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Microsoft Piracy DRM

Fight Piracy With a Blockchain-Based Bounty System, Suggest Microsoft Researchers (torrentfreak.com) 53

Posted by EditorDavid from the leveraging-ledgers dept.
TorrentFreak reports: A new paper published by Microsoft's research department proposes to tackle piracy with a blockchain-based bounty system titled "Argus." The system allows volunteers to report piracy in exchange for a reward. It uses the Ethereum blockchain and is transparent, practical, and secure, while limiting abusive reports and errors...

Pirated content is traced back to the source through a unique watermark that corresponds with a secret code. When a pirated copy is reported, the status of the source (licensee) is changed to "accused." The system provides an appeal option, but if that fails, the accused status changes to "guilty...." Whether Microsoft has any plans to test the system in the wild is unknown. It theoretically works with various media types including images, audio and software...

This idea isn't completely new, however, as the South African company Custos came up with a similar idea years ago. Microsoft's research notes that Argus is superior to Custos' solution as it can assess the severity of piracy and the strength of accusations.
TorrentFreak points out that the paper also received input from researchers at Alibaba and Carnegie Mellon University.

I like how the paper referenced the appropriately-named functions for parts of the process, including Report(), Appeal(), and SetGuilty().
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Fight Piracy With a Blockchain-Based Bounty System, Suggest Microsoft Researchers More

Fight Piracy With a Blockchain-Based Bounty System, Suggest Microsoft Researchers

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  • For you young ones. That was a piracy protocol for limited use of media cd's. If *one* company like microsoft owns the patent, guess who will not want to pay them? Most of the others? But I would like to see the effort. And watch what happens. I like reality TV Shows.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

      What could possibly go wrong?

      This blockchain solution seems to be a candidate for mass-reporting of piracy, even for innocents. Imagine the new leverage a malware can have by false reporting.

      • So all the legit users pay to put a transaction on the blockchain specifying their source, and all pirates copy the same version with the identifiers removed? how could this work in the real world?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kisai ( 213879 )

      This is the main reason why most DRM schemes ultimately fail. The weakest link is that nobody wants to licence stuff that works and instead roll their own trash, so instead of one widely supported DRM standard there ends up being a handful of broken ones, and once one of them is broken, the piracy comes back with a vengence, and the same media on other DRM systems start losing sales because the "broken" DRM product is more flexible.

      Now what would solve a lot of piracy problems is the obvious:
      - Stop installi

      • They also want to fulfill the demands of federal agencies that there _not_ be robust, untappable encryption built into their software nor into the operating systems. GPG, for example, can be used for verifiable or pseueonymous reports of sensitive information. But it's rejected in favor of some very peculiar and very proprietary tools, much as it was rejected for the built-in DRM attempted by Microsoft with "Trusted Computing".

    • Wait what? When did Divx ever produce DRM / piracy protocol? I only ever remember it as an MPEG4 codec...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Jzanu ( 668651 )
        Correct, the copy protection algorithm was called CSS (the Content Scrambling System). While that is still confusing to read now, it is at least confusing in a more accurate way.

      • GP is perhaps talking about DIVX [wikipedia.org], which is not the same as DivX [wikipedia.org]. To quote wikipedia:

        DIVX was a rental format variation on the DVD player in which a customer would buy a DIVX disc (similar to a DVD) for approximately US$4.50, which was watchable for up to 48 hours from its initial viewing. After this period, the disc could be viewed by paying a continuation fee to play it for two more days. [...]
        Each DIVX disc was marked with a unique barcode in the burst cutting area that could be read by the player, and used to track the discs. The status of the discs was monitored through an account over a phone line.

        I'm not sure it was ever intended for (or capable of) tracking the source of pirated media.

        • well microsoft had https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org] which was based on an mpeg4 draft, and thus offered mp4 levels of compression before it was available as mpeg 4. and microsofts had drm. except it was cracked and released as divx ;) (with the smiley) free for everyone and for some reason ms never went after the crackers or called it out. then it became a pseudo legit codec and eventually was developed in to a legit mpeg 4 codec. meanwhile open source devs created xvid as a real free alternative codebase,

        • Oh LOL, WTF? I had no idea this even existed. Thanks for the link, a fascinating bit of history there.

  • Microsoft is not pushing this anti-piracy thing too hard, as it knows that when it becomes impossible to pirate their software, alternatives will receive more work and become viable competition.

    There is no software that can't be re-created. I sometimes wish they would crack down hard on piracy just so that the world will learn how to live without them.

    • > There is no software that can't be re-created.

      It would take an unfathomable amount of talent and hard work to recreate Windows 10. That level of glitchiness, bugginess, unusability, ad-ware, slowness, and general shittiness isn't something that grows on trees. It takes years of effort by tens of thousands of people to polish a turd to that mirror shine.
    • or the beginnings of one from an engineer. You get this a lot, where engineers will do bogus patents because it looks good on their resume.

      It does creep me out that somebody thought of this though...

    • Freely copied and with multiple keys, Office 97 copied from workplace disks took over the home market while reinforcing the business market.
      "Free" software was free market chumming and critical to MSFT destroying competitors. It had the effect of being "free for personal use". Too bad Corel didn't think likewise and nudge the process along...

  • FOAD (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymouse Cowtard ( 6211666 ) on Sunday August 15, 2021 @04:05PM (#61695483) Homepage
    We, the unwashed masses, are already spending countless hours everyday training their AI and ML systems. Now they want us to protect their digital media assets too. We are the millions of monkeys on millions of typewriters, no, we are pigeons trained to respond to sensory stimula on a screen, pecking away at the keys, chained to the hive mind and living only for its betterment.

    • No we aren't. We're spending precisely no time on this. Zero. 100% of the efforts currently used to train AI and ML systems are done on the backs of things we would be doing anyway if AI / ML systems didn't even exist (and the activities we do predate what people consider "AI").

      We the unwashed masses are living our lives. The people who need AI systems trained do so off the backs of parallel efficiencies from tasks we were already doing.

  • Implausible prerequisite: Watermarks that can't be erased.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

      The pirates don't have to give a toss about watermarks if they're using stolen credit cards to subscribe to some service and using someone else's PC to make the recording.

      • This is why Microsoft's "Domain Keys" for email have proven so ineffective to prevent spam. They may have reduced it, but the spammers find it too easy to broadcast spam from rootkitted hosts with the laptop's locally stored credentials.

  • Watermarking again (Score:5, Informative)

    by cpt kangarooski ( 3773 ) on Sunday August 15, 2021 @04:14PM (#61695503) Homepage

    Mostly this appears to be a way to anonymously rat on people.

    As for the actual anti-piracy part, looks like this is premised on watermarking, an approach that generally doesn't work well if it's known to exist and pirates diff copies from separate sources and can strip it out. I liked the bits where they say:

    In this work, we assume that nobody can remove the watermark from a copy without badly deteriorating the content quality. ... We see this as a separate research concern.

    • This will be bad way before governments upgrade their anonymous tip systems.

      If mommy is a commie, you gotta turn her in!
      (http://www.songlyrics.com/chad-mitchell-trio/the-john-birch-society-lyrics)

      Though if I could actually turn in my dash cam footage and get people tickets I would do so for FREE!
      get. off. your. fucking. phone!

    • Didn't we go through this in the early 00s, with the entire SDMI debacle, where the DRM guys were saying that their watermarks were 100% unbreakable... only to have someone show them that was incorrect?

      In general, where someone makes a security technology, someone can break it... and in this war, generally weapons prevail over armor.

      As for anonymously ratting on people... that's definitely still present, and has been a thing since the SPA and BSA were sticking pictures of handcuffs in magazines. A disgrunt

  • Nothing like selling people out to mega corps (Score:3)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Sunday August 15, 2021 @04:15PM (#61695507)
    for a quick buck. This is just insane. I mean, I'm not a communist or anything, but reading dystopian stuff like this almost makes me wish I was. In an era when the cost of copying any given media is essentially zero we're talking about having people turn each other in to the authorities for making copies.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

      If snitching on pirates worked then the pirates would be caught already. Pirates don't go around telling everyone they are pirates.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ASDFnz ( 472824 )

        Pirates don't go around telling everyone they are pirates.

        Arrrr, yeah we do, just before we board we yell "Throw over all your silver and gold or we will come over and take it because we are pirates!"

      • Pfft! For a lot of people piracy is a badge of pride. Hey everyone! Look at me, I got away with something, and F--- the man.

      • . Pirates don't go around telling everyone they are pirates.

        yeah they do, mostly as everyone does it and there is no benefit to dob someone in. many people would happily hand over their mother if they thought there was profit in it for them.

  • Have solution... (Score:3)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Sunday August 15, 2021 @04:36PM (#61695549)
    ...i.e. blockchain. Looking for problem to solve it with. Are we suffering from the law of the instrument (AKA Maslow's hammer)?

    • Either that or block-chain is much more than I understand it to be and is instead a magic technology that solves all the world's problems. It seems like at least once a week there's some article about how problem x is being solved by block-chain. It must be something VCs are salivating over, like "cloud" and "web 2.0" or "mobile app" once were. And all three of those technologies are inappropriately overused because a bunch of managers were like, "we gotta do that thing, too, since everyone's talking about

      • There's something tenuous about the use of blockchain here, but it does seem to add a couple of things; taking the 'piracy database' out of the control of a single corporation so it's more likely to be used by all in the industry, and (I think) providing a majority system that stops single bad actors pushing through false piracy reports. These features could be provided in other ways though.

    • I mean, obviously blockchain hasn't found a practical application (beyond enabling scammers and other criminals) yet, and at this point it seems decreasingly likely.

      But if Microsoft hamfistedly trying to catch software pirates is the thing that finally kills blockchain, then the planet thanks you.

  • Well, it would create a new type of ransomware (Score:3)

    by zkiwi34 ( 974563 ) on Sunday August 15, 2021 @04:41PM (#61695559)
    As in, unless you pay up, this blockchain thing will find you guilty of all sorts of heinous crimes.

  • May I suggest a name for that new blockchain toy? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Sunday August 15, 2021 @04:54PM (#61695581)

    We could name it the Blockwart [wikipedia.org].

  • Three kinds of content are pirated, pop culture trash entertainment, scientific/tech literature of practical use, and proprietary software.

    Anything which damages consumption by any means of the first and the third is good news, and the determined will find ways to disseminate the second.

    • Unfortunately the first and third have the most determined (and abundant) pirates. Academic literature wouldn't exist without the massive subsidies and grants that allow research institutes to be research institutes. All of that work should be public domain.

  • There's already cash for this, so why would they want to pay by blockchain? I can see all sorts of false claims being filed for this.

  • Anything that increases the entropy of the Universe is favored so crank up those crypto miners and damn those humans!

  • I swear, it's like the early days of the internet all over again, when companies were running around getting patents for "the wheel, but on a computer". Now it's all "the wheel, but with blockchain".

    Pro Tip: You can watermark media already, and have been able to for decades, complete with CRCs etc.

    This is just yet another round of trying to drum up hype for ancient tech by adding the Buzzword Of The Month to it so you can sell it to gullible MBAs and VCs.

  • I like how the paper referenced the appropriately-named functions for parts of the process, including Report(), Appeal(), and SetGuilty().

    The next version will have Execute(), as soon as they finish integrating the drone control library.

  • while limiting abusive reports and errors...

    2 years later: Microsoft shuts down the Argus block-chain since it at this point consists to 100% of spam

  • The only fucking "pirates" here, are you assholes, who think they can pay somebody once, to do some work, and then rake in free money forever, in return for no work, or else... Making it literal robbery!

    If you want more money, Microsoft, here's an idea:
    DO MORE WORK!

    And I mean work with actual value! Not bringing back the old Start menu again, to take it away again!

    Because we actually have to work for that money we pay you too, you know? And not even using employees that we only pay once and only pay a fract

  • No surprise MS goes this non-honor path. Greed trumps everything.

  • Ya know? So much money spent on punishing them but no one even bothers to work out why. Its just like the prison system. No one cares why a person comitted the crime, but its super critical they get punished for it.

    Maybe the fact there are endless streaming platforms, with constant in screen ads, that you still pay for, is the reason for it.

    People who actually buy the platforms get punished with ads, people who pirate? play what they want, when they want, with no ads.

    That's really the opposite of what you w

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by swilver ( 617741 )

      You think the ads are bad now? Better hope they never manage to eliminate piracy because it will become far far worse then.

  • In many countries, accusing someone of a crime they did not commit is a crime itself. There will be a lot of criminal activity on that Blockchain.

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