Microsoft’s New Patent Identifies Pirated Content: Flags Repeat Offenders | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft’s New Patent Identifies Pirated Content: Flags Repeat Offenders

anonymster.com

117 pointsmarcolanger104 comments

It never ceases to amaze and frustrate me that almost every time I buy a legal DVD, I am punished by being required to watch non-skipable content warning me that pirating is illegal (I can just hear the irony dripping). This can often be followed by adverts and previews that are either difficult to skip or impossible.

All this combined with the fact that I probably had to wait longer to be able to purchase the DVD legally in the first place, because of regional restrictions...

Any anti-pirating scheme really should encourage, as its first priority, a smooth, hassle-free, user experience - or risk encouraging people to go over to the dark side.

I buy what I feel is worth buying, then pirate the superior version. I actually own blu-rays even though I have no actual blu-ray player.

My problem with that approach is that it provides financial support to companies that are using DRM. There's no incentive to change.

In some countries you'd still probably be sent an invoice to pay a fine for pirating anyway.

It's amazing how long that experience has been around and most people still put up with it; this image is at least from 2010 if not earlier:

http://i.imgur.com/dXiNAhu.jpg

Its interesting to read that imgurl is been constantly asked to take this image down. Boy I would pay few bucks to read andyof the letters from RIAA/MPAA/lawyers et al justyfing its removal... must be priceless fun ;)

It never ceases to amaze and frustrate me that often I can't even BUY the freaking DVD, or stream the damned thing because "they" decided to not release it on my country/region or decided to block my country from accessing their services.

Being assholes to their customers is what is killing them, not "piracy".

To quote Gabe Newell "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem", when pirating is more convenient than buying legally you are incentivizing it on multiple levels.

This has proven true time and time again for myself. Steam, Spotify, Netflix, and Sling all lead to the elimination of me pirating media. And I'm a lot more inclined to spend money on the occasional game/album/movie/show that those services don't offer than I was before.

From the artist's perspective, it's not much different. They don't make much off streaming.

Sounds like a problem between the artist and their label. Clearly the labels have no issue with the money paid out to them for the streaming rights.

Exactly! Like, you subscribe to Prime Video and Netflix, and still can’t watch even some Netflix shows, because Netflix licensed them exclusively to a TV channel that has no online offering and costs 60€/month. Or you can’t watch Amazon Prime because "you are using Linux with a multi-screen setup, please connect only one screen to watch this content in HD"

No thanks. Nowadays I pay for Amazon Prime, and if I can’t get something there, I just pirate. Simple as that. I don’t try to buy it anymore, I don’t even try to get it in another way. If you want my money, provide your content via Amazon Prime, or maybe Netflix (if they ever stop licensing out their own content exclusively to competitors)

Not only that but I've seen a similar message involving a video game trying to stop it's users from using Private Servers backfire and now people are aware they don't have to pay for xyz so what happens next is more people don't pay for xyz. So those messages do the opposite, instead of convincing people to stop doing something bad, you now have your entire legal unsuspecting audience knowing they can.

I feel that it is super obvious- if you want someone to do a certain thing, make the thing you want them to do be the easier and more convenient option if you want people not to pirate stuff, make legally owning it better and easier than pirating

>Another major blow will be to services such as Pirate Bay and Kodi.

For anyone unfamiliar, KODI is an excellent, open source media center program available on most major platforms. It started as a homebrew project (called XBMC) on the original Xbox game console. The name has become synonymous with piracy to some because there are popular 3rd party add-ons which allow streaming of potentially copyrighted media via links to files on cloud hosted file storage services. Depending on a user's jurisdiction, these files may be illegal to stream without appropriate permission.

Sort of like BitTorrent in that it has legitimate and better known illegitimate uses?

Sort of like the internet :)

Nice come back, but for BitTorrent the illegal use case constitutes probably more than 95%

The stats for the Internet aren't much better, spam, porn etc....

Most (but not all!) porn is legal. Spam, in many jurisdictions, is legal when selling something legal.

Most of the porn is illegal because it violates copyrights, the 10 times reencoded scenerips on PornTUBE are not exactly official.

Most places have no solicitation laws and other privacy laws that do make spam illegal.

You also neee to count in piracy and general violations of copyright laws; you'll be surprised just how much content on youTube is illegal search for "full movie" or "last week tonight full show" and you'll gea quite a few legitimate hits.

Like it or not from a logistical point of view illegal content makes up the bulk of the traffic, that said it isn't any different in any other field if we take global shipping then illegal arms and drugs probably make a nice chunk of global shipping (revenue wise) there also it doesn't mean we need halt all global and local logistics operations.

Illegal porn rips on aggregate sites are uploaded by the producer themselves, who are usually a sister company or subsidiary. This is done in a very nudge nudge wink wink manner to drive ad impressions and sell exclusive content

It might be higher in volume because the data size for a single illegal movie is several orders of magnitude the size of text based media.

That's because the copyright law is built around "default deny" and infinitely prolonged copyright period.

Once you take both out of equation, the cases of content either abandoned by owners or reasonably old will take more than 5%.

Does no-one see the irony in patenting an anti-piracy standard? If it is remotely effective, it will, itself, be pirated. If it is not effective, it will only make the lives worse of people who choose not to circumvent it.

Additionally, I just do not see how this passes subject-matter standards post Alice.[1] Seriously disappointing to see vague algorithms of this type receive patent protection.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Corp._v._CLS_Bank_Intern...

Not ironic. Just very fitting. They're using a failed system (patents) to try to monopolise their (probably very obvious) method of enforcing a failed monopoly system.

This is one of my pet peeves with movies as well.

When I buy a DVD, I have unskippable trailers and an ad that warns me not to pirate it at the beginning. Seriously, it's about 10 minutes of crap that I need to watch to see the movie I f*ing paid for! The viewing experience with pirated movies is much more enjoyable and streamlined. I get the movie, double click on it and booom - it starts right away.

I mean, I've torrented every single DvD I own and the disks sit in the attic. Strangely, not once I have missed the lack of "hilarious cut scenes" or "Directors commentary" features.

Man I love clicking on a folder, scrolling for 30 secs and pressing play and the actual film just starts playing. The only thing that it fails on is remembering where I am in a series. So for eg. Blackadder I'd rather just stick on Netflix thank play in VLC

> The only thing that it fails on is remembering where I am in a series. So for eg. Blackadder I'd rather just stick on Netflix thank play in VLC

You can easily solve that one with something like Plex :-)

Upvote for Plex. Setting up a Plex box in my house was astonishingly easy and we now use that more than Netflix.

Yep, only issue I have is that I now forget my netflix series because when I go to plex, my progress with those series isn't tracked or shown.

plus if you I guess do want to pirate, sonarr and radarr are freaking amazing to have a long with a plex server.

I've noticed Plex has stopped working with my TVs. It's kinda a bummer that the only help, that those on forums are willing to give is "buy a better TV". Is spending another 700 bucks really a tenable solution?

Apple TV Gen 4 has a Plex app that works extremely well. Still $130 to put down but you also get all the other things it does.

It's not a great solution, but there are several "streaming sticks" like the Roku, Chromecast, or FireTV for less than $50 you can buy and plug into your current TV.

I had been hearing about Plex for a while and when I bought a Seagate Personal Cloud drive, I decided to give it a try.

I like it. I have moved a lot of media to it and I can watch it all at my convenience from multiple devices or computers in my house.

I have young children and after they destroyed several of the kid-movie DVDs I gave them, this was a godsend.

Can you install Plex in a standalone fashion, or do you need to set up a server and client?

With Kodi it'd just be a case of install and point it at your media directories.

If you don't mind using a web client (and you shouldn't, it's pretty good), you can install the Plex server on your machine and then open the web client on the same machine.

I just keep a little document in the same directory.

    echo 9 > last-episode
    mpv s01e09.mkv

If you're using mpv, do this instead:

mpv tvshow/season1

Now use Shift+Q to exit. The next time you run mpv tvshow/season1, it will resume from where you left.

Thanks for the tip!

Install mpv and use Shift+Q to exit. That way when you open the folder again in mpv it will start exactly where you left it.

The original "Barbershop" DVD had over 25 minutes of non-skippable previews and ads on it... So much so, that when the DVD player started skipping 5 minutes in (scratches on netflix rental), I never got around to watching it later (or asking for a different disc).

That's when I started ripping DVD content, just so I could watch it as the studios had gone way too far.

Yes. Thank you, Microsoft, for stifling the anti-pirating industry.

By the way, pirating seems to be in the interest of big non-content companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google.

The iPod became big because of pirating (what teenager can afford 64GB of music in the first place?), and this also holds for YouTube.

EDIT: fixed iPad -> iPod

Do you mean iPod? I never saw the iPad as a 'music listening device', but I never really used one though :-)

I presume this will have the same faults as YouTube's Content ID:

- Can't identify when it is fair use.

- Can't identify when the user has licensed the content outside of the system for use.

Youtube and Soundcloud's content ID engines effectively killed the genre of mashups. There was a pretty vibrant community with a lot of new artists on both, with rooms on plug.dj and even turntable.fm back in the day. Then the content ID engines hit and one by one every mashup artist (with the exception of girltalk) had their work taken down by poor fingerprinting. It was such a massacre we took to making http://mashup.fm which used youtube-dl to cache everything locally, but by then it was too late. All the artists stopped creating content because they didn't want to be permabanned from these huge services.

I worry what by-catch Microsoft's engine will leave in its wake.

Warning for those with sound turned on. The website automatically plays music at full volume.

I hate this. There really should be a setting in browser so that I don't allow sound from any website unless I explicitly click the speaker icon in tab bar. Annoying as hell.

If you use Firefox, go to about:config and set "media.autoplay.enabled" to false. A few web sites throw a fit when they can't autoplay, but that's a price I'm willing to pay.

It's probably one of the worst faux pars you can make in UX. I'd appreciate it if they wouldn't announce to everyone in the bathroom what I'm browsing

That’s actually a default in the latest nightly. Pretty nice IMO.

It'll be a default on Firefox 55. Or you can try the current Nightly.

YES!!! Thank you! :)

EDIT: though it's not exactly what I had in mind... I want content to autoplay as normal, just the sound should be muted until I unmute it...

Or even:

- Can't identify when the user is the actual copyright holder who the accuser licensed the content from.

These automated systems are always going to have lots of false positives because they only know as much about the copyright status of a work as they have been told. The data entry process that drives them is inevitably going to be incomplete and error prone.

Copyright enforcement in the digital age is a hard problem that I've not seen a clear solution for. The legal system around copyright that exists today is not scalable enough to handle the volume of works being produced and distributed. It's not clear what sort of system could ever hope to handle the rate of disputes coming from a site like Youtube in a judicious and economical fashion.

You missed the biggest one:

- Can't identify content that has been cropped or had some sort of filter added.

It's amazing how many blatantly copyrighted videos (tv shows and movies) like this still appear on youtube, with ads.

Sure it can. The number of tricks you have to do to a video to circumvent the content ID system makes the video difficult to watch. For example, you have to stretch the audio by some percentage or else the audio fingerprinting will ID it regardless of your filters.

The early circumventers did, but the newer ones don't seem to mess with the audio as much. I suspect they either went a bit too far with the initial modifications or content-id had to be dialed back a bit.

For example, you have to stretch the audio by some percentage or else the audio fingerprinting will ID it regardless of your filters.

A few years ago, sped-up music was uploaded to YouTube in an attempt to bypass content ID, and with the realisation that this actually made it sound better, a whole new genre --- Nightcore --- was born.

...or so the story goes, but I've seen this explanation a few times before and it does make sense.

“Either he’s playing classical music at 78 RPM, or I’m still dreaming.”

http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1987/02/01

It looks like pirates have found enough ways around Content ID, since a lot of movies are available with the original + "full movie" in the headline... That's how I became fan of Air Crash Investigation and Mythbusters, btw.

1) Fair use is incredibly hard to identify, especially as the intent in the center of all of it.

2) This is easy once you go multi-site. We [0] are actually doing that across many sites.

[0] https://pex.com

1) Duh. Doesn't stop companies like Microsoft and YouTube saying "we've solved the copyright problem!" though.

2) This pex thing you've linked doesn't seem to cover the use-case I had in mind. I'm working on an analysis of XYZ Hollywood movie with a number of people working remotely (for argument's sake, with the consent of the publisher). I stick it in my OneDrive and share a link to them and they download it.

MS blocks it because I'm "sharing copyrighted materials" and they don't have the context in which I'm doing it legally.

If all you need to do is transfer the file, couldn't you just use something like WinRAR to archive the file, possibly with a password?

Pirates already do the same thing.

Why should I? I thought we were supposed to be making life easier by giving our lives to the six or seven companies that dominate our internet lives.

Sure, but you're using _their_ free platform to host _your_ content that _may_ be fair use. They have the right to be as legally cautious as they want on stuff appearing on their platform.

You have the right to put your stuff on your own platform without such oversight if you want and directly deal with the legality.

After the live YouTube feature added there was a lot of channel with the Simpsons, I saw yesterday that they flipped horizontally the episode in order to don't be tracked.

I must be missing something here.

I read the entire patent and it repeatedly mentions file metadata and a "content flag" that can be toggled and read to determine if there is restricted or prohibited content included in the file or stream.

So what I think this says is a copyright owner notices that you are sharing XYZ's latest movie and files a claim with the cloud provider. That metadata flag is then toggled and sharing is no longer allowed and there is some master server somewhere that tracks how many times files you have uploaded have been flagged. For this they can get a patent?

Why couldn't someone just change the metadata? Or presumably change the checksum?

(I think I have a really great way to actually implement something like this but I have to fill out a patent application before I tell anyone.)

> a patent which will allow the Redmond-based tech giant to identify and block users who stream files illegally over the web.

NO. Patents do not allow you to do whatever. Inventions do that. Patents give you a legal monopoly over whatever it describes. Either they actually made technology for this or they didn't, and that is unrelated to whether they have a patent.

It's an example of metonymy, where related objects are substituted for each other. Metonymy is a common trope. It doesn't reflect some kind of misunderstanding of the world, and if you're going to complain about metonymy you might as well complain about metaphor and irony too.

No, this is just wrong, not metonymy. It stood out to me too.

That metonymy argument would be more correct if we knew that the technology existed. Patents are filed all the time for technology that doesn't really exist (or maybe even can't really work).

Encryption --- along with unenlightening file naming, etc. --- seems like it would make this pretty trivial to bypass. Share the encrypted file and share the keys somewhere else.

OK maybe I'm missing something, but what is new about this patent? The schematic "how does it work" figure 6 is nothing but a napkin design. Anybody with half a braincell can make that up within 5 minutes after being introduced to the perceived problem. In other words: the subject of the patent looks to be very obvious, to me.

OTOH This might discourage other companies from implementing a similar idea, which is something at some users will appreciate.

I think the innovation is in the detection algorithm that isn't shown in the article, and in the fact that it happens when the data is shared, rather than applied on data sitting in a personal account, or data identified by third-party (e.g. the rightsholder). The patent isn't available online just yet, it seems, so I can't say for certain.

https://torrentfreak.com/images/msrep.pdf

All US Patents are available online, there just isn't anything innovative or novel anywhere in the patent that I think justifies it as anything more than patent trolling.

There is nothing new. I suspect the writer of the article did not really study the patent [1]. Reading the summary and part of the text I got quite clear impression that this is ONLY about counting how many times a certain user has shared something prohibited and then blocking users who do that too many times. I don't see this patent having anything to do with actually recognising infringing content.

So I don't see any real invention here. I think the only explanation for patenting this is that if you don't do it, somebody else might and then you may need to fight in court. Since filing patents is cheap (compared to going court over them and on Microsoft scale) it just makes sense to patent everything you can.

[1] https://www.google.com/patents/US9614850

It'd be nice if companies would stop wasting their time trying to enforce copyright.

You wouldn't say that if it was your copyright they were enforcing.

Except I would. I just use copyright to prove I made something. Everything I do is released under CC BY-SA or (for my code) Expat/MIT licensing. Things should open, information deserves to be free, especially when people are no longer making money from the content.

I bet you still wouldn't be happy if someone violated CC BY-SA or Expat/MIT licensing, and didn't even attribute to you. Thus, copyright still serves a purpose to you, and even for the minimal set of actions you want, it needs to be enforceable.

I agree that copyright law, as it currently stands is usually mostly about screwing the little guy, in favour of some big corporation in perpetuity, but that's a separate argument to enforcement which should apply equally to all works, including yours.

>I bet you still wouldn't be happy if someone violated CC BY-SA or Expat/MIT licensing, and didn't even attribute to you. Thus, copyright still serves a purpose to you, and even for the minimal set of actions you want, it needs to be enforceable.

Happy? No. Unhappy enough to pursue legal action? Hell no.

>I agree that copyright law, as it currently stands is usually mostly about screwing the little guy, in favour of some big corporation in perpetuity, but that's a separate argument to enforcement which should apply equally to all works, including yours.

True. I'm not arguing completely against copyright law, I just wouldn't sue someone for violating my license =P

In XXth century, Communism was about nationalizing companies.

In XXIst century, Communism will be about only recognizing a copyright duration of 10 years, after which the content is free to copy. And compiled content must be open-source.

It's the nationalization of content. If explained this way, I would be in favour of that kind of communism, and there's hope that it would participate to sharing more knowledge, be safer and advancing humanity faster. But given all countries are constrained by the WTO bindings, it would take a rogue nation like Cuba or China to implement that.

China doesn't enforce copyright because it's a benefit to them right now. you bet your bottom dollar they will if and when it becomes a liability (e.g., they start to invent things that are novel, but is easily copied).

> nationalization of content

Making content available to the whole humanity is completely different from "nationalization".

You clearly don't know what communism is.

"Communism" may be a distracting term, but I'm just going to throw this out for a fictional reference along the same general lines:

http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Infosocialism

I can't get over the triviality of that flowchart in the article. The system is well and truly broken. If anything this just allows Microsoft to extract money from any other company trying to prevent piracy on their cloud storage.

Doesn't Dropbox already do this? IIRC they let you store anything, but block sharing a file if its hash is found in some blacklist.

Yep.

Dropbox scans user uploaded content pretty aggressively, well beyond what is legally required. It won't always do this in a visible way, either. I know child abuse images will get you silently reported to LEO (as well as anyone who views the link), but I'm not sure about copyrighted content. Personally, I would refrain from storing any pirated songs or movies on Dropbox, since I think they'd be amenable to bulk snitching to large copyright holders.

Flip a LIB somewhere in the file and it works fine, though.

Just for a moment, combine this patent with Microsoft's announced willingness to look through your content.

> we will access, transfer, disclose, and preserve personal data, including your content [...] when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to: > > protect the rights or property of Microsoft, including enforcing the terms governing the use of the services

Sounds like a potential nightmare, especially if they can't tell the difference between legitimate backups and pirated software; of which the difference is only whether you've bought the original or not.

Looks like Microsoft urged to file the patent in 2013 when DropBox started doing this. Either as a potential weapon for patent wars or "just in case".

Thank you Microsoft! Everyone will start licensing your technology so that now there will be only a single point of failure. And, because you're Microsoft, there will be a failure.

What are they doing this for? Even honest people don't want to work with tattletales.

Pirate countermeasure: store encrypted files and decrypt "on the fly".

So as the file is downloaded it will check or while its being played?

That is a bad move by windows.

No news. This is for cloud services. It is not on windows from what I understood.

If it has the side effects of people rolling their own clouds - the better. We really need something better anyway. The last major innovation was bittorrent in 2004...

So where will this be used? On bing or Windows 10?

>The company aims to use the patent to disable prohibited content and identify repeat offenders in service provider storage systems.

So onedrive, more than likely.

Windows 10 is sort of the elephant in the room here. M$ absolutely could use these methods to determine what copyrighted material you have stored locally. However it's not as easy to say for certain that you've done anything wrong. Cracking down on sharing through their platforms is the low-hanging fruit, scouring your hard drive for known pirated files comes later.

My new patent 07-875545-99: [ SOMEBODY READ THIS ] -> [ PROFIT]

Reply on news.ycombinator.com