I thought the whole idea of digimarc was that it becomes part of the image itself - if you resize, cut and paste or do anything that isn't a significant modification the signature will be preserved. jstrip only removes redundant metadata such as EXIF which means it won't affect digimarc.

My thinking also. Need to make advancements on STOPPING the theft pre theft, not trying to get it back post theft. :2 cents:

really? I just downloaded a firefox extension. A 5 year old could do it.

Like pulling teeth. lol Ok so what are the reasons this will, or wont work folks?

Hey,

Watermarking is an invisible mark that is put into a video during the encoding process. I have a partner I work with that has a service we will soon be rolling out under Cave Creek which will encode nearly any file into any format or multiple formats, as well as adding watermarking.

Again, my solution did all of this. Links stolen videos [even ones cut, on rapidshare, etc] to a specific member, IP, download time, original file downloaded. Everything you need.

Did you ever consider giving out some free copies to some big programs to let people test it out? Maybe license monthly and have first month free?

Here's something I just whipped up in about 30 minutes just now.

http://www.megaxrated.com/galtest.cfm

It puts your IP address and time on the image. The location is slightly random and the text is black.

With more time I can make the text color blend in better and also be fully random anywhere in the picture. Also the information can be anything, IP, userid, some unique code that the user doesn't know, etc.

It's done with ColdFusion. Woo.

I used some Karups pics for the test because I already had a gallery built on my server with easy access to the images.

Also I would install a pixel font on my server for the smallest readable type.

A surfer could erase the info, but it would definitely be a pain in their ass.

That's what I assumed too. It's supposed to be able to persist through some pretty heavy manipulation before the watermark gets corrupted.

Hop on a VPN, use a prepaid credit card to sign up to your site, and then mirror your entire members area and then release it on the piratebay.

check mate. :1orglaugh

Welp, there's the reason why people dont do it, lol.

ummmm, i guarantee you i know more about this than nearly anyone in this biz!!!

theres a reason why i said what i did :upsidedow

See that's all it would take to prevent alot of people from sharing full sets and stuff, like whos going to remove their info from each and every single picture?

So how do we get our hands on that?

Yeah but at the same time thats alot of work for someone to do just so other people can look at porn.

How is that a lot of work?

VPN accounts can be purchased for $9.95/month, you can get a prepaid credit card at any store which allows you to sign up to sites using any information + cc number and the transaction will go through, and there is tons of software which will make a mirror of a site you specify which can run overnight.

When they upload the entire members area and you waste your time hunting them down, there will be nothing you can do.

You can't defeat it, the best thing to do is focus your time and effort on a project to generate more income.

Please let me know the last time you paid $10 then went to the store, bought something for $30, then spent all night just so you could share it with a bunch of people that you dont even know for free.

I don't know about you but it IS alot of work for me, and I wouldn't do that much work to steal from someone and then share it with people for free, and I know that lots of people wouldn't.

It's like saying why add a way to immobilize a car to an anti theft system, a guy can just go in and uninstall that, or why use that club to lock your steering wheel, its not a lot of work to just get a saw and cut that. There are a million things that are able to be bypassed rather easily but people would rather not, its called deterring theft because you can never say with 100% assurance that something can't be stolen.

I'm not saying I would waste my time to do that, but software piracy is a hobby for some people.

If someone was profiting from this activity, it isn't far out at all, it is a very reasonable and intelligent method to anonymously rip content no matter what countermeasures have been implemented.

My point is that there are better ways to spend $5,000+ and you should focus your efforts on productive things. IMO, 95% of the people who steal shit would have never purchased it in the first place.

In the real world, How are you going to ban or blacklist someone?
If Craigslist bans me I just change my IP and use a new email and I am back on.

Ok so whats more likely to happen in these two scenarios?

A. A bank puts their money on the counter. No security guards, no bank vault. Tellers and employees are rarely around leaving the money unattended.

B. A bank has a vault security guards, cameras, money is kept locked up unless taken out to give to a customer.

Which bank is more likely to lose money due to theft?

Sure bank B can be robbed. They can come in with guns and force them to open the vault and get the money. Absolutely it can lose money.

Bank A has no safeguards. They get pissed off and cry and whine about people stealing their money to the cops and form a committee to figure out ways to go after the owners of other stores that receive the stolen money for their goods. lol

Seriously it gets ridiculously old to hear people repeat over and over again that people CAN still steal content. EVERYONE friggin knows that duh. The problem right now is for 4.95 I can go rip some of the biggest paysites on the web overnight. Then I can upload them to all the free sites, and there is not SHIT anyone can do about it. Why? No accountability. What most people aren't getting is this. The people uploading this content are generally nice people that dont realize what they are doing. Its not some band of Robin Hoods merry men. Alot of this content gets out due to things like forums with reputation systems and getting points awarded, thanks of the community etc.

Right now they do it cause there is no way to really get caught. 80% wont bother going through all the work of removing watermarks that identify them. This would keep honest people honest.

This isnt ip info, this is something that would need to be done at the processor level, and would be banning the card they used, and the billing address they used. YES you can still get access by buying a prepaid card or whatever. WE KNOW THAT. lol :winkwink:

I made a solution to do this dynamically with various file formats, however, it's incredibly CPU intensive as the program 'passes through' the content after transparently writing the member's info into the file.

Anyway to streamline it so it would be less intensive? Maybe this is something the CDN networks need to introduce using separate servers to do the overlay.

give this man some business if you are looking for this type of a solution.

There's always a way to do it better. My prototype was entirely written in dynamic PHP; including the file parsing system. If it was rewritten in C and just used as a passthrough via FastCGI, or even just run through a module in SHM, it'd be quite a bit faster.

A friend of mine made something like this in Cold Fusion a few years ago for some mainstream personal site he had.

I would think they are using prepaid cards now?

Why would someone want them as a customer? No rebills or highly unlikely.

The little script I made earlier doesn't seem to be too heavy on my server. I might throw it onto some of my actual galleries and monitor it for a while.

When I posted this question since I'm fairly new to this whole thing, I thought there would be a million and one programs that you guys know about that did this. I figured every site did it just by logic, like why wouldn't you? I know its doable but no one has done it and it kinda shocks me to see how many people complain about shit being stolen when they leave it out for the taking like this.

Has anyone successfully ever even done this? I'm sure they have because I've seen posts on surfer forums where people complain about getting their accounts shut down from posting, but where are those people?

Like fuck man, add a visible watermark even, on a video thats damn hard to move/delete/cover up and it takes a long time to encode and all that shit, thats for one video let alone a site rip, add the persons IP or name right on the video, it wouldnt be much more or less of a distraction than the stuff that goes on there already with watermarks.

Hey man how can I test it too :D It looks like what I'd want!

Cant add their name or ip as thats a privacy issue. Hence do it with a code that cross references back to the user.

I could give you the script to try out, sure, it requires ColdFusion 8 though and that's not the most common thing on the porn sites these days.

Do you really think it's a privacy issue to have their IP on there? If they're a legitimate consumer then they will be the only ones to see the pic with the IP on it. If they're going to distribute the content then they'd be distributing their IP themselves. Hell, if their actual name was on the picture they'd really think twice before posting it into a newsgroup.

Shit, you could watermark the pictures with "USERNAME'S PRIVATE PICTURE COLLECTION" across the top and tell the customer it is a cool new feature that "uniquely customizes" their pictures for a "personal touch"

This is pretty easy to do with libgd in PHP for images. I wanted to do it differently, so I actually encoded the user's information into the image's stream, but it doesn't display. You can only get the data back out with the right salted key, so it's not really an issue of privacy, but it does log the time, the username logged in, and their IP.

Don't have the code on this machine; it's likely to be on a backup. I was dicking around with it in '06. Haven't touched it, since, as I found it to be fairly unfeasible for use.

Ya IP is iffy, but I can see people raising a fuss thinking it will give someone the ability to hack them, just from a general sense of unknowing. lol Personally no I dont see it as an issue, but Ive seen people cry about sigs that say like Your Ip is, and it really being their ip, and them crying hacker etc. Lots of kinks to work out I guess, but would you say its feasible to do something similar with images and video both? One problem I foresee is like downloadable zips you'd have to mark and zip up prior to download. Still there should be a workaround for it, maybe a que to download or something.

Video, I don't know... would be much tougher than pictures for sure. The ColdFusion script I did up just grabs a picture from a directory on the server that is not accessible from the Web, slaps some text on it then uses CFIMAGE action="WRITETOBROWSER" to display the image. Very simple, really.

Batching up images into ZIPs wouldn't be hard, either.

I would imagine putting dynamic watermarks onto video would require insane processing power.

Anyway of injecting the data that would stick with it regardless of re encoding etc? The way I was thinking on the video was more of a wrapper similar to the way google uses for google video. They dont actually re encode to flv. Should be a way to do this quickly on the fly. If not this could be something for the cdn networks to look at.

You can do it quickly, but at the cost of CPU. Remember that Google runs on cheap, disposable hardware. It means nothing to them to tax a machine for 4 simultaneous streams. However, most of this industry can't afford that method. The only issue you have is that you want it to identify the video/image/etc to that specific user; and even at the very least, if you serve the file with the user's IP as a long2ip() encoded, that's not necessarily going to mean anything, as the file may be renamed. You need to embed it, and in order to do that, you almost always need to load the whole file into RAM to do so. Even with that, a realtime rewrite/passthru still takes a lot of effort.

Ok hear me out here. Lets say streaming solution only. Lets say an .flv player that overlays the username, or code, or ip or whatever, and randomly moves it on the screen. Would cover the screen capture issue at least right?

If you built it into the player, they could technically just grab the FLV unless you had that parameter hidden very well. Really, anybody with a local proxy could snag it, even then, depending on how it was obtained. The most reliable solution is to tag the content as they get it.

If you don't mind using a self-hosted streaming system, it'd be worth it putting everything behind a hashing passthrough system like StrongBox, and having a simple utility written that does a trivial encryption of the FLV stream, which is decoded by the player. This wouldn't be too difficult to make, but supporting external players may be an issue, and if someone downloaded your player, and a stream, eventually some bored nerd would break it open.

Yeah, the way I see it man, if you need to add their IP to the photo then do it - people might be worried about their privacy but assure them that the IP address is recorded everywhere they go on the internet and can't really be used to do anything to them. Just a way to track stolen photos - MOST people DONT sign up for porn to steal pics, so they could care less if their IP is there, its not like they didnt just see that exact number on the page they put their credit card into.

You still give the customer porn, and as long as the customer isn't a douche and doesn't steal stuff it doesn't matter anyways.

all this sounds like a big waste of time to me.

figure out how to make money from the thieves instead and you're better off.

you need to realize these surfers / thieves / script kiddies are 1000 steps ahead of you .. anything you come up with they will laugh at and beat in 1 hour flat.

think further...

Im all for marketing on the tubes and torrents. Been doing that for quite a while, with good results. Nope you wont defeat them, you make it a pain in the ass for them to get the content.

I was tracking stolen Raven Riley vids for about 6 months. The most interesting thing: once the stolen accounts were killed off, 100% of the people who were stealing videos had been members for 1+ years.

That's a tough situation: it's the members that are giving you the most that are fucking you.

I ran this over a large sample size, with a lot of vids and about 6 months, and that was unerringly the result.

Still, the solution is solid for most CMS systems / plain htaccess / and works/ed for wmv avi and mpg. I was chasing Chio about it.. but he disappeared ;) Chiooooo?

I hear you ... it's just that things are moving at a very fast pace these days, you can try to protect yourself and end up one mile behind or you can be at the front line giving the low lives a run for their money.

I prefer the second ... even though I'm still young I just don't see a point in wasting time trying to hold back evolution.

I don't think tube sites or torrents are threatening us at all, rather challenging us ... so lets man up and take on the challenge. We control the content, we can win as long as we play it our way and don't let them take control... which is exactly what we're doing if we step back in to defense.

But that's just my 2 cents ... I've never claimed to know anything, I just like to hear myself talk ... a lot :)

As I said before I think you should hit up the upsells about this. Cam companies, dating, etc. All the non compete upsells. Get them to give you a percentage of all the sales that result. Have them give it out freely to any members area with only requirement being a plugin for their upsell. If it works package it up and push it. Ill help you push the idea for free. I just want to see adult start to out innovate mainstream again.

I like the idea.
Of course people can easily remove the watermark. But it's better than nothing.

Here is what I came up with:
http://sexteri.com/watermark/pic.jpg
It uses a php wrapper. This solution also seems to be faster than the previously posted one.
It's very easy to program an on-the-fly watermark. I'm not even a programmer. I use this solution to watermark all the images on one of my blogs.

I think it should be no problem to program a little application that adds the user to a database after signup. CCBill offers the post variables for this purpose. On your site, you could create a session for the user when he logs in and then serve the images on the fly to him.

I thought I posted last night, but I guess I didn't . Cave Creek will be riolling out an Encoding service with a partner we have who can do everything. Encode whole libraries in nearly any format including Watermarking and it all uses a Web interface.

Basically, during all the discussions at the Forum the Encoding issue came up numerous times and as is Ron's Mandate here at ccBill/Cave Creek we are always trying to find ways to fill the needs in the Adult Market . We intend to offer this service as low a cost as we can as a value add to the CDN streaming offerings we currently have.

The way we see it customers can use this service to encode content into any format then push directly into net storage and have it served off the CDN creating ultimate flexibility, performance , scale and ubiquity. ( I have been dying to find a way to use that word in a sentance)

I am still early on the process with these folks, but I have pricing and basic product descriptions so please ping me off line and I will be happy to help you.

bump for this thread