Hollywood is pondering whether a secret coding imprinted on films would stop pirates from spreading their surreptitiously recorded wares online, even if the code might show them who was the last to see the film legitimately.
Called iTrace, the technology involves a graduating watermark that takes about five seconds “to exploit the tendency of human vision to compensate and ignore images that change slowly,” according to Sarnoff scientist Jeffrey Lubin, who told reporters he used his psychology background to design a watermark invisible to a typical movie viewer and survivable even if crude copying degraded the film quality.
"There are few hotter topics in Hollywood today than forensic watermarking," said Post Logic Studios executive vice president Larry Bostock, whose company is working to perfect the iTrace technique with Sarnoff Corp., the former RCA Laboratories.
Hollywood has insisted film piracy costs them over $3 billion a year, and the Motion Picture Association of America recently decided to join in the litigation fun by suing a round or two of suspected Internet users swapping copyrighted movies illegally.
"The Holy Grail example” of film piracy, Lubin was quoted as saying, “is someone takes a camcorder into a movie theater and pirates a movie, and then compresses it on a digital file and puts it on the Internet."
He described iTrace as not words or numbers but blobs getting lighter or darker and repeated throughout the film, with the sequence unique to each legitimate print of the film. Cracking the code, he continued, would involve a pirated copy compared on a computer frame by frame to a print that doesn’t have the watermark – and, with both versions digitized, a computer can distinguish the legitimate watermarked print from the watermark-lacking bootleg copy.
Post Logic and Sarnoff demonstrated iTrace at Post Logic facilities in New York and Hollywood during November and in front of attentive audiences from the Disney Company’s Buena Vista film distribution arm, MGM, Miramax, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, and Warner Bros. Real-world testing of the technology is due to begin in January at Post Logic facilities.
And, if the testing goes well enough, iTrace could turn up on a film as early as the first couple of months of 2005, Post Logic said.
