This is really an opportunity for someone to fill a niche out there. Maybe a company similiar to check verification companies. Cant recall the name of the company but they do check verification for retail locations. Cut off the people doing the sharing. Start blacklisting them first, then make a few example cases if you have people offending multiple times. I have a feeling though that no one will try this, and just continue to whine about content theft. :(

Use coordinates like on a map. B:17, you sank my "battleship".

I did a script a couple of years ago that inserts the users username into the image Exif data whenever a user loads an image. As others in this thread have mentioned Exif data is pretty easy for the user to remove and it does put a little extra load on the server. BUT, while it is easy to remove exif data, most surfers have no idea it exists and will never ever even consider removing it and in my experience more than 95% don't.

lol Some big programs, or some big upsell programs need to step up and see what can be done I think. :winkwink:

dont waste your time...its VERY easy to defeat, and if you guys think this is some miracle thing thats gonna revolutionize content theft - think again!!!

once surfers realize whats going on, they'll start taking measures to "erase" the info

and its VERY easy to erase, inclusing digimarc crap you guys wanna spend thousands on (check out a free program called jstrip for example)

and as this becomes "standard" the twarting will become "standard" as well - making the technology USELESS



;)

And what if I insert 4 bits of info into a non-standard part of an image. How you gonna defeat it.

A 6 month ban on a site ripper is hardly punishment, better off adding something in your TOS that if their watermark shows up being shared you have the right to charge their CC
$xxxx. A ban is nothing, a different CC with a proxy and they back on your site, hit them in the pocketbook and see how they like it.

Umm you didnt read the thread I guess. We are talking about watermarks. And on video moving watermarks that randomly move on the video. Not enough to be overly noticeable but enough to be readable. Again again and AGAIN no you cannot stop someone if they want it bad enough, but the idea is to slow down the floodgates. All this content out there isnt from people ripping dvds. Yes there is some, but people with exclusive content shot specifically for their paysite this will be quite helpful. Blacklisting offenders would hopefully start to condition people to realize they are not a hero when they share the content they have bought access to.

I agree with that, the only problem there is getting the processors on board with that. I was mainly giving examples of what might be done. Its kind of a fine line. You dont want to come off like a nazi and scare people off from signing up either. There just needs to be consequences of some sort though. The person doing the actual theft is the ones that are uploading it to the sharing sites. Normally those are the ones buying memberships, or the ones that managed to get stolen user/passwords.

The main point of this thread I think is. There is more than one way to skin a cat, and people need to drop the "its impossible" stuff when it concerns locking down content from being 'easily' ripped off.

The way I see it is that it's much easier to go after the few people that upload the videos rather than the masses that watch them. So instead of going after youporn.com find out who just added your video and stop that guy, it might take some work but at least theres a possibility that you could know who is doing what. It can be stripped sure, but any extra work is the deterrent not making it impossible to do.

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!