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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

#31

Post by Sleeep »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #16
simias wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Bitcoin key is only to identify the leaker, not the pirate. Each copy has a different key.

Re: Custos is using Bitcoin to turn digital pirates against each other

#32

Post by anilgulecha »

drewbuschhorn wrote: post #22

It's a great idea from a game theory perspective, but I think an adversarial neural network plugin built into vlc as a preencoding step would probably defeat it pretty quickly with minimal quality loss. You just can't effectively watermark data intended for human consumption, our tolerance for intentionally induced noise is too high.

That's not what this is. It's a simple snitch system, made easy due to the ease of using bitcoin (pseudo)anonymously.

Re: Custos is using Bitcoin to turn digital pirates against each other

#33

Post by e12e »

jakobegger wrote: post #5

The 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)

> redeem unclaimed rewards

I think that would be a pretty safe bet - there'd be no need for the bounty post dvd/bluray release of the movies - while for some blockbusters that's a long time - I'd warrant typically there are only a few screener leaks of each movie - once a copy is out, there's no need for anyone to risk being caught leaking a copy - and release groups tend to be very active in promoting that they were the first to release a film (at a certain quality, screeners being somewhat of a sweetspot between cam releases and waiting for dvd/bluray relases).

So I imagine sending out 10.000 copies, each with a 20 dollar bounty would effectively cost less than 100 dollars in bounty pay outs - with the remainder being at risk for currency inflation.

There'd be little incentive to leave the reminder bounties up after the film is released to DVDs or BluRay.

Re: Custos is using Bitcoin to turn digital pirates against each other

#34

Post by codezero »

Blahah wrote: post #24
badosu wrote: post #2

> Custos embeds imperceptible bitcoin private keys in the digital files, with different keys for different advance copies of a movie or ebook. (...) > At the same time, Custos makes a piece of free software that screens movie files for these private keys and markets the screener to content pirates. Pirates now have an incentive to check pirated movie files in case they contain a key. If a key is detected, the pirate…

Seems pretty self-defeating. I'd just strip the keys and not claim the bounty. This whole system depends on pirates wanting $5 more than they want to pirate the thing, which from my 10 years around release and fxp groups in my younger days, I can say is barely ever the case.

I'm assuming the keys are embedded before it's leaked like a watermark of sorts. The leaker isn't the pirate in the scenario described _I think_.

Re: Custos is using Bitcoin to turn digital pirates against each other

#35

Post by rtkwe »

jakobegger wrote: post #5

The 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 much do they have to actually stock though? 50-100k USD ($5-10 over 10000 screeners) is a good bit of money but they'd probably only pay out a tiny portion of that and compared to the budgets of a large blockbuster it's not that large of an outlay.

If they can reliably embed multiple private keys into the screener DVDs they could get by with having fewer account and using the combination of accounts as the key. Though really if they're able to embed a whole private key in a way that survives encoding why bother with the bounty, though I guess that saves them the trouble of having to go find torrents/rips themselves.

Re: Custos is using Bitcoin to turn digital pirates against each other

#36

Post by krisleipus »

jakobegger wrote: post #30
pavel_lishin wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

According to the article "tens of thousands" of advance copies are sent out. So if you want the reward per leak to be $10, the cost would be hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe that's worth it to a studio, but it definitely is a significant junk of money.

Studio pays out that amount in case every single receiver of advance copy leaks it, is it the case? I would guess that there are only a few who leak it. Also, I think, studio can start legal action against the leakers, so it could collect fines in case of leak.

Re: Custos is using Bitcoin to turn digital pirates against each other

#37

Post by anotheryou »

I see no advantage over traditional invisiblee watermarks.

A movie usually just leaks once or twice, these leaks get replicate everywhere. So if you are looking for a specific movie, just get a pirated copy from anywhere and check the watermark yourself. It's trivial to check if there is a leak at all and also trivial to find that leaked version and test it. No need to throw 15 bucks per copy on it, just let the intern monitor some torrent trackers.

Re: Custos is using Bitcoin to turn digital pirates against each other

#38

Post by dragonwriter »

hellbanner wrote: post #29
badosu wrote: post #2

> Custos embeds imperceptible bitcoin private keys in the digital files, with different keys for different advance copies of a movie or ebook. (...) > At the same time, Custos makes a piece of free software that screens movie files for these private keys and markets the screener to content pirates. Pirates now have an incentive to check pirated movie files in case they contain a key. If a key is detected, the pirate…

Isn't this what watermarks have been doing for a while? Different theaters get different watermarks https://www.sans.org/reading-room/whitepapers/detection/wate...

Yes, but watermarks don't leave evidence in a public ledger when the movie is pirated, you have to go out and find the pirated copy and compare watermarks.

Using Bitcoin private keys, as long as some pirate prefers money now to the health of an illegal distributional chain in the future, creates an incentive to get someone else to provide that information to you via the blockchain.

Re: Custos is using Bitcoin to turn digital pirates against each other

#40

Post by rtkwe »

nfriedly wrote: post #10

Hah, now some pirate is going to try and figure out how to get all of the private keys :P

Beyond just hacking into Custos and stealing them or Custos using a somehow predictable keygen (not even sure that's really a thing?), in doing that they'd be tracking down all the leaks which is exactly what Custos and their customers are wanting.

In reality only a few screeners seem to leak for any given movie.

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