CUSTOS CATCHES DIGITAL PIRATES BY EMBEDDING BITCOIN INTO MEDIA FILES

A South African company has found a way to put a “digital alarm” into movies, music and other types of media files, that can detect when a rogue customer purchases content and uploads it to torrent sites, file lockers or file-sharing groups.

Over the past decade and a half, piracy has plagued the media industry. Artists, authors, developers, and producers have struggled against a rising tide of illegal copying and world-wide distribution of their films, software, games, music, and books. The scale of digital piracy is huge, and it robs content creators of rightful income. The industry has perhaps made some progress against digital piracy by creating convenient, legal, and affordable options for consumers to get access to media, for example via streaming services such as Spotify, Hulu, and Netflix or direct purchases through iTunes. Still, illegal media sharing is pervasive. Media providers have attempted to build security against piracy into their systems.

For example, movies or TV shows bought through iTunes can only be used on certain devices. These actions are irritating for consumers who feel they are punished with inconvenience for trying to do the right thing by paying for their media. Even worse, these anti-piracy systems are not particularly difficult to hack. A major problem is that once a file is initially provided to file sharing services, like BitTorrent, it becomes increasingly available as additional users download it and share it. Once a file is “out there” on the hard drives of millions of users, legal action against copyright infringers is more of a symbolic gesture than a practical solution, a gesture that often makes content creators look like bullies picking on lone users in a sea of infringers.

A major disincentive against the initial illegal sharing of a piece of media could go a long way to curb piracy without strong-arm tactics that anger or inconvenience users. Researchers at Stellenbosch University have discovered a method to do just that. The global rise of cryptocurrency (a medium of exchange that relies on cryptography to secure financial transactions and control availability), most famously, Bitcoin, provides a ready architecture to rapidly detect when media has passed out of the intended recipient’s control.

Cryptocurrency, by decentralising banking controls, provides anonymity to transactions, but still records each transaction in a publically accessibly ledger. Thus, content creators or distributors can embed a unique identifying code into each piece of content, for example a song, film, software, or even physical book or analogue recording, that they provide to a unique user. The code embedded in each piece of content can then be used to access a deposit in the form of cryptocurrency – a “finder’s fee”.  If the content is shared or leaked and a third party gets hold of the content, they can cash in the code for the finder’s fee.

The content producer is then be alerted though analysis of the cryptocurrency transaction ledger that the original authorised user shared or leaked the file. The user could then be subject to financial or legal penalties, or to reduced access to future content. In this manner, authorised media users are strongly discouraged from actively sharing files or carelessly leaking them, while at the same time, they need not be inconvenienced by cumbersome security measures.

The anti-piracy product is licensed and commercially developed by Custos Media Technologies, who provides solutions for content producers and e-commerce retailers to detect recipients (media reviewers, e-commerce customers or other trusted recipients) who illicitly redistribute digital content.

Current and Future Customers

• Video and audio content streaming services
• Video and audio content providers (television subscription services, film industry, music sales)
• Video and audio content producers who need to control access to screeners or samples.
• eBook and other digital media providers (digital news and magazines)
• Publishers of physical books and other media
• Software publishers
• Game developers

Value Proposition/ Benefits

Custos’s patent-pending technology allows content publishers to monitor copyright infringement and identify perpetrators. The system relies on embedding a unique identifying code into each piece of content provided to an authorised party. The code (a cryptocurrency key) is linked to an existing unit of cryptocurrency. Custos tracks these codes (identifying them to the associated user), and monitors the cryptocurrency’s public ledger to identify if and when a piece of media is compromised. Media creators or distributors who employ this system can reduce the likelihood that content is shared without authorisation, reducing the availability of pirated content for free. They may also benefit from the ability to identify copyright infringers and hold them accountable.

Competitive Edge

Compared to other attempts to restrict the ability of authorised users to share items of media, Custos’s solution need not inconvenience users by relying on codes and passwords or restricting their fair use of the item by controlling when and how they can enjoy their media. It also links, unequivocally, a leak of a file to an individual authorized user. However, the Custos technology is DRM-agnostic, and can be seamlessly combined with other anti-piracy technologies and countermeasures.

Technical Description

Custos embeds watermarks into the analog and/or digital content of media items, which are imperceptible but difficult to remove. Each watermark contains a Bitcoin wallet, with a reward for anyone who anonymously claims it once the media has passed out of the control of the original recipient. Media downloaders who want to search for such rewards (“bounty hunters”) can do so anonymously, from anywhere in the world. The moment a bounty is claimed – and by the nature of cryptocurrencies, this can only happen once – the transaction reflects on the blockchain, and Custos notifies the media provider of the incident, and to which recipient the content was originally licensed. Effectively, Custos’s technology turns the downloaders against the uploaders – thus identifying the original infringers.

Product Features

• Custos Core provides digital asset association, bounty management, and infringement monitoring, through a REST API that can easily integrate with existing media management systems.
• Secure service hosting, either on-site or as a remote service.
• Proprietary media watermarking functionality, or integration with 3rd-party watermarking tools.
• No need for customers to own or manage cryptocurrency directly – this is handled by the Custos back-end.
• Custos Commerce provides a media protection plugin for digital commerce on the Magento e-commerce platform, allowing media distributors to start selling Custos-protected digital content
with minimal integration effort. Plugins for other popular platforms are planned.
• Custos Screener (forthcoming) enables simple distribution of pre-release content protected by Custos’s technology

CUSTOS MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES: http://custostech.com/