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230 points perryflynn | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.209s | source
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john01dav ◴[] No.43747099[source]
Even with all of this onerous encryption and DRM, it's not hard to find pirated copies of movies. It makes me think that the sacrifice in ownership rights for the theaters over their equipment isn't worth it.
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perryflynn ◴[] No.43747502[source]
It also contains watermarks. So theatres which failed to prevent recording will run into serious issues. See https://dcpomatic.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2372
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coppsilgold ◴[] No.43748013[source]
If the software to watermark is widely available (as it appears to be) then an adversary has all they need to corrupt any existing watermark.

These steganographic watermarks depend on no knowledge of the process. If the method is particularly ingenious (one of the inputs is centrally stored entropy which the extractor references by trialing them all) then knowledge of the process alone may not be sufficient to obtain a high quality result (as too much corruption may be required) but could be used to inform the next step:

If you obtain two or more copies of the decrypted content you will be able to diff them and work out what you need to corrupt even without knowledge of the watermarking process. This probably won't work with pirated CAM's or take quite an effort to find the signal in the noise.

Edit: After some more research it looks like they don't actually watermark the distributed data (the movie sent to cinemas). The projector inserts its unique watermark during playback. There may be other secret watermarks put in by distributors not mentioned anywhere.

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1. Aurornis ◴[] No.43748467[source]
> If the software to watermark is widely available (as it appears to be) then an adversary has all they need to corrupt any existing watermark.

The commercial software used to embed watermarks into the digital files is not readily available. It’s also much more advanced than putting an obvious logo on screen. There are techniques to embed signals into the video that survive some amount of compression and aren’t obvious to the viewer.

You can identify signals deep below the noise floor if they’re sufficiently low bandwidth and you know what you’re searching for. See GPS and its ability to work even though the signal is completely lost in the noise until you know what you’re searching for in the noise.