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Company hopes invisible technology will fight film piracy
3 December 2004Invisible technology could soon point the finger toward the camcorder-wielding pirates responsible for that bootleg copy of "The Incredibles" hawked on the street or posted on the Internet.
Hollywood is considering whether the technology, developed by a New Jersey company, could help reduce video piracy, which the major studios contend is costing them more than $3 billion in worldwide revenue.
The secret code imprinted on a movie would not stop film pirates from spreading their grainy counterfeits on the Internet, but it would reveal the identity of the last legitimate user to industry sleuths.
The developers claim their method will improve on existing techniques to create such a code, known as a "watermark" after printing, that can only be seen under certain conditions.
"There are few hotter topics in Hollywood today than forensic watermarking," said Larry Birstock, executive vice president of Post Logic Studios, a post-production company that is working with Sarnoff Corp. of West Windsor on the "iTrace" anti-piracy method.
Sarnoff, known as RCA Laboratories when it opened in 1942, is known for pioneering work in color television, music recording and liquid crystal displays.
The technology was developed by Sarnoff scientists, including Jeffrey Lubin, who used his background in perceptual psychology - vision - to devise a watermark that not only would be invisible to the movie viewer, but would survive even if the movie quality was degraded because of crude copying.
"The Holy Grail example is someone takes a camcorder into a movie theater and pirates a movie, and then compresses it on a digital file and puts it on the Internet," Lubin said.
The watermark occurs gradually, over the course of five minutes, to exploit the tendency of human vision to compensate and ignore images that change slowly, he said.
The watermark itself is neither words nor numbers, but blobs that slowly get either lighter or darker. It is repeated throughout the film. The sequence of light and dark blobs is unique to each legitimate copy, he said.
To crack the code, a pirated copy is compared on a computer, frame by frame, to a version of the film that lacks a watermark.
Since the images on both versions are digitized, the computer can "subtract" the version that lacks a watermark from the bootleg. What is left is the watermark, Lubin said.
As a security precaution, the version lacking a watermark has frames that are much smaller than those used for typical viewing, so it would be of no interest to pirates.
The companies developing iTrace gave demonstrations at Post Logic locations in Hollywood and New York last month, attended by studios including Buena Vista Pictures (Walt Disney), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Miramax, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Bros., Birstock said.
"We've gotten lots of interest," he said, adding that the system will begin to be tested in "real-world" situations at Post Logic facilities later this month.
None of the studios have agreed to start using the technology yet, but if the tests go well, the code could be used on a film as soon as early 2005, he said.
Post Logic, and other post-production studios, are where the final assembly of motion pictures takes place, including the addition of special effects.
"The applications for watermarking are not just for the final result, but it also gives us freedom to move images around during production so that if they get into the wrong hands, they can be traced back to the last rightful owner," Birstock said.
Watermarks already are assisting the industry, for instance, by pinpointing the theater screen where a pirate made a camcorder copy and identifying areas prone to such activity, said John Malcolm, senior vice president and director of worldwide anti-piracy operations for the Motion Picture Association of America.
But if the reproduction is pristine, the trail might lead to a DVD given out by the studios, which have had to adjust how it distributes copies of film in production or of those it wants considered for awards.
Malcolm said he was not familiar with the iTrace system.
Source: Miami Herald
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