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Maybe I don't understand something? John Doe, random employee working for Universal Studios leaks an advance copy of "The Revenge of the Avengers: The Revenger

Maybe 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 notices the watermark strips it, and reencodes the movie for general consumption. The pirating public receives an unwatermarked copy and cannot claim any prize. IAmBecomeDeath, XPirateSephirothX and John Doe have no incentive to claim the prize because they will implicate themselves in copyright violation. Are they implying the watermark is impossible to remove? That seems unlikely to me as pirates can be quite enterprising (and there may be some money on the line for them as well), so I'd expect them to reverse engineer the process and figure out how to strip it. Heck, this company is even offering an application that checks if the watermark is present or not which should at least give the pirates a measurement on whether their watermark removal method worked (on at least some version of the watermark detection logic). Or maybe the plan is to play a constant game of cat and mouse, Custos will continually switch up their methods for watermarking and so the pirates will never be sure if they caught and successfully stripped the latest and greatest version of the watermark, preventing some piracy through uncaught watermarks and some piracy through fear?

anilgulecha 9y ago
> 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.)
- delinka 9y ago
  Not putting down a breadcrumb, but implicating John Doe. Presumably because the watermark/key was created specifically for John Doe's copy.
- horsawlarway 9y ago
  It's not lucrative enough. The product is worth far more than the measly bounty. Sure, claim that 15 dollars in bitcoin, and never receive another pre-release copy again, or... strip it and continue business as usual. 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).
icebraining 9y ago
The idea is that IAmBecomeDeath and XPirateSephirothX are not implicated, since they can claim it anonymously, by simply moving the coins to a random BTC address, and then using a tumbler or something to cover their tracks. Of course, John Doe and whoever knows about this will never trust them again to spread leaked copies, so it's hard to see $5 being worth that loss.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Retr0spectrum 9y ago
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 crawling solutions that are enabled to search for Custos-protected content too. The third role is that of Custos’s internal forensic team, who can also discover infringed content. The note about their "Internal forensic team" implies that there will be a secondary watermarking system, whose implementation is kept a secret. This means leakers will never be able to be sure whether they have completely removed all of the watermark systems.
- dogma1138 9y ago
  A little known unknown secret in the industry is that there are much simpler watermarking systems than what people think. 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.

anilgulecha 9y ago

> 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.)

delinka 9y ago
Not putting down a breadcrumb, but implicating John Doe. Presumably because the watermark/key was created specifically for John Doe's copy.
horsawlarway 9y ago
It's not lucrative enough. The product is worth far more than the measly bounty. Sure, claim that 15 dollars in bitcoin, and never receive another pre-release copy again, or... strip it and continue business as usual. 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).

icebraining 9y ago

The idea is that IAmBecomeDeath and XPirateSephirothX are not implicated, since they can claim it anonymously, by simply moving the coins to a random BTC address, and then using a tumbler or something to cover their tracks. Of course, John Doe and whoever knows about this will never trust them again to spread leaked copies, so it's hard to see $5 being worth that loss.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Retr0spectrum 9y ago

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 crawling solutions that are enabled to search for Custos-protected content too. The third role is that of Custos’s internal forensic team, who can also discover infringed content. The note about their "Internal forensic team" implies that there will be a secondary watermarking system, whose implementation is kept a secret. This means leakers will never be able to be sure whether they have completely removed all of the watermark systems.

dogma1138 9y ago
A little known unknown secret in the industry is that there are much simpler watermarking systems than what people think. 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.