Managing Rights Management

The BD+ Cat and Mouse Game: Advantage BD+

The programmable security technology used by Fox and more recently Paramount to protect theatrically released films on Blu-ray discs represents an important step forward over previous security technologies, such as the quickly broken CSS for DVDs and AACS encryption key management used on the now dead HD-DVD and on Blu-ray. Although no security technology is perfect, BD+ is an important advance because the programming can be modified in response to successfull cracks. 

There has always been a cat and mouse game between security technologies of all kinds and those who seek to break them. Each side learns from the others successes and failures and improves their defense and offense accordingly. Postings on Slashdot  and the Slysoft website report that there are now at least 19 Blu-ray releases that have not yet been broken.

It appears that the least powerful forms of BD+ were used first in order to determine how crackers / hackers would attack the security system. Having been through several iterations, it seems that the level of security has been upgraded on the newer offerings.

AACS-LA Changes Licensing Terms

As noted earlier, the International Digital Media Alliance (nee the DVD Association)  have been lobbying the AACS licensing authority to reduce fees to accommodate smaller companies. Now the H-Security site reports that AACSLA has reduced fees.

 The Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator (AACS LA) has reduced the licence fees for its mandatory AACS copy protection for Blu-ray Discs. The new scale of charges is primarily intended to benefit small studios and pressing companies that have yet to release any Blu-ray versions of their films due to the high cost.

Licensees no longer need to make a one-off payment of $3,000 for a Provider Agreement. Instead they pay $500 annually and can terminate their contract with the AACS LA at any time. The licence fee for a glass master used for producing a film disc has also been reduced from $1,300 to $500.

Philips Digital Watermarking and Fingerprinting Patent Applications

On Thursdays the USPTO publishes new pending patent applications. Today's Spotlight Applications address aspects of digital watermarking and fingerprinting. Both applications are assigned to Philips (NL). The first application discloses recoverable marks for films. The second application discloses  techniques for fingerprinting, identifying, and synchronizing video.

France Telecom and Thomson Watermarking Patents

On Thursdays the USPTO issues new patents. Both of today's Spotlight Patents concern aspects of digital watermarking. Assigned to Thomson (FR), the first patent addresses techniques for reducing the computational cost of embedding information in digital representations. Assigned to France Telecom (FR), the second patent concerns techniques for watermarking a color image by vectorial approach.

Quallcomm and Searete DRM Patent Applications

On Thursdays the USPTO publishes new pending patent applications. Both of today's Spotlight Applications address various aspects of DRM. Assigned to Qualcomm, the first application discloses techniques for managing policies for time-based licenses on mobile devices. Assigned to Searete, the second application discloses control techniques for object production rights.

Akamai and Advestigo Digital Fingerprinting Patents

On Tuesdays the USPTO issues new patents. Both of today's Spotlight Patents concern aspects of digital fingerprinting. Assigned to Akamai, the first patent deals with a dynamic multimedia fingerprinting system. Assigned to Advestigo, the second patent deals with techniques for indexing and identifying multimedia documents.

Two DRM Patent Applications

On Thursdays the USPTO publishes new pending patent applications. Both of today's Spotlight Applications concern aspects of DRM. The first application discloses techniques for protecting unprotected content, no assignee given. The second application discloses techniques for dealing with digital rights management among apparatuses, also no assignee given.

Philips and Canon Watermarking Patents

On Tuesdays the USPTO issues new patents. Both of today's Spotlight Patents concern various aspects of digital watermarking. Assigned to Philips, the first patent concerns techniques for time domain watermarking of multimedia signals. Assigned to Canon, the second patent concerns techniques for digital watermark embedding/ extraction in accordance with manipulation, editing, and compression.

Philips and Sony DRM Patent Applications

On Thursdays the USPTO publishes new pending patent applications. Both of today's Spotlight Applications address aspects of DRM. Assigned to Philips, the first application discloses digital rights management for retrieving medical data from a server. Assigned to Sony, the second application discloses techniques for video upscaling.

Microsoft and Nokia DRM Patents

On Tuesdays the USPTO publishes new patents. Both of today's Spotlight Patents concern aspects of DRM. Assigned to Microsoft, the first patent concerns techniques for converting content protection from conditional access to DRM systems. Assigned to Nokia, the second patent concerns techniques for dynamically enforcing digital rights management rules.

Watermarking Patent Applications

On Thursdays the USPTO publishes new patent applications. Both of today's Spotlight Applications deal with the use of digital watermarking. The first application discloses techniques relating to a watermark generating circuit. The second application discloses a digital watermarking CMOS sensor.

Microsoft and Digimarc Watermarking Patents

On Tuesdays the USPTO issues new patents. Both of today's Spotlight Patents concern aspects of digital watermarking, which continues to be a "hot topic" relative to DRM patents. Assigned to Microsoft, the first patent addresses techniques for audio watermarking with covert channel and permutations. Assigned to Digimarc, the second patent addresses techniques for content processing using reversable watermarking.

Dolby and Philips Digital Watermarking Patent Applications

On Thursdays the USPTO publishes new pending patent applications. Both of today's Spotlight Applications concern aspects of digital watermarking. Assigned to Dolby Labs, the first application discloses techniques for replacement based watermarking. Assigned to Philips, the second application discloses techniques for watermark embedding using lookup tables.

Microsoft and Purdue Watermarking Patents

On Tuesdays the USPTO issues new patents. Both of today's Spotlight Patents concern aspects of digital watermarking. Assigned to Microsoft, the first patent addresses techniques for media watermarking by biasing randomized statistics. Assigned to the Purdue Research Foundation, the second patent addresses techniques for rights assessment over digital data through watermarking.

Avid and Vital Source DRM Patent Applications

On Thursdays the USPTO publishes new pending patent applications. Both of today's Spotlight Applications concern aspects of DRM. Assigned to Avid, the first application discloses a media editing system using digital rights management metadata to limit import, editing and export operations performed on temporal media. Assigned to Vital Source Technologies, the second application discloses techniques for providing digital rights management of protected content.

Canon and Digimarc Watermarking Patents

On Tuesdays the USPTO issues new patents. Both of today's Spotlight Patents concern various aspects of digital watermarking. Assigned to Digimarc, the first patent addresses techniques for audio watermarking and decoding. Assigned to Canon (JP), the second patent addresses techniques for image processing.

Two Watermarking Patent Applications From Thomson

On Thursdays the USPTO publishes new pending patent applications. Both of today's Spotlight Applications concern aspects of Digital watermarking and both are assigned to Thomson (FR). The first application discloses techniques for digital cinema projector watermarking. The second application discloses techniques for reading digital tatooing.

Civolution and Digimarc Watermarking Patents

On Tuedays the USPTO issues new patents. Both of today's Spotlight Patents concern the use of digital watermarking. Assigned to Civolution (NL), the first patent relates to techniques for watermark-based access control. Assigned to Digimarc, the second patent relates to techniques for embedding auxiliary information within original data.

Macrovision (MSVN) Earnings Call, Blu-ray, and BD+ Adoption

Macrovision (MSVM) recently conducted its quarterly earnings call. The complete transcript is at SeekingAlpha.com here. Here are selected excerpts that deal with Blu-ray and BD+:

In our other category, we continue to expect fairly linear growth, with the fourth quarter likely the strongest, assuming we continue to successfully broaden our licensing of BD+ to the MPAA studios....

In terms of our entertainment business, I'm pleased that we were able to reach a long-term agreement with Paramount for various copy protection solutions. When combined with our other licensees, I believe we have good visibility into ACP remaining on DVD's, until at least the middle of the next decade. Not only did Paramount agree to use RipGuard and ACP, but it also became the second MPAA studio to license the right to use our BD+ Blu-ray copy protection technology.

While home video entertainment spending declined 7% last quarter, according to Video Business, sales of Blu-ray DVDs were up over 100% and analysts forecast remain robust.

While the rollout of BD+ has taken longer than initially hoped, I think Paramount's agreement along with other MPAA trials which we recently began, bode well for the future.

So I believe our entertainment business will continue to be a little soft in the near term given market trends, I expect it will be a steady revenue contributor in the coming years as BD+ grows.

Fingerprinting and Watermarking Patent Applications

On Thursdays the USPTO publishes new pending patent applications. Today's Spotlight Applications concern various aspects of digital fingerprinting and watermarking. Assigned to Barracuda, the first application discloses techniques for Peer-to-Peer traffic control using fingerprinting. Assigned to the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, the second application discloses techniques for reversible image watermarking based on integer to integer wavelet transforms.

Digimarc and AT&T Watermarking Issued Patents

On Tuesdays the USPTO issues new patents. Both of today's Spotlight Patents concern various aspects of digital watermarking. Assigned to Digimarc, the first patent addresses techniques for computing distortion of media signals using embedded data with repetitive structure and log-polar mapping. Assigned to AT&T, the second patent addresses techniques for watermark detection that use a matched filtering technique on a log polar re-mapping of a watermarked signal to detect peaks associated with a repetitive structure of a watermark.

Paramount Licenses Macrovion Technologies Including BD+ For Blu-Ray

Macrovision has announced that Paramount Home Entertainment has licensed copy protection technologies including BD+, the programmable security and DRM technology used with Blu-ray optical discs. 

...Paramount Home Entertainment has agreed to license Macrovision’s content protection products, ACP and RipGuard. ACP and RipGuard provide protection against unauthorized copying of content across packaged media such as DVD as well as electronic channels such as the Internet, cable and DBS.

The license also grants Paramount the right to use Macrovision’s advanced Blu-ray protection technology, BD+. Along with the other technologies, Macrovision’s BD+ provides an additional content protection method for content released on Blu-ray. The Blu-ray format provides consumers with high definition video, a more interactive user experience via BD-Java, and exciting new features available in the most recent Blu-ray players with BD-Live. 

Thus far, Fox is the only studio known to be using BD+. The relationship between Macrovision and the BD+ licensing authority, BD+ Technologies, LLC, remains opaque.

Microsoft and Alcatel Lucent DRM Patent Applications

On Thursdays the USPTO publishes new patent applications. Both of today's Spotlight Applications concern DRM. Assigned to Microsoft, the first application discloses techniques for conditional access to digital rights management conversion. Assigned to Alcatel Lucent (FR), the second application discloses techniques for network-based DRM enforcement.

Motorola and Sony DRM Patents

{Back from travels and client work.]

On Tuesdays the USPTO issues new patents. Both of today's Spotlight Patents address various aspects of DRM.  Assigned to Motorola, the first patent concerns techniques for transferring digital rights. Assigned to Sony (JP), the second patent concerns interfaces for presenting downloadable digital data content format options.

DirecTV and LG Conditional Access Patent Applications

On Thursdays the USPTO publishes new pending patent applications. Both of today's Spotlight Applications concern various aspects of conditional access systems commonly found in cable and satellite broadcast systems. Assigned to DirecTV, the first application discloses techniques for securely requesting download of content to a user device from another device.  Assigned to LG Electronics (KR), the second application discloses a digital broadcasting system and method of processing data.

Digimarc and Apple Watermarking Patents

On Tuesdays the USPTO issues new patents. Both of today's Spotlight Patents address various aspects of digital watermarking. Assigned to digimarc, the first patent concerns layered security in digital watermarking. Assigned to Apple, the second patent concerns the use of watermarking in copy protection.

Watermarking Related Patent Applications

On Thursdays the USPTO publishes new patent applications. Both of today's Spotlight Applications concern the use of digital watermarks. The first of today's applications discloses techniques for rights protection of datasets with dataset structure preservation, no assignee given. The second application discloses ways of incorporating additional information into main information through electronic watermarking technique, assigned to Yamaha (JP).

Auditude Fingerprinting and Toshiba Watermarking Patents

On Tuesday's the USPTO issues new patents. Today's Spotlight Patents concern digital fingerprinting and digital watermarking. Assigned to Auditude, the first patent concern extraction and matching of characteristic fingerprints from audio signals. Assigned to Toshiba, the second patent concerns techniques for embedding and detecting digital watermarks.

Oracle and Yahoo Digital Fingerprint Patent Applications

On Thursdays the USPTO publishes new patent applications. Both of todays Spotlight Applications address aspects of digital fingerprints. Assigned to Oracle, the first application discloses techniques for fraud monitoring and detection using application fingerprinting. Assigned to Yahoo, the second application discloses techniques for providing multimedia content optimization.

MPAA and Sprint DRM Issued Patents

On Tuesdays the USPTO issues new patents. Both of today's Spotlight Patents address digital rights management. Assigned to the MPAA, the first patent concerns an adaptive digital rights management system for plural device domains. Assigned to Sprint, the second patent concerns wireless access provider intermediation to facilliate digital rights management for third party hosted content.