Audio watermarks let the MPAA know where a recording was taken, but not by whom
By Tim Stevens 
posted March 9th 2009 8:18AM
posted March 9th 2009 8:18AM
We've heard of some crazy audio watermark plans in the past, designed to prevent people from making copies of Hollywood blockbusters, and despite the audio industry finally moving away from its protective restrictions, the film industry seems to just keep working on more. The latest, created by Professor Noboru Babaguchi and his colleagues at Osaka University in Japan, is a means to apply spread-spectrum audio waveforms to a film's multi-channel soundtrack, enabling pirate seekers to determine exactly (well, to within 44 centimeters) where the bootlegger was sitting when he or she committed his or her felonious deeds. Interesting, sure, but unless all theaters worldwide start assigning seats by name it's useless. Beyond that, there's nothing stopping an intrepid recorder from stashing a mic a few feet to the left or the right, thus implicating an idle popcorn-muncher. Will these flaws keep this technology from being implemented? Don't count on it.[Via Slashdot]
Not so unrealistic, at least in Japan. Most of the major theaters chains here are be moving towards assigned seating. With the rise in electronic payment and online ticketing, it may not become increasingly trivial to find out just who was sitting in that 44 cm circle.
Who still downloads cams? (save your grant money)
Very nice point, but I'm sure what you mean by "trivial" in your post.
So basically, every theater in the world is going to have it's own signature?
What about the fact that Cams probably aren't all that big a problem in reality. I'm not all that big on watching a movie that was video recorded. The picture is usually shaky, quality is usually grainy and the sound sucks. I'd rather just wait until it comes out on video than suffer through all of that.
Most people in the piracy world are right there with you; people sneaking digital cameras into movie theaters don't produce particularly good quality videos and very few people download them.
Of course, the real irony will be the twelve lines of code it takes to write an audio scrubber that removes the waveforms from the track.
Or the fact that they'll get dropped when encoded into XVID.
I think this is more to know where the problem theaters are so they can focus their resources. If they get 32 different recordings with the same signature they know to watch that theater.
Certainly there will be a way to erase or spoof the signature that it stored on the audio signal.
im sure within a few weeks of this protection going big, there will be a way or erasing the tag or somthing, therefore throwing months of development time and millions of dollars down the drain
They just want to punish Theaters that are letting people record from there place.
What they are targeting the people video taping the movie in the theater?
I think thats the least of their problems.
I dont think anyone enjoys watching the result, which is usually terrible quality. I pondered downloading Indiana Jones while it was still in cinemas but i just couldnt, it would of totally ruined it. Plus im SURE the people who do would see it again some time. I dont think theyll be adding the handycam version to their dvd collection anytime soon.
The picture quality of a cammed copy of Indiana Jones would have been nowhere near as bad as the actual film itself...
I KNEW someone would say that haha.
It wasnt that bad...typical far fetched Indiana.
Are you kidding? It was basically the worst movie of the year...
That's true. But unfortunately, there are TONS of people in Asia who's willing to watch a low quality cam-recorded film simply because it's free. This scheme probably won't catch any cam-holders, but it will help identify the problematic theaters where those cam-recording occurs.
Far fetched Indiana? When did he ever do anything as far fetched as surviving an atom bomb in a fridge, fall off three consecutive waterfalls, get attacked by swarms of CGI ants, swing through the jungle with CGI monkeys and cut through a jungle with a giant CGI buzz-saw car at 15 miles per hour.
The only events in the other movies that I consider farfetched are when he falls out of the plane and uses a yellow life raft to slow his decent, and the mine car chase, both in Temple of Doom I might add.
I guess opening the arch and all the Nazi's being killed wasn't that far fetched and neither was the chalice in the last crusade? I mean it's a freaking movie based on an imaginary character where every historical artifact does what it's literal mythology says. I would say that it was at least better than "The Temple of Doom". Not sure who's more annoying short round or Mutt. I might be inclined to vote for Mutt just because Shia LaBeouf keeps popping up in movies. Admit it he's the real reason the movie isn't as good.
yep, Indiana 4 was indeed very dissapointing... like anything Lucas touch.
The only watermark that would make an ounce of difference is one that your television detects and chooses not to display. People are strange - they'll spend $2000 on a television and home theater system, but won't spend $200 on the movies to play on it. You have to hit their hardware if you want them to pay for software.
But then people wouldn't buy the $2000 'protected' TVs.
@Evan
You really think it's just $200??? It is much more than that.
$200 worth in bootleg movies, maybe
Bomberman: Yeah, just like they didn't buy those darn HDCP TVs.
fail. they have obviously never heard of telesync. fools
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telesync
Yes, out of all the pirated video online very few people want cam'd video and out of those, who the hell cares about video with sound recorded using the built-in mic. Most cam'd video has sound taken from the local induction loop for the deaf or low power radio for the headsets you can get from behind the ticket booth.
It's only a matter of time before cinema owners are forced by the big studios to start taking night vision snaps of movie-going audiences before every screening.
What?
They already do that at my locale cinema. All the screen have night vision cameras in them all the time, piped straight to security. Its great when some little shites are messing around and out of nowhere security comes in and hauls them out.
With the new all-digital cinemas, what they should do to prevent bootlegging _and_ make more money is to lower the cost of the tickets. Lower prices = more customers => more people buy over-priced popcorn and snacks.
Or find a screener version, or one of the early-released Asian copies. Yeah, I'm gonna call this one a non-issue.
I thought that most of these bootleg copies of the films used audio fed from the handicapped accessible sound systems? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telesync)
It seems to me that a watermark that identifies the theatre only would be fine. Why do we need to know where they were sitting? Doesn't the cam angle show us that?
Also, it seems really hard to embed an audio watermark that survives going through an analog medium, especially a crappy cam mic that further gets reencoded to some compressible audio format. The handicapped accessible sound system would actually give the best results.
The only thing this will do is cause a slow down or inability for purchesed media to function.
That's pretty retarded.
But better than being recorded at a theater, I guess.
how are they going to know what showing and such too?
yeah for soundwave!
"By your command."
WDF!!!!! GTFO!!!!!
Are they serious, why waste billions of our dollars (tax payers) on this shit, just for someone like me to figure out how to get around it within 3 weeks of them utilizing it.
Copies sync'd to a direct-line audio source (usually captured from devices to facilitate hard of hearing customers) would pretty much thwart this system. Since copies like this have been around for years and years I dont see this having much impact.
If only the camrippers would upgrade their cameras to HD...
Soundwave superior, MPAA inferior
I always find this confusing. I rarely go to the movies anymore. I only go when a friend feels they "must" see it there.
I'm quite content to wait for a used copy from blockbuster 6-8 months down the road. If I watched more often, I could
always pay the $1 red box or if I really watched a lot I could go the netflix route or the library in some cases.
The only reason I get them at blockbuster is so I have a stock pile of stuff to watch when I want to or in the case of a
few movies, I know i'm going to watch it again farther down the road or loan it to a friend.
What about putting IR projectors on the screen? Most cameras can see IR light and that can easily ruin whatever you are trying to film.
any idiot with half a brain can tell you this won't work, and it's not because of assigned seating or some such nonsense, it's because of the fact that the people are using CAMCORDERS and then compressing their copies. The signal would have to be inaudible to the audience, then get picked up in detail by the cam, then not removed or even so much as altered by compression. The data can't be hidden from listeners without being removed or at least changed by compression software. If this idiocy had any merit then they would be hiding disc IDs steganographically in our blu ray discs, not doing this sort of gimmick.
what they failed to overlook is that many groups that pirate movies from theatres either have the theatre all to themselves and use a boom mic that they place in the middle of the theatre, or they use an assisted listening device so that they get a good signal
I could solve their cheapie-pirate-video-recording-at-the-theater problem:
Flood the marketplace with low-res 320x240 videos for handheld devices, for $2.50 each, thereby outpricing the pirates that use video-recorders and then sell their wares for $5 or more.
Nuff said.
If a pirate can find the wave form, they can scrub it out.
Don't know about the rest of the world,
but most of the theaters I've been to have the audio broadcast over FM waves...
No microphones necessary!
Plus, who watches screeners anyway?? I always wait for the DVDRip. ;)