watermarks for academy awards screener tracing

[Eugen Leitl]

http://www.slate.com/id/2134292/

Memoirs of a Free Geisha
DVD pirates successfully plunder Academy Award screeners.
By Xeni Jardin
Posted Friday, Jan. 13, 2006, at 1:56 PM ET

When Oscar season hits Hollywood, count on three things: teary-eyed
speechifying, long lines at Botox boutiques, and tightened security on the
"screeners" essential to the Academy Awards process. These days, screeners are
high-quality DVDs. The movie studios send them to voters as a convenience,
since academy members, at least the conscientious ones, have dozens of movies
to watch before filling out their ballots.

But there's one big problem. Academy members and movie production workers may
wring their hands over piracy in public, but backstage some of them are
apparently file-swapping like tweens. Despite studio attempts to prevent leaks
online this year, and the threat of jail time and steep fines for movie
pirates, at least four screeners are on file-sharing networks already. More
may follow.

During Jack Valenti's reign as head of the Motion Picture Association of
America, panic over awards-season leaks reached such heights that studios
banned all screeners in 2003. This miffed academy voters, who had become
accustomed to the comforts of viewing at home. The ban was later reversed, but
the problem didn't go away. In recent years, screeners have been issued on
DVDs that contain watermarks.hidden data strings.used to trace leaks back to
their sources. Other anti-piracy measures include encrypting DVDs so that they
will only play in special machines supplied exclusively to voters.

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Academy members or others tapped in to the screener-distribution chain have
already posted copies of Syriana, Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, North Country,
and Memoirs of a Geisha to the peer-to-peer file-sharing network BitTorrent,
complete with "FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION" blurbs and studio IDs.

When screener distribution became widespread in the mid-1990s, leaks were not
considered as significant a threat as they are today. Sharing a VHS with five
of your nonvoting buddies back 1997 wasn't a big deal. Seeding BitTorrent with
a ripped screener of a 2005 blockbuster today means hundreds of thousands of
peers might bloom within hours. Whoever uploaded the ripped 2006 screeners may
not have realized that the files contain hidden information that could end up
busting them.

Jian Zhao is chief technology officer in the content security division of
Thomson, the parent company of Technicolor and other firms that serve the
movie business. One of the tools Zhao developed at Thomson is a watermarking
program that inserts a short string of numbers throughout the file. "We're
inserting that invisible stamp in each frame . and we can we design a
different stamp for each recipient," explains Zhao as he demos the app for me
in his Burbank office. Zhao closes the app and launches another.this one is a
watermark-detection program. He opens a watermarked movie that he downloaded
from the Internet. The app slowly chomps through the movie, frame by frame,
spitting watermark digits back on the screen like black seeds.
Cross-referencing that information with a database of award voter names helps
investigators figure out whodunit.

The Internet tracking firm BayTSP monitors pirated movie traffic for industry
clients. They reported the online presence of this year's screener crop in
December 2005. The firm declined to confirm exactly who its clients are or
which watermarked screeners it discovered online, but spokesperson Jim Graham
says the pirates failed to erase the invisible stamps.

However, Princeton University computer-security researcher Alex Halderman says
the technology has its limits: "It's just one piece of evidence, not a
conclusive link that proves you or I released a screener on to a peer-to-peer
network. There are many opportunities for a movie to be intercepted or stolen
after we watch it, so it's not conclusive proof of who committed the act.and
it can only help after the act happens." And while developers may strive for
sound and image tags that are simultaneously invisible, traceable, and
unerasable, even the technology's strongest advocates admit there's no such
thing as a perfect watermark. As the technology improves, so do abilities for
more determined downloaders to detect and delete it.

Still, proponents argue that the technology has proven value as a deterrent.
In 2004, two men were prosecuted for distributing pirated copies of academy
screeners. The FBI said that for three years, actor and academy voter Carmine
Caridi, 70, shipped dozens of screener DVDs to Russell Sprague of Illinois.
Sprague ripped and uploaded those movies, but the files contained watermarks
that investigators used to trace their origin.

Sometimes, the steps taken to secure screeners render them inaccessible to the
people who need to see them. Organizers of the U.K.'s counterpart to the
Oscars, the BAFTA Awards, supplied members with encoded DVDs for Steven
Spielberg's Munich that would only play on Cinea DVD players provided for that
purpose. But BAFTA voters who received the discs soon learned they'd been
mastered for Region 1.that's North America.instead of Europe. Effectively, the
discs were unwatchable for voters, meaning Munich will not have a fair shot.

Though he's long gone from the MPAA, Jack Valenti may yet have the last laugh.
Even more than technology or forensics intelligence, the screener system
relies on human trust.the trust that those responsible for processing,
distributing, and reviewing screeners won't do what this latest round of leaks
proves they have.

Here in Hollywood, you just can't trust anyone.

Xeni Jardin is co-editor of BoingBoing.net and tech culture contributor to
Wired and NPR's Day to Day.

--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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