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An Invisible Technology May Slow Piracy

Fri Dec 3,11:45 AM ET Technology - AP

By JEFFREY GOLD, AP Business Writer

NEWARK, N.J. - Invisible technology could soon point the finger toward the camcorder-wielding pirates responsible for that bootleg copy of "The Incredibles" hawked on the street or posted on the Internet.

Hollywood is considering whether the technology, developed by a New Jersey company, could help reduce video piracy, which the major studios contend is costing them more than $3 billion in worldwide revenue.

The secret code imprinted on a movie would not stop film pirates from spreading their grainy counterfeits on the Internet, but it would reveal the identity of the last legitimate user to industry sleuths.

The developers claim their method will improve on existing techniques to create such a code, known as a "watermark" after printing, that can only be seen under certain conditions.

"There are few hotter topics in Hollywood today than forensic watermarking," said Larry Birstock, executive vice president of Post Logic Studios, a post-production company that is working with Sarnoff Corp. of West Windsor on the "iTrace" anti-piracy method.

Sarnoff, known as RCA Laboratories when it opened in 1942, is known for pioneering work in color television, music recording and liquid crystal displays.

The technology was developed by Sarnoff scientists, including Jeffrey Lubin, who used his background in perceptual psychology — vision — to devise a watermark that not only would be invisible to the movie viewer, but would survive even if the movie quality was degraded because of crude copying.

"The Holy Grail example is someone takes a camcorder into a movie theater and pirates a movie, and then compresses it on a digital file and puts it on the Internet," Lubin said.

The watermark occurs gradually, over the course of five seconds, to exploit the tendency of human vision to compensate and ignore images that change slowly, he said.

The watermark itself is neither words nor numbers, but blobs that slowly get either lighter or darker. It is repeated throughout the film. The sequence of light and dark blobs is unique to each legitimate copy, he said.

To crack the code, a pirated copy is compared on a computer, frame by frame, to a version of the film that lacks a watermark.

Since the images on both versions are digitized, the computer can "subtract" the version that lacks a watermark from the bootleg. What is left is the watermark, Lubin said.

As a security precaution, the version lacking a watermark has frames that are much smaller than those used for typical viewing, so it would be of no interest to pirates.

The companies developing iTrace gave demonstrations at Post Logic locations in Hollywood and New York last month, attended by studios including Buena Vista Pictures (Walt Disney), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Miramax, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Bros., Birstock said.

"We've gotten lots of interest," he said, adding that the system will begin to be tested in "real-world" situations at Post Logic facilities later this month.

None of the studios have agreed to start using the technology yet, but if the tests go well, the code could be used on a film as soon as early 2005, he said.

Post Logic, and other post-production studios, are where the final assembly of motion pictures takes place, including the addition of special effects.

"The applications for watermarking are not just for the final result, but it also gives us freedom to move images around during production so that if they get into the wrong hands, they can be traced back to the last rightful owner," Birstock said.

Watermarks already are assisting the industry, for instance, by pinpointing the theater screen where a pirate made a camcorder copy and identifying areas prone to such activity, said John Malcolm, senior vice president and director of worldwide anti-piracy operations for the Motion Picture Association of America.

But if the reproduction is pristine, the trail might lead to a DVD given out by the studios, which have had to adjust how it distributes copies of film in production or of those it wants considered for awards.

Malcolm said he was not familiar with the iTrace system.

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The watermark itself is neither words nor numbers, but blobs that slowly get either lighter or darker. It is repeated throughout the film.

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The secret code imprinted on a movie would not stop film pirates from spreading their grainy counterfeits on the Internet, but it would reveal the identity of the last legitimate user to industry sleuths.

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Good to see that the industry is still trying to crack down on exhibitors who don't strip search all of the patrons on a Friday night. Isn't this like getting excited about figuring out which old lady owned the purse that got stolen?

Prevention is an important part, but it can't be the entire fight. If CRAP code hasn't stopped piracy, what the hell are blobs going to do?
 

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Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 12-04-2004, 05:26 PM:
 
In my opinion it is worth it to ruin movies for everybody and not give an optimal performance in order to stop pirates.

Still though, it doesn't catch the actual pirate, just the suspected print. And what if that print has been circuited before the pirated file has been found or created? Studios will scream at the theater (possibly the wrong one) and then the theater will start patting everybody down who enters just like airport security. They'll have people with nightvision goggles scanning the audience walking all over the auditorium throughout the show, which is very distracting. People will feel like they are being babysat and prosecuted. Freedom goes bye bye.

If it gets like that, movie theaters will also soon go bye bye, as people will not want to be treated like criminals whenever they go to the theater, so they just won't go. Technologies like CAP code and the pulsing blobs described above are contributing to the decay of movies as we know it. Work on catching the criminal instead of treating everybody like one. Also please realize that this is a battle that can never, EVER be completely won. Anyone who thinks it can shouldn't be allowed to reproduce, or otherwise we'll have to start a stupid-people hunting season just to thin the population of such folks.
 

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Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 12-04-2004, 06:10 PM:
 
I figure I've had about half a million movie customers since I've owned my theatre. Of those people, not one has ever complained to me about the antipiracy codes. This is probably because they don't know about them, and I'm not about to publicize it.

I'm not defending the codes. I think they suck. But driving people away from theatres? Not in any great numbers. Screaming babies, four dollar Cokes and unruly teenagers are doing it, not the Crap codes.
 

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Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 12-05-2004, 02:13 AM:
 
I think you missed my point. I'm saying that those codes don't catch the actual person who did the pirating, only the print it was copied from. If they trace a copy back to your theater, studios will yell at you and expect you to take all sorts of measures which the public won't find too pleasing when they are just trying to enjoy a movie.

Also, the public won't complain because they are used to things like AMC theaters. If they tolerate theaters with horrible Torus screens and bad sound like AMC, CAP code won't bother those morons. They are used to getting sloppy presentations as well. I like theaters and all, but I would really laugh my ass off if they just went away and home theater took over.
 

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Posted by Carl Martin (Member # 1146) on 12-05-2004, 04:22 AM:
 
i can't think of any feasible way that this would be implemented. i don't think they're going to be changing the intensity of the light for every print. they could conceivably add a dark blob using a second light later in the printer like with crap code (but much harder), but how would they make the lighter blobs? and could they really qc it well enough that it's "imperceptible"?

hmmm. ok, here's a way, but it's a logistical nightmare. there could be, say, n versions of the internegative for each reel, with the blob patterns incorporated. for an m-reel film, there are n^m different prints that can be assembled. so if n=m=5, you get 3,125 different prints. but this could be defeated by taping half at one theater and half at another. and who's really going to be keeping track of all those reels when the prints ship?

carl
 

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Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 12-05-2004, 06:54 AM:
 
Also, if the variations are small enough to be undetectable by the human eye, they might also be undetectable in a camcorder transfer; especially if the camcorder's auto exposure mechanism compensates for them.

And print tracking would be a real issue, I'd have thought. Even assuming that you can approach 100% accuracy in recording which print numbers have gone to which theatres, how can you carry out any meaningful investigation if you have a tape which has been camcordered from a print which has played at 5 or 6 different theatres?
 

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Posted by Thomas King (Member # 2745) on 12-05-2004, 07:25 AM:
 

quote: Nicholas Roznovsky

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How about a system that randomly makes certain parts of the feature out of focus? Or drops out sound channels in a special coded sequence?

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Our local Odeon has one of those

iTrace? Sounds like it's made by Apple. I'll look pretty, but be expensive, useless and incompatible with 99% of movie theatres.
 

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Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 12-06-2004, 09:16 AM:
 
Kodak's Digital Watermarking System:

Kodak Digital Watermarking

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Despite extraordinary advances in technology, the motion picture industry has yet to eliminate a very costly problem – movie piracy. Those pirated films often are made by using a camcorder to record a movie as it is being projected in a theater. At Kodak, Emerging Technologies scientists developed a technology called digital watermarking that can be used to identify illicit copies of movies and help track down and put a stop to piracy.

For movies that are distributed electronically to theaters, a Kodak Digital Cinema projector can continuously embed a small amount of data into the movie when it is shown. Each showing of the movie is given a unique, invisible digital watermark identifying the date, time and theater of that particular showing. So if a camcorder is used to capture that movie, the videotape also records the watermark embedded throughout. As a result, a series of frames from a suspected bootleg copy of a movie can be examined to determine the time and place of theft, which can help with the apprehension of movies pirates.

Kodak recently demonstrated an industry milestone: the extraction of 16-bit digital watermark data from as few as 15 frames

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Data Embedding Using Phase Dispersion
Chris Honsinger and Majid Rabbani
Imaging Science Division
Eastman Kodak Company
Rochester, NY USA
Abstract
A method of data embedding based on the convolution of message data with a random phase carrier is
presented. The theory behind this method is reviewed and it is shown that the technique can be used to
hide both pictorial and non-pictorial data. The details of the procedures used for carrier design, message
template optimization, message extraction optimization, block synchronization, and rotation and scale
correction are discussed. Finally, the algorithm’s benchmark results using Stirmark are presented.

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