is using Bitcoin to turn digital pirates against each other
#19This is neat, but I can't help but feel it's not going to work. It would work if you encounter a movie that you wanted to watch, decide you want the money instead, and you report to Custos. This is not how piracy works. Instead, a pirate knows the value of the good they have. They know it's worth more to their reputation in the community than $5-10 dollars. By setting a bounty on it, you'll just have others willing t…
You don't "report" to CustOS directly, rather you simply move the money from one of the CustOS "bounty" private keys into one of your own. Effectively it does the same thing but I think psychologically it's pretty different. For one thing you know that the bitcoin transaction will be very hard to trace (you can't be betrayed by your IP address or something like that) and you don't really rat anybody, you're just movi…
One would hope that CustOS has learned the lesson from Dr. Strangelove [0] and will tell screener recipients that there is a countermeasure, and that they'll be held in breach of contract if that bitcoin account is touched. And for anyone who receives screeners, their financial incentive to keep receiving those screeners is far in excess of a single $5. A random pirate? Not so much.
Re: Custos is using Bitcoin to turn digital pirates against each other
#20I don't get it. Any 'damage' to the studio happens when the movie is publicly leaked, at that point just download the copy yourself and check for a watermark, telling you where the leak originated without ponying up $5-$10 (which is a paltry sum to begin with).