Managing Rights Management

Anonos and Proclus Blockchain and Rights Management Patents

New patents are issued by the USPTO on Tuesdays. Today's Spotlight Patents continue the theme of blockchains (distributed ledgers, smart contracts) and rights management broadly construed. Assigned to Anonos, the first patent addresses techniques for enforcing centralized privacy controls in de-centralized systems. Assigned to Proclus, the second patent addresses techniques for securing a blockchain with proof-of-transactions.

WSJ: RIAA Drops MediaSentry, Picks Up DtecNet

The Wall Street Journal reports that the RIAA has dropped MediaSentry (Safenet), an application that finds and documents copyrighted music on consumer and student PCs. The information is then used as evidence in the RIAA-instigated lawsuits against individuals. Instead, the RIAA will use software or servies from Danish software provider DtecNet.

The RIAA announced last month that it planned to curtail its practice of filing mass lawsuits for copyright infringement. However, it still plans to closely monitor people it believes are illegally uploading copyrighted music, and continue with the legal action it already has in progress. It says it will still file lawsuits for exceptional cases.

In place of MediaSentry, the RIAA says it will use Copenhagen-based DtecNet Software ApS. The music industry had worked with DtecNet previously both in the U.S. and overseas, and liked its technology, said RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy.

Obviously, this apparent change in strategy and technology doesn't do anything to fix the record industry's broken business model.

BD+ Broken Yet Again

As many news outlets (e.g., CDRInfo, ) have noted, the latest version of BD+, the virtual machine based software that protects movies and games on Blu-ray discs.  The cat and mouse game continues.

CNET: The RIAA's Letter to ISPs

cnet.com has obtained a copy of letters sent by the RIAA to ISPs regarding P2P downloading of music files.

Please bear in mind that this letter serves as an official notice to you that this network user may be liable for the illegal activity occurring on your network. This letter does not constitute a waiver of our members' rights to recover or claim relief for damages incurred by this illegal activity, nor does it waive the right to bring legal action against the user at issue for engaging in music theft. We assert that the information in this notice is accurate, based upon the data available to us. Under penalty of perjury, we submit that the RIAA is authorized to act on behalf of its member companies in matters involving the infringement of their sound recordings, including enforcing their copyrights and common law rights on the Internet.

It's unfortunate that the major labels do not recognize that their fundamental business model is substantially broken and that these rear guard actions will not put humpty dumpty back together again. The money spent would be far better used to work toward thinking through the challenging problems that come with business model change and then implementing a new course.

Judge postpones hearing in key RIAA lawsuit

CNet reports that a hearing regarding the RIAA initiated copyright infringement suit in Rhode Island federal court against Joel Tenenbaum has been postponed until January 6. As reported here and elsewhere, Harvard professor Charles Nesson and Law School students have intervened in Massachusetts Federal Court to get the copyright law under which the RIAA brings suit declared unconstitutional.

U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner's courtroom in Boston is where most of the action has been taking place; the Rhode Island proceedings are a sideshow to the main event.

One hint at her possible receptivity to the Harvard students' argument can be found in her remarks at a hearing earlier this year: "There is a huge imbalance in these cases. The record companies are represented by large law firms with substantial resources. The law is also overwhelmingly on their side. They bring cases against individuals, individuals who don't have lawyers and who don't understand their legal rights...the formalities of this are basically bankrupting people...At a certain point after 133 cases in my court and countless around the country, the plaintiffs are going to realize this is making no sense and making them look bad."

Blu-ray BD+ Resealed, At Least For A While

Slashdot, Engadget, and others are reporting that there are now at least 16 Blu-ray titles that cannot be cracked by SlySoft because of updated / upgraded BD+ programming on the optical disc. The Engadget article also presents a useful BD+ architecture drawing.

As I've noted earlier, the BD+ VM-based programmable security technology can be adapted to particular attacks. I would not surprise me if the weakest implementation was put out there originally as a kind of "honey pot" to see the kinds of attacks pirates used. Having done that, it's not surprising that BD+ has been resealed. This "cat and mouse game" will go on indefinetely.

Harvard Professor Fires Back At RIAA

The AP reports that Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson has filed a law suit in Boston federal court challenging on constitutional grounds the RIAA's aggressive legal tactics against individuals.

Nesson argues that the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999 is unconstitutional because it effectively lets a private group — the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA — carry out civil enforcement of a criminal law. He also says the music industry group abused the legal process by brandishing the prospects of lengthy and costly lawsuits in an effort to intimidate people into settling cases out of court.

Nesson, the founder of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said in an interview that his goal is to "turn the courts away from allowing themselves to be used like a low-grade collection agency."

Yea.

Blu-ray Piracy

The WSJ is reporting (subscription require) that pirates in Asia are providing high-quality copies of films released on Blu-ray discs.

Pirates are taking advantage of the fact that many viewers can't tell the difference
between Hollywood's new high-definition, higher-priced Blu-ray movie format
and a bootleg format -- called AVCHD -- that's a grade lower: AVCHD uses 720
horizontal lines of resolution instead of Blu-ray's 1,080, but still offers a sharper
picture than an ordinary DVD on high-definition television sets.

ATI and Samsung Copy Protection Issued Patents

On Tuesdays the USPTO issues new patents. Today's Spotlight Patents deal with aspects of video copy protection in analog and analog/digital video. Assigned to ATI Technologies, the first patent concerns the detection of copy protection indicators or redistribution control indicators in an analog video signal. Assigned to Samsung, the second patent concerns A/D conversion without eliminating copy protection signals.

Who Killed The Home Theater PC (HTPC)?

Writing in Ars Technica, Nate Anderson says the death of the Home Theater PC may be ascribed to several factors, including various rights management / copy protection / encryption technologies.

While the recording industry has largely learned its lesson from DRM, the movie business still thinks it's a great idea. You want to rip your legally-acquired DVDs or Blu-ray discs to your HTPC to create a disc-less movie archive? Forget it.

You can thank encryption schemes like CSS (DVD), AACS (HD DVD and Blu-ray), and BD+ (Blu-ray) for preventing this common request. The issue isn't largely technical, either. Despite the time and money invested in creating these schemes, bypassing them isn't particularly difficult, though the US DMCA will make a criminal of you for doing so. (There's a reason the AnyDVD guys are based in Antigua.)

Selectable Output Control: MPAA, Others Lobby FCC

Ars Technica reports that the MPAA has petitioned the FCC to enable Selectable Output Controls (SOC) on theatrically released movies distributed via cable and satellite prior to their release on DVD.

SOC lets video distributors close down analog or digital output on broadcasts, which could be used to force HD downscaling to SD and/or block output to devices such as DVRs, an option that MPAA says will allow it to more securely distribute early-run studio films on TV. "The Petitioners' theatrical movies are too valuable in this early distribution window to risk their exposure to unauthorized copying," MPAA wrote to the FCC in June. "Distribution over insecure outputs would facilitate the illegal copying and redistribution of this high value content, causing untold damage to the DVD and other 'downstream' markets."

A Textbook Case of Piracy

The Boston Globe reports that textbook piracy is becoming rampant.

"We think it's a significant problem," said William Sampson, manager of infringement and antipiracy at Cengage Learning Inc., a reference book publisher in Farmington Hills, Mich. Sampson said that in any given month, 200 to 300 of the company's titles are posted illegally as free Internet downloads. Distributing books for free without permission violates copyright laws and deprives publishers of revenue.

What's Up With Home DVD Copying?

A survey funded in part by copy protection and DRM company Macrovision reports that home copying of DVDs in the US and the UK is up. Roughly a third of respondents in the UK (36%) and the US (32%) report copying DVDs in the previous six months compared with 25% in 2007.

Copying of movies declined slightly between 2007 and 2008 from 76% to 67% of respondents while copying of TV shows increased from 42% to 61% of respondents.

Textbooks Shared On BitTorrent

[tip o' the hat to Farber's IP list]. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the Association of American Publishers (AAP) is increasingly concerned about the use P2P BitTorrent to share textbooks.

One Web site, called Textbook Torrents, promises more than 5,000 textbooks for download in PDF format, complete with the original textbook layout and full-color illustrations. Users must simply set up a free account and download a free software program that uses a popular peer-to-peer system called BitTorrent. Other textbook-download sites are even easier to use, offering digital books at the click of a mouse.

M.P.A.A. Accuses Laser Printers of File Sharing Copyright Violations - Really

Brad Stone's NYTimes blog entry describes research conducted by Tadayoshi Kohno, an assistant professor, Michael Piatek a graduate student, and Arvind Krishnamurthy, a research assistant professor, all at the University of Washington. The research was directed toward understanding  how the M.P.A.A. identifies those who received nastygrams from the trade association. Stone blogicle says:

Nate Lawson on Designing and Breaking DRM

Nate Lawson is a co-creator of the BD+ security layer on Blu-ray. He gave a talk at the recent RSA conference.that covers techniques for attacking DRM. His slides are posted here and are worth reviewing. Lawson writes:

Of course, people in glass houses should not throw rocks. As someone who had a part in developing BD+, I am biased toward thinking a different approach than mere broadcast encryption [e.g. AACS] is the only thing that has a chance of success in this rough world. The first BD+ discs were cracked in mid-March, and it remains to be seen how effective future updates will be. Unfortunately, I can’t comment on any details here. We’ll just have to watch and see how things work out the rest of this year.

2008 will prove whether a widely deployed scheme based on software protection is ultimately better or equivalent to the AACS approach. I have a high degree of confidence it will survive in the long run....

EXCLUSIVE - Macrovision's Eric Rodli Comments On Slysoft's Claimed Break of BD+

As noted here yesterday, Slysoft claims that it's AnyDVD (HD) 6.4.0.0 software will remove the BD+ security component of Blu-ray HiDef optical discs. When asked for a comment, Eric Rodli, Macrovision's Executive Vice President & General Manager of Entertainment, had this to say via email:

“Macrovision does not comment on specific techniques or procedures that may directly impact the BD+ security technology.  BD+ is a security response system designed to react to security attacks, not prevent them entirely.  As part of this system, updated BD+ security code is continuously developed so that BD+ customers obtain ongoing value from the use of this technology.”

One of the major benefits of BD+ is that it is programmable security. Thus the cat and mouse game between those who apparently encourage piracy and the major studios and their technology partners remains intact.

Verizon Set To Improve Legal P2P File-sharing

According to the AP and NYtimes, Verizon is set to announce later today support for legal P2P filesharing companies and applications. Working with companies that use P2P and researchers at Yale University, Verizon will reportedly help P2P applications make more efficient use of the Net.

Verizon shared details about the structure of its network with the researchers and Pando in the ''P4P Working Group,'' created last summer, and they together created a system that connected users not randomly, but to other users close by.

In a traditional P2P network, if a Verizon customer downloads a file, only 6.3 percent of the data will come from another Verizon customer in the same city, said Doug Pasko, senior technologist at the company. In the ''P4P'' trial, 58 percent of the data came from nearby Verizon users, vastly reducing the company's cost of carrying the traffic.

Another View of Piracy in the PC Games Space

Loyd Case writes on the ExtremeTech site about rampant piracy in  the PC games space. This longish article is well worth a read.

Among other data, Case offers selective quotes from an article by Michael Fitch on the shutdown of Iron Lore Entertainment, for reasons that include piracy:

Rampant Piracy In the Causal Games Space

Causal games might be defined as games small enough to be downloaded and/or web based (e.g., one of my favs, Desktop Tower Defense). How does piracy affect the causal game business? Over on Gamasutra, Reflexive's director of marketing Russell Carroll has posted a great article asserting that 92% of one game, the full version of Ricochet Infinity, were found to be playing pirated copies. A staggering percentage.

One way to fight the search-engine facilitated piracy is to work to remove the ever-expanding number of links to illegal copies, but in many cases improving the Digital Rights Management (DRM) system to be more secure can be more effective as it renders a large number of those links obsolete. This is tricky to be sure, because improving the security must be done without making the DRM so onerous that it keeps honest customers from purchasing games.

Exactly so.

The RIAA is At It Again-Where Has All The Music Gone?

CNet reports that the RIAA is shooting new threatening letters across the bows of numerous colleges and universities coast to coast in what must be a failed attempt to deter piracy.

Critics charge that the letters are just a scare tactic, and the RIAA has admitting to goofing on identifying copyright infringers in the past. But the music industry still views its prelawsuit campaign as an important deterrent. Without such action, "an emerging legal marketplace...would have struggled to gain traction," spokeswoman Cara Duckworth said in a press release.

To quote a Pete Seeger song, "when will they ever learn, when will they ever learn."

The record industry business model is broken. The music industry is alive and well. The labels and their trade association had better figure out something different than alienating the very people who sometimes buy their products.

What's Next for Blu-ray, BD+?

So now that Toshiba has given up on HD-DVD, what's next for Blu-ray, the winning HiDef optical format? This is the question posed by Kelly Rush and posted on HiDefDigest. Rush's prognostications include the suggestion that "BD+ starts getting aggressive:"

Until now, studios haven't been overly-aggressive with pushing this; they haven't even really needed to yet, since BD+ has not been properly cracked. Expect the studios and the Blu-Ray alliance to monitor what happens in the piracy community extremely closely now, and start making aggressive changes, should the need arise. Also, don't be surprised if new updates are added to the specs if it looks like crackers are getting too close to a proper solution for the BD+ protection, that allow the studios to have even tighter control over the DRM (Sony and Blu-Ray have made it clear that they don't mind breaking certain capabilities on older-standard Blu-Ray players as they move forward).

Agreed.

MPAA Admits Mistake: College Students Not As Culpable As Previously Asserted

According to this AP news story, the MPAA nows says that there was a computational error in earlier results indicating that college student file sharing was a major source of pirated media. The MPAA said that it

has told education groups a "human error" in that survey caused it to get the number wrong. It now blames college students for about 15 percent of revenue loss.

Reuters - Porn Industry Challenged By Video Sharing Sites

In a Reuters article, Adam Tanner reports that the adult film industry is being hit hard by piracy. Adult rated videos are being distributed by sites such as Xtube, a site for 18+ year olds apparently modeled after youtube.

"We're dealing with rampant piracy, tons of free content," said Steven Hirsch, co-founder of privately held Vivid, the best-known studio making sex films.

Vivid once earned 80 percent of its roughly $100 million a year from DVD sales, but last year that fell to 30 percent, Hirsch said in an interview.

Fox, Apple, and FairPlay - Jon Healy's View

Check out Jon Healy's coverage (LA Times blogs) of the Fox / Apple iTunes deal regarding downloading Fox movies. Fox has been in the lead on Blu-ray BD+ and their implicit endorsement of Apple's FairPlay DRM should come as no surprise.

Healy says:

Today, the Financial Times reported that 20th Century Fox's home video unit, Fox Home Entertainment, had agreed to offer new titles for rent through Apple's iTunes store and sell DVDs with an extra copy of the movie locked in Apple's proprietary FairPlay DRM. If the latter proves to be true (no mention of it in the NYT piece), it means the movie industry may be on its way to the same DRM incompatibility problem that has vexed the music industry....

MPAA, ISPs, and Content Filtering

[tip o' the hat to Lauren Weinstein's post on the Net Neutrality Squad list]. Nate Anderson writes in Ars Technica that the MPAA expects ISPs to reduce piracy by implementing content filtering technologies (e.g., deep packet inspection and/or fingerprinting-based filtering).

Case in point: AT&T and its publicly-stated plan to implement some sort of filtering system on its network. No technical details of such a system have yet been revealed, but the announcement has warmed the cold cockles of the MPAA's heart and has garnered support from companies like NBC Universal.

Glickman also held out the hope that filtering technology would quickly be adopted by many more ISPs. "The ISP community is going to be at the forefront of this in the future because they have everything to lose and nothing to gain by not seeing that the content is being properly protected," he said, "and I think that's a great opportunity." It's not the first time he's asked ISPs to do more.

So much for net neutrality and privacy.

 

Goldman Sues PirateBay For Lost Royalties On O.J. Simpson Book

The Associated Press reports that Fred Goldman, father of slain Ron Goldman, is suing the Swedish site The Pirate Bay over alleged lost royalties from O.J. Simpson's book, If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer.

Although Goldman's attorneys have sent a letter demanding the Web site's operators stop posting the book, the defendants have indicated "they are not subject to the laws of the United States," the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit seeks to recover profits from the "illegal publication" and suggests The Pirate Bay receive advertising money from such American companies as Wal-Mart, Target, Jamster and The Wall Street Journal.

Anti-Copying Programs May Slow Piracy Says MSFT and BSA

The Associated Press' Brian Bergstein reports that anti-copying technologies may be reducing software piracy.

The technology has provoked some hostility, because it enables Microsoft to remotely examine user computers. After analyzing such information as the computer's manufacturer, hard drive serial number and Windows product identification, Microsoft can block access to certain software functions if it suspects the product was illegally copied.

Does possibly antagonizing consumers actually benefit software publishers? At least in MSFT's case, it apparently does:

Microsoft does not offer piracy statistics specific for its software. But the company says it appears its plan is working. As evidence, the company notes that in the last quarter, Windows sales were up 20 percent while worldwide PC sales were up only 14 to 16 percent. Microsoft said the difference reflected the fact that people with counterfeit copies of Windows were having to put the real thing on their existing computers.

Macrovison Says BD+ Not Hacked

In today's conference call regarding the acquisition of BD+ technology from CRI, Macrovision says that BD+ has not been hacked:

"So first of all let me provide a clarifying comment. BD+ has not been hacked. There was a software player that did not have the correct implementation of the specification, and as a result, it did not have the same effectiveness for controlling and understanding the BD+ spec. So it wasn't that BD+ was hacked. BD+ actually wasn't hacked. And since we had heard about that, there were conversations between CRI [the developer of BD+] and the software player manufacturer and developer at which point in time they corrected the specification and the hole was closed. So to the best of our [Macrovision's] knowledge, BD+ has not been hacked yet and its been several months that its already been out there."

Will BD+ Be Hacked In The Near Future? Slysoft Says Yes

The blogosphere is alive with the songs of BD+ being hacked by Slysoft. This noncommital note from Engadget's Darren Murph is an example of reasonable "wait and see." Others are more enthusiastic about Slysoft's comments, for example this posting on CDFreaks.com, which quotes Slysoft as follows:

To prove them right and to take on the challenge, SlySoft has just released the latest AnyDVD version which beats the latest 4th generation HD-DVD and BluRay copy protection MKBv4, which was expected to be unbreakable.

All that AACS-LA has to offer now is BD+, but even that is on the verge of being circumvented and a release is expected by the end of this year.
James Wong, Head of development at SlySoft: "We already found a way to crack BD+ and we have just turned to fine-tuning. I should really think about hiring a bodyguard now, since this product won't please everybody."

There are a couple of things wrong with this. First, if they have cracked the AACS Media Key Block, no one expected this to be unbreakable. Rather, AACS was created as a renewable key management technology. So the MKB will be changed as planned.

More serious, perhaps, is that AACS-LA (the licensing authority) has nothing to do with BD+. Instead, BD+ is made available through its own, distinct licensing authority, BD+ Technologies LLC.

Even if it has been hacked, BD+ was designed to provide programmable security which includes the ability to detect compromised players. So we'll see if Slysoft can deliver on its claims.

Microsoft blocks FairUse4WM v2

So says George Ou:

Just over a year ago when hacker “Viodentia” wrote FairUse4WM and broke Microsoft’s Windows Media DRM scheme wide open, Microsoft responded with record urgency in a mere 3 days.  But when Viodentia came back as “Divine Tao” and wrote a second major revision of FairUse4WM this July and broke Microsoft’s Windows DRM scheme wide open again, Microsoft didn’t seem to be as concerned and spent their usual 3 months to patch the issue. As of the last patch Tuesday, the current version of FairUse4WM no longer works so the ball is in the hacker’s court again to break Microsoft’s latest DRM revision.

The cat and mouse game continues.

Hollywood Tests Watermark Technologies

Brad Stone reports in the NYTimes on Movielab's testing of several watermarking technologies. According to Prof. Leonard Kleinrock, one firm's technology was better than the rest. Goodness was judged by maximizing true positives (detecting a watermark when present) and minimizing false negatives (failing to detect when present) and false positives (detecting when not actually present). Movielabs declined to identify the company with the best performing watermark technology.

Nevertheless, afterwards, executives from Santa Clara, Calif-based Vobile were crowing in the hallways of the Universal Hilton Hotel.

The two-year old company’s technology, called Video DNA, has apparently bested others from the Royal Philips Electronics, Thomson Software & Technology, and the highest profile digital fingerprinting company, the Los Gatos, Calif.-based Audible Magic, which has deals to filter video sharing sites like YouTube and Microsoft’s Soapbox.

A Truth In Marketing Award To Chicago Digital Post and Macrovision

Chicago Digital Post (CDP) and Macrovision are partnering to offer DVD copy protection for indie DVDs using Macrovision's RipGuard technologies. CDP and Macrovision deserve an award for truth in marketing by providing information about the degree to which RipGuard can protect DVDs. As pointed out in this NewTeeVee article,  RipGuard was thought to be relatively ineffective a few years ago, but it may have been improved since then. Here's what CDP and Macrovision say:

Don't Miss "Modern Major Googler"

Don't miss privacy watchdog and activist Lauren Weinstein's Gilbert and Sullivan parody, ""I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major Googler" with sing along lyrics.

Privatunes Doesn't Privatize iTunes Music Files - EFF

Privatunes announced software that removes the identifying information that Apple includes in each music file, including those sold without FairPlay DRM. However, the Electronic Frontier Foundation says the removal is not complete:

MRT Holds Apple, Microsoft Responsible for Piracy

Media Rights Technologies put out a press release quoting CEO Hank Risan indicating that Media Rights Technologies will ask for an injunction against Apple, Real, Adobe, and Microsoft because they have failed to implement technologies to prevent recording of streaming audio. The MRT press release holds the vendors responsible for not solving the streaming audio piracy problem with existing, well vetted technologies.

The iTunes User Mark - Risks and Hacks

Chris Maxcer has written an informative article on iTunes embedding buyer information in each file and on the possible consequences of sharing such files with others.

It's been recently discovered, though, that each song sold through iTunes Plus --the section of iTunes that sells the higher-quality, DRM-free music -- is marked with the name and e-mail address of the user who bought it....

AT&T to target pirated content - More privacy gone wild

As readers know, I'm very sympathetic to the plight of the movie studios. Music is pretty much a lost cause at this point, in my view. Still, we all want, need, and should demand privacy in the digital world.

According to this article in the LA Times, AT&T is teaming up with movie studies and record labels to monitor traffic on the Internet in search of pirated content.

Last week, about 20 technology executives from Viacom Inc., its Paramount movie studio and other Hollywood companies met at AT&T headquarters to start devising a technology that would stem piracy but not violate privacy laws or Internet freedoms espoused by the Federal Communications Commission.

Cicconi said that once a technology was chosen, the company would look at privacy and other legal issues.

This seems like a clear case of putting the technology cart before the privacy horse, so to speak. In the interest of privacy, I believe we need to move to a digital world in which all Internet communications are encrypted and in which the users and not ISPs have the keys.

YouTube Testing Watermarks For Studio Content

The Wall Street Journal reports [subscription required' that YouTube is developing and testing its own video fingerprinting (watermarking) technologies, which are expected to work in the same way as already implemented audio watermarking.

Mr. Maxcy [YouTube Partner Development Director Chris Maxcy] said YouTube has been using audio-fingerprinting technology from closely held Audible Magic Corp. of Los Gatos, Calif., to identify songs in clips uploaded by consumers since the beginning of the year in conjunction with its music-label partners. When a user tries to upload a video to YouTube, the fingerprinting technology checks to see whether its audio matches the fingerprint of music its partners have identified to Audible Magic. Mr. Maxcy said "the overwhelming majority of the time" when there's a match, the labels license the music to YouTube, which then can sell advertising when the clip appears and shares any ad revenue with the copyright holders.

Reigning In The RIAA and MPAA

The LA Times [registration required] is reporting that the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America are lobbying the California legislature for an exemption to proposed laws that would outlaw pretexting, the practice of misrepresenting one's identity in order to gain access to confidential or private information. Pretexting was at the core of the recent Hewlett Packard board brouhaha.

The trade groups are arguing that they need to use pretexting to pursue pirates of physical and digital goods and that the proposed legislation would deprive them of an import tool in combating piracy.

Hollywood Crackdown

KGO-TV reports that Hollywood is cracking down on piracy using content tracking techniques rather than DRM or watermarking techniques.  One company actively involved is BAY TSP.

The men and women at BAY TSP are the Web version of undercover cops, posing as pirates, seeking copyrighted material. Their company issues one million  take-down notices a month. And that's a sign that DRM (Digital Rights Management) isn't working well. Like the watermark on currency that hasn't stopped counterfeiting, digital protection is giving way to better detection.

Vobile is another company in the same space with VideoDNA:

Yangbin Wang, Vobile Inc.: "The VideoDNA will be immediately identified, whether that's a copyrighted material or not. And, then, based on that, the studio and the rights holder can decide whether they want to take down the piracy video, or replace it with a legal version and with ad- sponsored or the user can choose to pay."