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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

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)

pavel_lishin 9y ago
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.
- jakobegger 9y ago
  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.
  - krisleipus 9y ago
    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.
    - jakobegger 9y ago
      The problem is that they must pay the bounty for every leak in advance! (As I said, they could redeem unclaimed bounties after some time, but they must put up the full amount in advance, and are thus vulnerable to exchange rate fluctuations)
e12e 9y ago
> 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.
rtkwe 9y ago
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.
- jakobegger 9y ago
  This is a brilliant idea! Since we expect only a handful of leaks, each screener could contain lets say around 100 bounties of $10, with 200 bounties total. Then the first leak would be worth $1000, the second leak $500 (expected value) etc, and the studio only needs to pony up $2000 in total. We are guaranteed to be able to identify the first leak, I'm not sure if we can identify further leaks (there is probably some kind of trade-off between payout for the first leak, total amount of bounties, and probability of being able to identify further leaks, but the mathematics of this is probably not trivial.

pavel_lishin 9y ago

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.

jakobegger 9y ago
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.
- krisleipus 9y ago
  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.
  - jakobegger 9y ago
    The problem is that they must pay the bounty for every leak in advance! (As I said, they could redeem unclaimed bounties after some time, but they must put up the full amount in advance, and are thus vulnerable to exchange rate fluctuations)

e12e 9y ago

> 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.

rtkwe 9y ago

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.

jakobegger 9y ago
This is a brilliant idea! Since we expect only a handful of leaks, each screener could contain lets say around 100 bounties of $10, with 200 bounties total. Then the first leak would be worth $1000, the second leak $500 (expected value) etc, and the studio only needs to pony up $2000 in total. We are guaranteed to be able to identify the first leak, I'm not sure if we can identify further leaks (there is probably some kind of trade-off between payout for the first leak, total amount of bounties, and probability of being able to identify further leaks, but the mathematics of this is probably not trivial.