New audio "watermark" copy protection scheme for cinemas in the works

For various reasons, everyone likes to talk about the "analog hole" problem with DRM protection: pretty much all security falls down in the face of a well positioned camera and mic setup in the back of a movie theater. Well not for long… the movie industry just unveiled a system at their DVD Forum in Paris last week that would embed an audio "watermark" during the soundtrack mixing process by slightly varying the waveforms at regular intervals. (Screwing around with the noise.) They claim the change shouldn't be audible to paying cinema goers, but would be easily picked up by a decoder embedded in forthcoming HD playback systems, starting with Toshiba's HD-DVD players next year. This soundtrack mojo will only be applied to the cinema release of a film, so if a player recognizes the pattern, it will know it's not playing a legit copy, and shut down on the double. It does seem like any audio changes would have to be rather obvious to make it through the quality loss you'll get with this type of piracy, and we can just imagine the legions of audiophiles who will pick up on the patterns and run from the theater screaming and clutching their golden ears. We also have to wonder what those MPAAers think the next step is. A large red "X" across the screen? Maybe they could throw in some dancing elves and a strobe-like flashing effect? That would surely curb piracy. No, wait, don't please — we were only kidding!

[matt @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

yeah, another anti-piracy scheme that'll be defeated before it's even out.

[mikey @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

Hookers! Hookers in the theater! But they're under cover hookers. With ninja-robot reflexes and giant guns.

[Alex @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

Wow. Thats really sad. I can even figure out how to bypass the watermark. Well you know the lightscribe burners, I bet there is a way to draw the watermark on top of a dvd so the player would recognize it.

By the way, nothing is hack proof. There is a way of hacking into everything that involves software and hardware.

: )

[max @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

I remember seeing a movie a couple years ago and noticing a cirular pattern of "dots" flash in the middle of the screen every twenty minutes or so. I found myself waiting for them for the second half of the movie. Very distracting. I asked my friends I was with about them after the movie and no one else had seen them.

Looked it up online when I got home and read some stuff about how compression algorithims have a hard time with them and they "become very much more noticeable"

Any got to go, but has anyone else seen those dots?

[Daniel Nicolas @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

We vote with our money.

[duestown @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

It's an audio watermark, Alex, not an actual image on the disc. Unless you have some sort of sick DSP mod chip for your HD-DVD player, it'd be pretty tough to crack.

Either way: the MPAA sucks.

[AFD @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

The MPAA needs that device from the "Men in Black" movies that the agents used to erase people's memories. Then the ushers can zap the patrons leaving the theater, therefore cutting down on any pirated 'mental images' of the film.

I really think Hollywood needs to spend a little more effort toward creating decent releases, and less time worrying about people pirating their crappy movies.

[Marc @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

As if we needed more reasons to not support either next-gen DVD format.

[AndrewNeo @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

The best part is this totally doesn't defeat watching the movies on your computer, or on any media that isn't something like HD-DVD.

[Qubit @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

Where there�s a will, there�s a way.

Creating new copy-protection to stop piracy is like trying to reach infinity; you can keep going, but you will never reach it.

If they don't want people copying their stuff, then they shouldn't create it.

[michael @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

Don't know if this is what they have planned but it would work. Record the audio, perform an fft on the signal. Adjust the component waveform phases in whatever way you wish and then recombine the components. Humans can't hear the phase shift so it goes unheard but if the new phases were set in a specific relationship to each other, the signal would be there for the decoder to find. The decoder would just have to re-fft the new signal and if it found the phases had a specific relationship, it'd signal that the audio was stolen.

However, for every measure, there's a counter-measure. To get around the detector spotting a specific phase signal, you perform the fft before it reaches the decoder, scramble the phases and the detector lets the signal pass.

[Fuzz @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

This is just stupid. Anyone willing to setup a camera in a theater obviosly transfers the file to their computer. From there, it will be a simple matter of stripping out the "unhearable watermark", either by trimming the top or bottom of the waveform or by removing the pattern. The pattern will be easy to identify, as it will have to be hardcoded into the chip, and can't change, so they will only have one(or in the worst case, a few) patterns to work with. It won't be hard to issolate them, and the fancy hakers will have a program that will remove it. Barring all this, chances are they will just be watched from the computer anyway. Stupid MPAA. Just stupid. If someone came to me with this idea, I'd kick them in th groin and tell them they were fired.

[super_structure @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

I thought the main way the Hollywood studios were curbing piracy was by producing movies that aren't worth the time it takes to watch them. I this is referred to as the "Freddie Prince, Jr." watermark.

[Jazzay @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

...they need to hire me. How about they just have a blinding infrared or ultraviolet light, not so intense to harm the people, and they wouldnt see it, cause they cant, but itll blind the camera lense :) just dont tell anyone about it and let those hackers firgure out they need to put an infared filter on the camera, i dunno how good a lot of those guys are with physics and hardware apart from computers... it wouldnt take long, but for hollywood premiers and stuff, why not at least try it?

[Anawrahta @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

The MPAA's revenues are down like 15% year over year for October and like every other month this year. Just keep bringing on this great ideas you guys and keep watching your sales fall! And I'll stick with BT thanks.

[Feeble @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

If you want to curb piracy, why dont they just digitize their media.

and sell it online for a few dollars less, that would normally be spend on pakaging and transportation.

i hear the itunes store is making a truck load off their videos. 2million downloads or something of that numbers so far.

i for one hate entering hmv stores or similar, as they just like to promote crap movies and crap music.

[Cash4Cookies @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

Luckily we have direct audio sources :D. The MPAA is really stupid.

[aftermath99 @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

it sounds like this "protection" is limited to the player itself. what would stop some enterprising company to allow you to disable this feature? ie. ship the player with the chip, but then allow the consumer to turn it off ala multi region players?

[Alex K. @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

the movie industry can go screw itself.

maybe if they made good movies like they used to then it wouldn't be such a problem.

[Alex K. @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

who said we were going to use HD-DVD anyway??

it can all still be put on DVD. The more anti-piracy measures people put into HD-DVD and Blu-ray the more people will just stick with the current format.

[Geoffrey Hoffman @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

For a bit more technical info about the watermarking: the process that #11 described is actually VERY resistant to attacks. In college, we did some research with spread spectrum watermarking of images and video. For the images, you can cut, scale, rotate, zoom, and blur images, and it remains. you can print them out, make a bad photocopy, scan them back in, and the watermarks are still recognizable. With video, we would watermark the I-frames in mpeg, and the watermark could carry through to all the other frames.

That being said, since the decoding will be hardware, it will have to use fixed watermarks, and will be easier to remove. Trivial to remove a "known" watermark; quite difficult to remove an unknown watermark. It may be possible to do it in the frequency domain, like #11 was talking about, but we never played with that.

They could rig this up like they do with the HDMI protection now: they have a set of keys that devices can use. Once a "key" is compromised, they basically invalidate it, and newer media (cable, and newer DVD's) no longer works with that key. As devices get more connected (like HD cable boxes), having changing and updating keys will be easier for the media producers.

But, I still think the analog hole is fundamentally impossible to protect. Our eyes and ears are analog: if we can experience, it can be copied. To get philosophical for a second: we HAVE to decode it with our eyes and ears to experience the media. Until they do "direct mental injection", media will always have to be able to be turned into sounds and pictures.

[Gunbuster @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

So now I can have horrid audio to go along with the brown dots that I see at every single movie in the theatre.

woohoo!

[duestown @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

If it's spread spectrum, then even if you try changing it in the frequency domain, it'd still be very difficult. The watermark would probably just look like white noise. If you know the code, it'd be simpler to do the decoding, but without that knowledge, it'd be like trying to hack a CDMA network with an antenna and a computer.

Then again, I don't know the exact implementation the MPAA is going for here.

Like #19 (Alex K.) said, people are still burning compressed movies to CDs. People are still selling pirated VCDs and VHS tapes on the streets of Chinatown. The MPAA doesn't realize that piracy does not need the most advanced format to be rampant.

[Trent @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

So this system works to identify the source of the pirate flick? Give up already, one theater gets shut down, another will crop up. To get those that are making CAM videos, they are better off developing a system that uses invisible band light to detect reflections from lenses and can automatically zoom into the audience member and analyze the reflection and allow a remote operator to determine if something funny is going on. For the theaters where telesyncs are done in the projection booths, install security cameras in the booths or create a tamper proof secondary projection system synced to the main projector to flash a very faint watermark on the screen between frames at random positions on the screen. Or, as others have suggested, maybe the whole movie industry can just go to hell.

[hydrogen_wv @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

Record it, stick it into some video/sound editting software, and remove sounds at that certain frequency. To make it inaudible it'd have to be a very high frequency, because inaudibly low frequencies invoke fear. If it is an audible frequency, people will notice it and complain.

Easy stuff, it seems.

[Theron @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

dam they are stoooooopid

most, if not all, digital video recorders save space by only recording what we can hear, so if it is as unaudible as they claim, the camera wont even record it. so either they are lying about it being unaudible, or they are just plain stupid
(more than likely both)

[Saif @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

The real concern here is, what if, by some stroke of coincidence, the audio of the movie itself already either:
a) contains a forbidden watermark, or
b) negates an authorized watermark?

No security system is ever both completely closed and completely expressive. For every authentication heuristic, there's a certain domain of signals that can't be properly communicated, no matter what.

For example, what if I just made a home movie called "The Big Red X versus the Dancing Strobe Elves?" By the very nature of the content, my HD-DVD player would prevent it from being played. Which totally sucks, because that sounds like an awesome idea for a movie...

[Samuel Febres @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

To Max,

those dots you're seeing are more than likely chemical burns or just the reel switching from one to another. More likely reels switching since movies come in 20 minute reels and are spliced together to make one big print. You're probably seeing the film jump as it goes through the projector 'cause of the tape holding the film together. It shouldn't be anything more than that, unless you were watching The Ring.

[Hank Cazorp @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

So cap codes splattered red dots all over Minas Tirith and now a new technology will muffle King Kong's mighty roar. But who cares? The theater experience is already ruined by rude patrons, overpriced concessions, even more overpriced tickets, uncomfortable seats, noisy air handlers, jarring reel transitions, crappy out of focus pictures, decrepit old movie screens, television commercials, and a host of other annoyances. Anyone who thinks enduring that crap is a good time isn't going to give a damn about cap codes and strange gurgling audio. Screw all theaters.

[Eject @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

I could almost understand all the annoyances in the NYC theaters, but 15 MINUTES ADVERTIZING just before the MOVIE? I�m sorry but that is just too much for me.

[MrFloppy @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

Finally, piracy is killing cinema.
Thank you, pirates �_�

[facehugger @ Dec 19th 2005 2:31AM]

So moronic. to think people using cams in the cinema (= piss-ass lousy sound and video).. will put it on the expnsive HD-DVD or Bluray disc..

What would be the point to use high-price-high-quality media as the image would be as good on a non protectc VCD player from...

The only thing this would lead to is for slower sales of players unable to playback these "shitty" copies. I am pretty sure there will be OEM players that would not spend (and forward to consumers) the extra cost of having the "find-the-audio-watermark"-chipset...

/facehugger