Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems pretty self-defeating. I'd just strip the keys and not claim the bounty. This whole system depends on pirates wanting $5 more than they want to pirate the thing, which from my 10 years around release and fxp groups in my younger days, I can say is barely ever the case.
I'm assuming the keys are embedded before it's leaked like a watermark of sorts. The leaker isn't the pirate in the scenario described _I think_.
Custos is using Bitcoin to turn digital pirates against each other
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Re: Custos is using Bitcoin to turn digital pirates against each other
#62Maybe I don't understand something? John Doe, random employee working for Universal Studios leaks an advance copy of "The Revenge of the Avengers: The Revengers Strike Back" to their contact XPirateSepirothX for 250$ (or for free because they really want to get back at their boss for laughing at them). XPirateSephirothX passes on the watermarked movie to their friendly neighbourhood reencoder IAmBecomeDeath who notic…
> IAmBecomeDeath who notices the watermark strips it, and reencodes the movie for general consumption. Or wants the $$, so claims it, putting down a breadcrumb. (Atleast that's what the technology in the article is for.)
This model really only works when most encoders are not aware the tag is there at all, and don't strip it.
Alternatively (as some other comments suggested) Custos buries additional tags without revealing them, in which case they act just like all sorts of other watermarking companies doing the same thing (not terribly effectively).
Re: Custos is using Bitcoin to turn digital pirates against each other
#63Maybe I don't understand something? John Doe, random employee working for Universal Studios leaks an advance copy of "The Revenge of the Avengers: The Revengers Strike Back" to their contact XPirateSepirothX for 250$ (or for free because they really want to get back at their boss for laughing at them). XPirateSephirothX passes on the watermarked movie to their friendly neighbourhood reencoder IAmBecomeDeath who notic…
On the subject of stripping the watermarks, Custos says this on their website: Custos employs three roles in the search for infringed media. The first group is the bounty hunters who are anonymous individuals in the piracy communities who use Custos’s freely available bounty extraction tool for their personal gain. The second role is that of Custos’s trusted enterprise partners: these are existing providers of web cr…
Yes each copy is tagged with multiple watermarks visible and cryptomarks in both the visual and audio channels.
However the most common mark is the "cut" mark, the studio will have multiple copies with slightly different cuts of a couple of scenes including sometimes very slight post production changes (e.g. items that appear or do not appear in a given scene). These marks are as simple as adding or removing a few frames from several scenes that do not change the context of the scene or the movie. With 10-20 scenes that can easily be manipulated you can produce a large number of marked copies that cannot be wiped without knowing what scenes have been touched. The studio usually produces a few versions which are scene marked and for the individual copy marking relies on several layers of cryptographic and traditional water markings.
This means that even if all of the technical watermarkings fail the studio still knowns roughly who leaked the video then pinpointing the source is much easier in most cases.
P.S. Studios make multiple versions of movies with different cut tales also for other reasons such as to gauge audience responses to specific scenes or in cases where movies would have slight line differences for different regions.
Re: Custos is using Bitcoin to turn digital pirates against each other
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#65The 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. T…