MPAA Developing Digital Fingerprinting Technology 544
Danathar writes "The MPAA is looking to use digital fingerprinting technologies that in conjunction with legislation will enable and force ISPs to look for network traffic that matches the signatures. " From the article: " Once completed, Philips' technology--along with related tools from other companies--could be a powerful weapon in Hollywood's increasingly aggressive attempts to choke off the flood of films being traded online."
It's funny... (Score:5, Interesting)
lol (Score:1, Interesting)
"Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated."
All of their new 'tricks' end up being incorperated into nexgen p2p apps. So whats the point; do they really want to fund the nextgen p2p apps by releasing research/specs/documentation on this?
Re:Forget it (Score:5, Interesting)
aaaactually, mr wizard taught me that it's just the water's skin that's really wet--that is, it's self-adhesive properties...
pour a shitload of babypowder on a cup of water, and stick your finger down to the bottom. it'll be baby-fresh instead of wet.
Screw em (Score:4, Interesting)
If they want to assume an anti-consumer posture, then they can just all go out of business. Screw em.
Re:Encryption (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Better than upstream measures (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, until you get your new bill from your ISP, which includes an extra $50.00 per month so that they can afford to comply with the law.
See, I'm pretty sure that the MPAA won't be paying the ISP to implement this technology, to purchase the additional equipment to use it, and to maintain it.
Re:Encryption (Score:5, Interesting)
Can fingerprints survive encryption? (Score:3, Interesting)
Although good encrytion should make it impossible to recover unknown bits in the original file, it seems to make no gaurantees that one can't detect the presense of known data (of a sufficiently clever pattern) in the encrypted file.
IANAC, so any expert comments about why known data is made irreversibly invisible by encryption would be appreciated
Freenet (Score:2, Interesting)
umm.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Freenet (Score:3, Interesting)
So basically it won't be long before we'll have more bandwidth than we know what to do with... then you install Freenet (or some other P2P app that does its own routing).
While You're Bitching ... (Score:1, Interesting)
And don't give me the same, lame story about music being overpriced, crappy, one good song and twelve fillers on the CD, etc. etc. If you don't like it, don't buy it. It's not AIDS vaccine. It's music. You're not going to kak without it. In fact, it's all pap, so you'll be better off without it, right?
Yeah, yeah, the labels were nailed for price fixing. They paid the price. Two wrongs don't make a right. Move on.
No, I'm not a musician, and I'm not with the RIAA, and I have nothing to do with whatever other conclusion to which you're about to jump.
Re:Better than upstream measures (Score:5, Interesting)
It's generally considered wrong when private individuals or organizations take the law into their own hands (see: vigilante justice.) It's even more dangerous when the organization in question is as heavily-bankrolled and as morally bankrupt as our two favorite "entertainment industry trade groups". No thanks. They can keep their grubby little lawyer fingers out of my data stream.
Re:Encryption (Score:2, Interesting)
It wouldn't even have to be that hard. Since the tracker part of the torrent protocol is based on http, what would stop it from using https and simply using ssl encryption? Hell, any tcp protocol can be tunneled through ssl afaik.
DMCA and encryption. (Score:4, Interesting)
The DMCA makes a whole lot of statements about copyright circumvention. But not much of anything about encryption. This is why CSS, with its laughably weak encryption, can be used, and anyone who pokes at the gaping goatse vulnerability-hole is then liable for horrible, horrible damages.
If you're not using encryption to protect your copyright---and if you're not selling all those "vacation" JPEGs and school papers, it's damn hard to show copyright damages---the DMCA is mute on this issue.
It is designed to protect copyright holders, not to protect anyone who uses encryption.
--grendel drago
Why not just create an encrypted wrapper? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is this feasable, or would it just turn into an arms-race of "who has the bigger processor"?
The scariest way ... (Score:3, Interesting)
All too do-able in the hyper-paranoid post 9/11 US of A...
Afraid yet?
Re:Encryption (Score:2, Interesting)
When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn.
Re:Why Bother Encrypting? (Score:4, Interesting)
You are quite correct that this will defeat the watermarking.
There would be significant side affect though. You could say goodbye to downloading a single file from multiple sources because if we were to use your proposed solution then every copy of "The Matrix" on the P2P network would be unique, therefore you would not have the advantage of pulling in all the "parts" from disparate sources.
Re:Wow! (Score:3, Interesting)
Agreed. The story makes it seem like this could be implemented next month or something. The technical and legal hurdles here are huge. Even if this fingerprinting technique is the cat's meow, building a database of fingerprints by itself might take years (those masters need to be found, loaded, queued, etc.). And that says nothing about the challenge of keeping this database current! The logistics of that alone are staggering.
In addition, think about the kind of act that Congress would pass (assuming it ever did get passed over the strenuous objections of giants like SBC). It would provide a timeline, like "All ISPs have until 2012 to implement a system that can handle this." The market will be completely changed by the time anyone is actually forced into implementing this kind of scheme.
Hardly (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Technically infeasable and economically ruinous for ISPS to scan all network traffic (unless you want to pay them for their trouble, MPAA? you could indemify us all for the resultant Internet slowdown perhaps?). You've been told so many times, you can't be that stupid.
2. Copy-protection can always be broken. It's like King Canute live action when I go to see a movie and be insulted by MPAA movie-theft ads.
3. If you drive the people to encryption, a lot more than your precious assets will go byebye, it will bring down the gravy train for everyone else, and won't they thank you for it.
Using Occam's Razor I ask which is more likely: that they either don't read slashdot or do so in such a way as only read it for the pictures.
Re:Computer = COPY (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a very strict balance between signal power and watermark power---if you increase watermark power (make it harder to remove), you're degrading the media. There is a balance that exists between the two---and to destroy the balance, you just have to re-watermark the image the 2nd time (yes, losing some quality), and all of a sudden, the original watermark is gone.
Pretty much all papers that claim to embed their watermarks several times have either tweaked media or tweaked watermarks that specifically embed the data into different things---but if you re-apply any spread spectrum watermark to the media, all of the separate tweaked parts are gone.
The trick is `quality loss'... but then again, most of the time it's not -that- bad.
Re:Encryption (Score:4, Interesting)
As an example of a circumvention technique, consider if BitTorrent were to be extended to allow trackers to use encrypted connections to the clients, and to mediate keys between the various clients. Torrent files could be extended to contain the public key of the tracker. Then, regular SSL connections to the torrent websites would work.
I can think of a few other things off the top of my head... The client-to-client connections could be made to look like SSH connections. Can't stop those without crippling the economy and people actually pay attention to the keys there so you can't proxy it either. Or, you could start putting keys in the DNS records like Yahoo! domainkeys. UDP messages would be a pretty big PITA to classify and firewall.
The people behind most of the p2p protocols are way smarter than me and I could do any of those.
Simpler Solution? (Score:2, Interesting)
Specifically, wouldn't any watermarking be lost in the process of converting from MPAA licensed stuff (i.e. DVDs, stuff shown in the theaters) to the files people download? If there was a digital watermark, I believe it would be erased in the process of encoding the file with Divx, xvid, or [insert favorite video codec here]. If the watermarking were, say, a special frame of movie, it would look different digitally depending on which codec was used, even if it looked the same on the screen.
Granted, I'm not an expert in cryptography/watermarking, so I would love for someone with more knowledge to support or contradict my argument...
Would work... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I Love Slashdot, Really I Do ... (Score:1, Interesting)
they started treating EVERYONE like thieves.
So why not act like it? Live up to our label.
Until the riaa/mpaa bends over and literally kisses my ass. I say screw them. They started pissing off REAL customers who never pirated anything ever. Once they did that i said screw them. And started "stealing" all my media.
If they are gonna treat everyone like a thief. You might as well download everything. The outcome is the same. And its for free.
Re:Encryption (Score:3, Interesting)
If P2P Apps implement encryption then breaking that encryption becomes a violation of the DMCA. Hell, even trying to break that encryption becomes a violation of the DMCA.
They can legaly require breaks, but only if they get the DMCA overturned or provide a special exception to anyone who runs an ISP.
Of course, in a world where any insecure Linksys router can be an ISP, that won't get them very far.
They won't get this through, and even if they do, they won't be able to enforce it because the ISPs can just throw up their hands and say "we couldn't break the crypt because we didn't know before hand if it was your copyright! We only have permission to break it if it's your copyright and we can't know if it is without breaking it first!"
Re:Encryption (Score:1, Interesting)
Says who? My work connection, my home connection and my next-door neighbour's unsecured WLAN all use different ISPs. That is, they will all be different men-in-the-middle and hence not have the same key. If I connect to one network to get the key, and then connect to another to do the download, and the keys don't match, I know something is going on...
Re:Hmm, wouldn't... (Score:2, Interesting)
In Israel, for example, you have to show your ID when you buy TV. it is supposed to help tax collection. There is a $100/year tax from houshold owning one or more TV sets. the logic behind the tax that the money is supposed to go to the public TV and radio station which do not run ads - they run ads, of course. many people still do not pay this tax and some avoid paying the tax using IDs of their relatives who already have TV. then there is a provision in the Israel law that gives to the tax authority right to access list of the cable TV subscribers. If you are a cable TV subscriber you have to pay tax. There is also tax on radio in Israel (no kidding). But it is enforced only for radio in cars. If policeman finds radio in you car and there is no relevant stamp of the tax authority in the technical passport of the car you are screwed. Sure enough some people use MP3 (and DVD) players in their cars without actually installing them. Interesting also that there was a case in the Supreme Court when deaf person argued that he can not listen radio in the car. I think the case was lost. Radio tax is per box, not per listener and in case of TV it is per household no matter how many people and TV sets.