posted by
LaminatorX
on Tuesday March 04 2014, @02:58AM
from the the-first-rule-about-Dallas-Buyers-Club dept.
from the the-first-rule-about-Dallas-Buyers-Club dept.
Fluffeh writes:
"In its first DMCA takedown request sent to Google, Voltage Pictures, the folks behind Dallas Buyers Club, a movie that earned Oscars for its leading men, has issued a whole swath of URLs that are apparently too naughty to link to for Google. Of course, some of those links are questionable. An article on CNN promoting the movie, a link to Google FAQ talking about robots.txt and how to block google but the utter gem is a link to Comcast's perfectly legal XFinity service. Google, not impressed with the quality of the whole 388 URL takedown requests, has decided to remove NONE of the links."
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Voltage Pictures Issues DMCA Against... Comcast
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(Score: 4, Funny) by regift_of_the_gods on Tuesday March 04 2014, @03:28AM
Disclaimer: this is speculation on my part, *not* verified. It could be that the parents of one of the film's producers had their cable TV service cut off the morning of the Oscars, because they were 30 days late on their bill.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday March 04 2014, @03:31AM
The riff raff and script kiddies have to try out new toys when they become available. They got some idiot to dream up ways to apply DMCA, just so some executives could feel important. Next up, the lawyers get a turn to feel important by dragging Google's lawyers into a pre-trial hearing.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by prospectacle on Tuesday March 04 2014, @04:18AM
The two just aren't compatible. As storage gets cheaper and networks get faster, the cost of enforcing copyright goes up, and the effectiveness of doing so (even at great cost) goes down.
Even when you get an copy removed from the internet, the people who already downloaded it own flash drives.
The only solution is to have every piece of hardware or software that can play audio or video, perform pattern recognition on every piece of content it's asked to play, then compare the results against a database of registered copyrighted material, and then refuse to play it if it finds a match, but can't find the appropriate licence file on your system. Furthermore this law would have to be enforced.
Every personal recording you made would have to be scanned in this way, whenever you wanted to play or copy it. So if you're not online, you can't play any video or music of any kind. Every open source media player would have to be outlawed, or else you could just download the source, and comment out the line that says "if (!licence_valid()) return false;".
Surely that won't happen. It's only a matter of time before even the most stubborn and ignorant accept that it won't happen. I reckon maybe 10 - 15 years until they all give up and put their next album or movie on a crowd-funding site instead.
If a plan isn't flexible it isn't realistic
(Score: 2, Insightful) by JimmyCrackCorn on Tuesday March 04 2014, @04:24AM
ummmm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_deduplication [wikipedia.org]
Hashes are more common than you seem to imply.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by sjames on Tuesday March 04 2014, @05:51AM
That's the wrong kind of hash. They would have to invent some uber hash that can make sloppy matches AND never be wrong at the same time. Otherwise, people will re-encode their media and get different hashes with little to no difference in what you can see and hear.
To avoid massive backlash, they would have to never screw up and make baby's first birthday go poof. TFA and others suggest they would screw up plenty.
(Score: 1) by JimmyCrackCorn on Tuesday March 04 2014, @06:34AM
I say you have a different perspective and you are incorrect, here is a link for you:
http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2011/04/how-dropbox-sa crifices-user-privacy-for.html [dubfire.net]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Angry Jesus on Tuesday March 04 2014, @07:15AM
Data dedup works on a per block basis (typically 512 byte or 4KB) -- you see it hinted at in your link "if you make a change to a file that's already on Dropbox, you'll only have to upload the pieces of the file that changed." That actually has the magic effect of also letting pieces of different files that happen to have some identical blocks also benefit from the space savings.
That link doesn't appear to go into the exact technical details, it only says that you can tell if someone else has already uploaded the same file by the fact that your upload will only result in "a few kb of communication" - that's not enough detail to say if dropbox does a full-file hash in addition to per-block hashing.
But if we assume that they indeed do full-file hashing, that's only a problem for pirates who are unaware of it. It is trivially easy to break full-file hashing and most per-block hashing by prepending a random number of bytes to the file. Obviously that breaks the full-file hash, but it also breaks practically all per-block hashes because it shifts the starting offset of each block too. For a 4K block-size that means it would require 4K of different hashes for each block in order to reliably detect such a "masked" file -- assuming a 4-byte hash (smallest plausible size) that means it would take 4x more space to store the hash-detection data than to store the file itself.
And that's only with a trivial countermeasure. Most media file formats (mp4, mkv, avi, ts, m2ts, etc) are "interleaved" data streams where every X bytes the file switches from a packet of one data stream to a packet of a different data stream. For example, a packet of video data and then a packet of audio data. More specifically, bluray files (.m2ts) have packets that are roughly 200 bytes each. That means you could insert a packet of random bytes (say a bogus subtitle stream) every 200 bytes which would stump practically any hash comparison but would not change the quality of the media at all, just increase its size.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by sjames on Tuesday March 04 2014, @08:13AM
I have written a de-duplicating filesystem, I know how it works. It also does versioning BTW.
Angry Jesus is quite correct. Further, an mp3 codec will skip junk between the frames based on the sync bits.
If they manage to compensate for that, there's always binary patching the codec to defeat the hash check. For every move they make, there is a countermove. The 'harder' they make it to defeat, the harder it becomes for them to convince a court that someone defeated it.
(Score: 4, Informative) by zimmer on Tuesday March 04 2014, @06:04AM
Perhaps you've not heard of Cinavia?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia [wikipedia.org]
It's non-trivial to defeat, and it doesn't rely on quashing at source, it relies on owning the playback devices, which in this case is every Bluray player made after 2012 since Sony owns Bluray. It also doesn't require any "online" authorization.
It's good enough to stop "most people" that have the money to buy expensive entertainment systems, and it doesn't stop the poors from playing stuff on their computer. They weren't going to buy the source material anyway, so that's a pretty solid win; those that have the capacity to buy do.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by prospectacle on Tuesday March 04 2014, @07:36AM
I had not heard of Cinavia and it appears very technically accomplished.
I see a few minor problems with your argument that it will be a good anti-piracy measure in general, to quote:
'It's good enough to stop "most people" that have the money to buy expensive entertainment systems'
Expensive entertainment system doesn't equal blu ray player. General-purpose computers range in price from cheaper than an average blu-ray player, to far more expensive. An expensive entertainment system might be based around a general-purpose computer (which might include a blu-ray player as one of many means of loading videos).
'and it doesn't stop the poors from playing stuff on their computer'
More generally, it doesn't stop anyone from playing stuff on their computer.
'They weren't going to buy the source material anyway, so that's a pretty solid win; those that have the capacity to buy do.'
This appears to assume that people who want to watch unauthorised copies of movies, and people who buy or rent authorised copies of movies are never (or rarely) the same people. If this is the case, why put any anti-piracy measures in place? If it's true that the people who have the capacity to buy, do, (and those who don't, don't), then copy-prevention is unnecessary.
If a plan isn't flexible it isn't realistic
(Score: 1) by zimmer on Wednesday March 05 2014, @12:00AM
That's kinda my point, it's not true and DRM is designed to stop casual copying by people that can afford to buy.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Angry Jesus on Tuesday March 04 2014, @07:50AM
The only reason cinavia hasn't been cracked is because it is so easy to circumvent. "The poors" (lol) who play pirated stuff on PCs (and other not-bluray media players like roku, wdtv, ipad, etc) are the ones most capable of "scratching the itch" and cracking it. Since cinavia hasn't really pissed off the people who are skilled enough to crack it, it still stands.
Sooner or later some bored teenager will go asperger on the problem for a few months and come up with a cinavia stripper. My guess is that they will do it by decompiling the Cinavia subroutines in a software bluray player like PowerDVD or a firmware load from a hardware player and use that to reverse engineer the algorithm and any needed crypto keys.
PS - Cinavia would be a great stripper name!
(Score: 2, Insightful) by halcyon1234 on Tuesday March 04 2014, @05:38PM
Actually, it fucks over people who paid good money for the entertainment system and the content. I paid (not much) for a copy of Resident Evil 5. I still ripped it to stream to the PS3. 10 minutes into the movie, I got hit with a "fuck you pirate asshole" message and the playback stopped. On content I own, on a device I paid for. I had to hook a computer up to the TV to watch it. Thank fuck the TV doesn't have that shit built in.
It, of course, gets better. After watching that wonderful piece of cinema, I tried to get some actual entertainment out of it. I loaded Phelous' excellent review [phelous.com] for a laugh. Stream through the media server, to the PS3 and-- well, one of the clips he used must have had The Taint on it, because it trigged Cinviva, and I got another "fuck you asshole pirate" message.
On content THEY don't own. On a fair-use review. For a movie I paid for.
Fuck Cinavia.
Original Submission [thedailywtf.com]
(Score: 1) by jonh on Tuesday March 04 2014, @08:14AM
Copyright meh. I'm waiting for when 3D printing becomes mainstream, and the manufacturing industry has to adapt to the new market realities that emerge. I expect that they will react with grace and diginity equal to that of the entertainment industry's reaction to the current state of internet capability.
(Which is to say I expect that whole companies will entirely lose their shit and start suing people left, right and centre over things like designs for forks, chairs and small plastic widgets which are currently hard to find and more expensive than they should reasonably be. It'll be fun.)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mojo chan on Tuesday March 04 2014, @08:24AM
Google should accept these take-down requests and notify the sites being targeted. Let them sabotage their own movie and waste the everyone's money sending counter notices. They will soon find no-one is using their services any more.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 04 2014, @09:12AM
Wouldn't that just shift the effort from copying of media files to copying/manufacturing of license files?
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday March 04 2014, @01:48PM
Copyright isn't compatible with digital-only content but still works perfectly well (or could if the law was sane) with physical media. The media companies are shooting themselves in the feet with their greed, they should be convincing you that physical media has worth and you actually own something, unlike with digital, rather than charging ridiculous prices for something that has no physical presence at all.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by Open4D on Wednesday March 05 2014, @03:28PM
Reminds me of "Windows Genuine Advantage [wikipedia.org]" or always-on DRM [wikipedia.org]. If our society has accepted these, how can we be so sure we won't be forced to have all our music authorized online in the future? (Especially with the ever-increasing availability of Internet connectivity)
Well, they tried [wikipedia.org] to throw someone in jail for making the first Linux DVD player. Don't underestimate politicians' willingness to make the laws demanded by the copyright lobbyists. E.g. ACTA [wikipedia.org], the Mickey Mouse copyright extension act [washingtonpost.com]
I hope you're right, but we have to be very vigilant.
(Score: 1) by sjames on Tuesday March 04 2014, @06:00AM
Google should remove every link of any kind that refers to anything Voltage has ever produced. Make their works totally disappear from the web according to Google. And be sure to never link to any future work of theirs including reviews and where it might be playing or where the BluRay might be sold.
It's the only way to make sure they never contribute to infringement in any way.
Considering that Comcast is apparently in their gun sights, I suggest that cable, Netflix, and any sort of pay-per-view do the same.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by monster on Tuesday March 04 2014, @11:24AM
That would put Google on very dangerous waters. You can't be a major player in an industry field and get a free pass to bully others to do as you will. Maybe it works that way on that side of the pond (since so many of you say businesses own the government, maybe it's at least partially true) but in Europe regulators take a more serious approach to antimonopoly issues. Do I have to remember you how, given the atrocious curriculum of Microsoft regarding the law, the only time it faced serious fines about anticompetitive or delictive behavior was here?
Google may comply with DMCA requests, or take them to their legal team and fight them, but being jerks about them just because they can wouldn't be wise.
(Score: 1) by skullz on Tuesday March 04 2014, @04:25PM
I wish someone would tell Apple that.
(Score: 1) by sjames on Tuesday March 04 2014, @05:02PM
Although I was being somewhat facetious, Voltage HAS made it perfectly plain to Google that they really don't want any mention of their works to exist. They even complained about good reviews of their movie and a legitimate pay-per-view offering. Arguably, Google would be just being extra careful to honor Voltage's clearly expressed wishes.
Be careful what you wish for...
(Score: 2, Funny) by halcyon1234 on Tuesday March 04 2014, @05:42PM
On the contrary, Google should comply with the DCMA, and remove every link/reference to Comcast in existence. When Comcast goes "wtf", Google should just shrug their shoulders and say "Legally, they [Voltage] made us do it. Take it up with them."
Once Comcast sues Voltage into ashes, Google can restore them. Then we'll be down one copyright troll, and up one excellent example of DON'T FUCK AROUND.
Original Submission [thedailywtf.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by elf on Tuesday March 04 2014, @03:17PM
Not that I download movies, but it was interesting to see the amount of websites offering the free download of the movie. I always knew the more links you take down the more other people will fill them with new links but the sheer number of these links is overwhelming.
I like the fact google just dismissed this as a whole, DMCA take downs are abused so much. Until there are financial penalties for doing a bad job this will just continue. I am in favor of having sites totally abusing the system being removed but there has to be some sort of standard in any take down request
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 05 2014, @01:28AM
You want to bring a halt to fraudulent DMCA filings?
Make it an automatic disbarment for any attorney who files (knowingly or unknowingly) a false DMCA take down notice.
Suddenly, everything would become crystal clean.