Piracy monitoring system for video

The distribution of music over the internet has already been broadly prevailed, and video contents such as news programs have also started to be distributed by using streaming video technology. As video contents usually require much broader bandwidth than music, most of them on the net have had very low resolution and little commercial value. However, recent improvements on telecommunication infrastructure and progress in compression technique enabled the distribution of high-quality video on the net.

In such a situation, more and more contents owner want to sell their video contents on the net. Distribution itself can be done securely by using IBM EMMS(Electronic Media Management System), but a problem occurs when the user who bought the video contents duplicates and distributes them illegally against the license agreement. Such piracy which includes the illegal distribution on web sites and file-sharing on peer-to-peer networks is expected to cause huge loss to the contents owner.

We enabled the deterrent of circulation of pirate editions by applying our Video DataHiding technology. In case the video content is the pirate edition, a digital watermark can be extracted from it, which is the proof that it has been sold and pirated.

Piracy monitoring system for video

This system aims to prevent the illegal distribution of the video which has been sold on the net. Through the research and development on Video DataHiding, we have targeted mainly on high-quality videos that have equal or better quality than DVD Video. Comparing to these ones, the videos on the net have the following characteristics:

• Resolution : mainly low-resolution, such as 160x120, 320x240, etc.
• Compression : high compression ratio by MPEG4 etc.

System Overview

Here we explain how the system works.

1. Making contents
   
   
   • The contents owner such as movie company embed digital watermarks in the original video contents.
   • The video contents are converted to the appropriate format for distribution on the net.
   
   
   
2. Distribution
   
   
   • The watermarked contents are distributed to the users via the net.
   • IBM EMMS enables secure purchase and distribution.
   
   
   
3. Illegal duplication and distribution
   
   
   • A malicious user who has bought the video contents distributes pirate editions.
     The pirate editions usually suffer some alterations such as file format conversion or D/A, A/D conversion.
   • The pirate editions are uploaded by web sites, or sometimes shared on peer-to-peer networks.
   
   
   
4. Monitoring
   
   
   • The detection agent, which can be the distributor or the third party which contracted to watch piracy, downloads the contents which likely to be the pirate edition.
   
   
   
5. Exposure
   
   
   • If the digital watermark which was embedded in advance was extracted from the downloaded content, it is identified to be the pirate edition.
   • The detection agent warns the malicious user or the web sites to stop the illegal distribution.