Movie Piracy Blackmail Plot Fails In India, Six Arrested (torrentfreak.com) 47
An anonymous reader quote's TorrentFreak's report about "a plot against Baahubali 2: The Conclusion, a record-breaking movie taking India by storm."
Someone posing as a "film anti-piracy activist" told the company that a pirated copy of the movie had been obtained and if a ransom wasn't paid, a leak onto the Internet would be inevitable... Following the call Arka Mediaworks immediately involved the police, who advised the company to engage the 'kidnappers' in dialog to obtain proof that they had the movie in question. That was delivered in the form of a high-definition sample of the movie, a move that was to mark the beginning of the end for those attempting to extort Arka Mediaworks. It's unclear whether those who sent the sample were aware, but the movie was forensically or otherwise marked, something which allowed police and investigators to track the copy back to a specific theater... shortly after the owner of the theater was arrested by police. This was followed by the arrest of the person who allegedly called Arka Mediaworks with the ransom demand. From there, police were led to other co-conspirators. In total, six arrests were made, with two of the men already known to police.
TorrentFreak calls the ransoming of movies "a worrying trend in 2017" that's "damaging the image of piracy further, if that was even possible."
TorrentFreak calls the ransoming of movies "a worrying trend in 2017" that's "damaging the image of piracy further, if that was even possible."
Good (Score:1)
These guys were messing things up for honorable, old fashioned media pirates.
And yet online (Score:2)
And yet, even if the police managed to arrest these blackmailers,
the movie will still hit the torrent and streaming sites over the next few weeks anyway.
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And yet, because it's possible to digitally mark every single copy released to theaters, it's impossible to hide the source of the leak. So, the more often they leak, the more often the message gets sent that if you leak it, you will be caught. It's not rocket science.
Do you really think people will continue to be willing to leak movies when it's an almost-guaranteed jail term in an Indian jail just to get some cred for leaking a movie? Did you know it's possible to rape someone of either sex to death? The
They did the needful for the film maker (Score:3, Funny)
But still have not fixed my microsoft pc they called about.
Fix my pc, dears!
Heh. (Score:3)
Pirates giving piracy a bad name.
"worrying ... damaging the image of piracy" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Movie pirates are strange, I can't think of when the last movie came out that I would even accept if given to me for free. They're basically stealing someones trash.
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I can't think of when the last movie came out that I would even accept if given to me for free.
I feel the same way about most films. It seems like better than 90% of them are escapist drivel and nonsense. Every once and a while something decent will emerge, but that too is happening less and less often these days. We live in consequential times with an escalating cycle of war, disease, inequality and environmental destruction. If we're not careful, the species will soon be extinct. Stephen Hawking gives us 100 years to figure it out or perish. Honestly, I don't think we have even that much time left.
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Just the fuel to and from the theater costs five to ten bucks. Let's say you smuggle in snacks, but you bought them somewhere else. There's another five to ten bucks. Even if you are a total cheapskate bastard like me you're already hilariously close to the cost of just buying the damned movie when it hits disc, and you're at least at if not beyond the cost of streaming it even if you have to pay-per-view on Amazon or something. Maybe this is the comparison to DVD and not Blu-Ray, but I'll go ahead and take
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Not to nit pick, but at $3 a gallon, if you get 20 mpg the theater would have to be over 16 miles away for gas to cost $5. If I lived that far from the closest theater I don't think the cost of popcorn is what would keep me away.
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Not to nit pick, but at $3 a gallon, if you get 20 mpg the theater would have to be over 16 miles away for gas to cost $5.
It is.
If I lived that far from the closest theater I don't think the cost of popcorn is what would keep me away.
What? You wouldn't drive for 20 minutes to go to a movie? In most places, traffic will bump any trip up to at least 20 minutes.
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Movie pirates are strange, I can't think of when the last movie came out that I would even accept if given to me for free. They're basically stealing someones trash.
So you're calling most people's taste trash because it doesn't align with yours, classy. I like my sci-fi/fantasy drivel, I just don't pretend that the Force or warp drives is objectively better than romantic comedies, Bond movies or whatever. The worst kind... well, okay not really the worst kind of people I get are wine-sipping intellectuals that have decided that their obscure art movies is the pinnacle of culture and everyone else is simply not sophisticated enough to appreciate it. No, it's just your f
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In what way "strange"?
Someone's trash is worth precisely what others are willing to pay for it. Fortunately, for them, the movie industry is not reliant on your valuation and millions of others will pay for it. So their "trash" is worth billions. That sounds like something worth stealing, which is immoral but not at all strange.
Typical Indian IT work - shoddy, ends in failure (Score:2, Insightful)
What did you expect when you outsourced your piracy?
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Oh I liked that one. They stopped after 2 seasons tho.
lessons learned (Score:2)
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I guess this is why you always make your ransom videos on a really shitty old video camera that can't be traced back to anyone...
It would have to be a pretty terrible camera, these forensic watermarks are designed to be recognized on camcorder copies. They'd probably still find the cinema, but the fact that they had access to the digital copy proved it was an inside job by someone with access to the digital distribution system.
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That's the part that puzzles me. You can't, without some pretty sophisticated hardware, intercept a DCI-compliant stream. It's encrypted all the way into the projector, and if you open an inspection hatch on the projector, it goes dead until a tech arrives to re-certify it - and no, they won't give you the codes over the phone.
So I guess this film wasn't delivered to the cinema in encrypted form. The distributors must have been trying to save some money, or the distribution system in India isn't set up for
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It's like the analog hole for music - just point an hd camera at the screen from a great position (after all, it's an inside job) and you've got your screener.
Unfortunately, that doesn't hide the watermarking, which can be things like an extra duped frame followed by a dropped frame. Easy enough to alter during transmission of the video to the theatre, since it's done before encryption and transmission.
Sure, you can detect the altered frames by comparing different copies from different theatres, but who's
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Speaking from experience (projectionist, not pirate), pointing any camera at the screen from the projection room is:
1. Difficult for pirates. It's going to have almost unusable audio. The noise from the projector's cooling fans makes dialogue almost incomprehensible, and low-level subtle sound FX are right out. I suppose the usual glass-shattering shrieks from a bollywood musical would survive. Ditto server noise, if it's a one-screen cinema and the server is in the same room. You'd need to intercept the au
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2. Doesn't have to be exact to work. Even if you get half the previous frame and half the next, it's still detectable.
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You make it sound so simple. Up to seven separate sound channels, just "tap into the audio". How many handycams have 7.1 or even 5.1 recording? So you'll need a separate sound recorder, and mux it all later.
Of course it's possible, just not likely.
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I was trying to make the point that "tapping into the audio" from a DCP isn't as simple as it sounds. It's not like you can plug in an "AUX" cord somewhere. Soundtracks for a DCP are supplied as a separate WAV file for each speaker, left front, right front, left rear, right rear, centre, sub, and sometimes a separate channel for dialogue. Tapping into the audio means having to capture and re-mux all those channels somehow. If you miss the centre or dialogue channel, your copy will only be useful to lip-read
Sure hope... (Score:1)
I sure hope the owner of the theater place was actually involved in the scam, and it wasn't just employees running around behind his back. (The summary kinda makes it sound like they got the sample of the film then went off and arrested the guy.)
Copyright violation (Score:2)
They stole that plot directly from here [slashdot.org]
No such ransom was or will ever be paid (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, even the dumbest studio accountant knows that it does not have any significant impact on his revenue whether unlicensed copies of his movie are "out there" some weeks sooner or later. People will certainly not make a decision for or against watching the movie "unpaid" based on whether that is possible a little sooner or later.
These ransom schemes, if they actually exist, are 100% certain to fail.
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watermarks (Score:1)
Each vendor has a different method, some more effective than others.
Philips apparently has been doing some work in this field as they have a relatively newer pirate leak tracking system called “Cinefence”. CineFence watermarks are believed to be harder to erase by pirates, and contain the time, place and date
Are you seriously telling me (Score:2)