
Microsoft’s New Patent Identifies Pirated Content: Flags Repeat Offenders - marcolanger
https://anonymster.com/microsofts-new-patent-identifies-pirated-content-flags-repeat-offenders/
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SeanDav
It never ceases to amaze and frustrate me that almost every time I buy a legal
DVD, I am punished by being required to watch non-skipable content warning me
that pirating is illegal (I can just hear the irony dripping). This can often
be followed by adverts and previews that are either difficult to skip or
impossible.

All this combined with the fact that I probably had to wait longer to be able
to purchase the DVD legally in the first place, because of regional
restrictions...

Any anti-pirating scheme really should encourage, as its first priority, a
smooth, hassle-free, user experience - or risk encouraging people to go over
to the dark side.

~~~
disconnected
It never ceases to amaze and frustrate me that often I can't even BUY the
freaking DVD, or stream the damned thing because "they" decided to not release
it on my country/region or decided to block my country from accessing their
services.

Being assholes to their customers is what is killing them, not "piracy".

~~~
graphitezepp
To quote Gabe Newell "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a
pricing problem", when pirating is more convenient than buying legally you are
incentivizing it on multiple levels.

~~~
toxican
This has proven true time and time again for myself. Steam, Spotify, Netflix,
and Sling all lead to the elimination of me pirating media. And I'm a lot more
inclined to spend money on the occasional game/album/movie/show that those
services don't offer than I was before.

~~~
spacemanmatt
From the artist's perspective, it's not much different. They don't make much
off streaming.

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toxican
Sounds like a problem between the artist and their label. Clearly the labels
have no issue with the money paid out to them for the streaming rights.

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drewmol
>Another major blow will be to services such as Pirate Bay and Kodi.

For anyone unfamiliar, KODI is an excellent, open source media center program
available on most major platforms. It started as a homebrew project (called
XBMC) on the original Xbox game console. The name has become synonymous with
piracy to some because there are popular 3rd party add-ons which allow
streaming of potentially copyrighted media via links to files on cloud hosted
file storage services. Depending on a user's jurisdiction, these files may be
illegal to stream without appropriate permission.

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chris_wot
Sort of like BitTorrent in that it has legitimate and better known
illegitimate uses?

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grub5000
Sort of like the internet :)

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hasenj
Nice come back, but for BitTorrent the illegal use case constitutes probably
more than 95%

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dogma1138
The stats for the Internet aren't much better, spam, porn etc....

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emiliobumachar
Most (but not all!) porn is legal. Spam, in many jurisdictions, is legal when
selling something legal.

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dogma1138
Most of the porn is illegal because it violates copyrights, the 10 times
reencoded scenerips on PornTUBE are not exactly official.

Most places have no solicitation laws and other privacy laws that do make spam
illegal.

You also neee to count in piracy and general violations of copyright laws;
you'll be surprised just how much content on youTube is illegal search for
"full movie" or "last week tonight full show" and you'll gea quite a few
legitimate hits.

Like it or not from a logistical point of view illegal content makes up the
bulk of the traffic, that said it isn't any different in any other field if we
take global shipping then illegal arms and drugs probably make a nice chunk of
global shipping (revenue wise) there also it doesn't mean we need halt all
global and local logistics operations.

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rjeli
Illegal porn rips on aggregate sites are uploaded by the producer themselves,
who are usually a sister company or subsidiary. This is done in a very nudge
nudge wink wink manner to drive ad impressions and sell exclusive content

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libertymcateer
Does no-one see the irony in patenting an anti-piracy standard? If it is
remotely effective, it will, itself, be pirated. If it is not effective, it
will only make the lives worse of people who choose not to circumvent it.

Additionally, I just do not see how this passes subject-matter standards post
_Alice._ [1] Seriously disappointing to see vague algorithms of this type
receive patent protection.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Corp._v._CLS_Bank_Intern...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Corp._v._CLS_Bank_International)

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donquichotte
This is one of my pet peeves with movies as well.

When I buy a DVD, I have unskippable trailers and an ad that warns me not to
pirate it at the beginning. Seriously, it's about 10 minutes of crap that I
need to watch to see the movie I f __*ing paid for! The viewing experience
with pirated movies is much more enjoyable and streamlined. I get the movie,
double click on it and booom - it starts right away.

~~~
Ntrails
I mean, I've torrented every single DvD I own and the disks sit in the attic.
Strangely, not once I have missed the lack of " _hilarious_ cut scenes" or
"Directors commentary" features.

Man I love clicking on a folder, scrolling for 30 secs and pressing play _and
the actual film just starts playing_. The only thing that it fails on is
remembering where I am in a series. So for eg. Blackadder I'd rather just
stick on Netflix thank play in VLC

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danparsonson
> The only thing that it fails on is remembering where I am in a series. So
> for eg. Blackadder I'd rather just stick on Netflix thank play in VLC

You can easily solve that one with something like Plex :-)

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FussyZeus
Upvote for Plex. Setting up a Plex box in my house was astonishingly easy and
we now use that more than Netflix.

~~~
nobleach
I've noticed Plex has stopped working with my TVs. It's kinda a bummer that
the only help, that those on forums are willing to give is "buy a better TV".
Is spending another 700 bucks really a tenable solution?

~~~
chadgeidel
It's not a great solution, but there are several "streaming sticks" like the
Roku, Chromecast, or FireTV for less than $50 you can buy and plug into your
current TV.

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jackvalentine
I presume this will have the same faults as YouTube's Content ID:

\- Can't identify when it is fair use.

\- Can't identify when the user has licensed the content outside of the system
for use.

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jjcm
Youtube and Soundcloud's content ID engines effectively killed the genre of
mashups. There was a pretty vibrant community with a lot of new artists on
both, with rooms on plug.dj and even turntable.fm back in the day. Then the
content ID engines hit and one by one every mashup artist (with the exception
of girltalk) had their work taken down by poor fingerprinting. It was such a
massacre we took to making [http://mashup.fm](http://mashup.fm) which used
youtube-dl to cache everything locally, but by then it was too late. All the
artists stopped creating content because they didn't want to be permabanned
from these huge services.

I worry what by-catch Microsoft's engine will leave in its wake.

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Mayzie
Warning for those with sound turned on. The website automatically plays music
at full volume.

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annnnd
I hate this. There really should be a setting in browser so that I _don 't_
allow sound from any website unless I explicitly click the speaker icon in tab
bar. Annoying as hell.

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msl
If you use Firefox, go to about:config and set "media.autoplay.enabled" to
false. A few web sites throw a fit when they can't autoplay, but that's a
price I'm willing to pay.

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alexsays
It's probably one of the worst faux pars you can make in UX. I'd appreciate it
if they wouldn't announce to everyone in the bathroom what I'm browsing

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achievingApathy
I must be missing something here.

I read the entire patent and it repeatedly mentions file metadata and a
"content flag" that can be toggled and read to determine if there is
restricted or prohibited content included in the file or stream.

So what I think this says is a copyright owner notices that you are sharing
XYZ's latest movie and files a claim with the cloud provider. That metadata
flag is then toggled and sharing is no longer allowed and there is some master
server somewhere that tracks how many times files you have uploaded have been
flagged. For this they can get a patent?

Why couldn't someone just change the metadata? Or presumably change the
checksum?

(I think I have a really great way to actually implement something like this
but I have to fill out a patent application before I tell anyone.)

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quadrangle
> a patent which will allow the Redmond-based tech giant to identify and block
> users who stream files illegally over the web.

NO. Patents do not allow you to do whatever. Inventions do that. Patents give
you a legal monopoly over whatever it describes. Either they actually made
technology for this or they didn't, and that is unrelated to whether they have
a patent.

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klodolph
It's an example of metonymy, where related objects are substituted for each
other. Metonymy is a common trope. It doesn't reflect some kind of
misunderstanding of the world, and if you're going to complain about metonymy
you might as well complain about metaphor and irony too.

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monochromatic
No, this is just wrong, not metonymy. It stood out to me too.

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userbinator
Encryption --- along with unenlightening file naming, etc. --- seems like it
would make this pretty trivial to bypass. Share the encrypted file and share
the keys somewhere else.

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bartl
OK maybe I'm missing something, but what is new about this patent? The
schematic "how does it work" figure 6 is nothing but a napkin design. Anybody
with half a braincell can make that up within 5 minutes after being introduced
to the perceived problem. In other words: the subject of the patent looks to
be very obvious, to me.

OTOH This might discourage other companies from implementing a similar idea,
which is something at some users will appreciate.

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Asooka
I think the innovation is in the detection algorithm that isn't shown in the
article, and in the fact that it happens when the data is shared, rather than
applied on data sitting in a personal account, or data identified by third-
party (e.g. the rightsholder). The patent isn't available online just yet, it
seems, so I can't say for certain.

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achievingApathy
[https://torrentfreak.com/images/msrep.pdf](https://torrentfreak.com/images/msrep.pdf)

All US Patents are available online, there just isn't anything innovative or
novel anywhere in the patent that I think justifies it as anything more than
patent trolling.

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beedogs
It'd be nice if companies would stop wasting their time trying to enforce
copyright.

~~~
nitemice
You wouldn't say that if it was your copyright they were enforcing.

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PrimHelios
Except I would. I just use copyright to prove I made something. Everything I
do is released under CC BY-SA or (for my code) Expat/MIT licensing. Things
should open, information deserves to be free, especially when people are no
longer making money from the content.

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nitemice
I bet you still wouldn't be happy if someone violated CC BY-SA or Expat/MIT
licensing, and didn't even attribute to you. Thus, copyright still serves a
purpose to you, and even for the minimal set of actions you want, it needs to
be enforceable.

I agree that copyright law, as it currently stands is usually mostly about
screwing the little guy, in favour of some big corporation in perpetuity, but
that's a separate argument to enforcement which should apply equally to all
works, including yours.

~~~
PrimHelios
>I bet you still wouldn't be happy if someone violated CC BY-SA or Expat/MIT
licensing, and didn't even attribute to you. Thus, copyright still serves a
purpose to you, and even for the minimal set of actions you want, it needs to
be enforceable.

Happy? No. Unhappy enough to pursue legal action? Hell no.

>I agree that copyright law, as it currently stands is usually mostly about
screwing the little guy, in favour of some big corporation in perpetuity, but
that's a separate argument to enforcement which should apply equally to all
works, including yours.

True. I'm not arguing completely against copyright law, I just wouldn't sue
someone for violating my license =P

~~~
tajen
In XXth century, Communism was about nationalizing companies.

In XXIst century, Communism will be about only recognizing a copyright
duration of 10 years, after which the content is free to copy. And compiled
content must be open-source.

It's the nationalization of content. If explained this way, I would be in
favour of _that_ kind of communism, and there's hope that it would participate
to sharing more knowledge, be safer and advancing humanity faster. But given
all countries are constrained by the WTO bindings, it would take a rogue
nation like Cuba or China to implement that.

~~~
chii
China doesn't enforce copyright because it's a benefit to them right now. you
bet your bottom dollar they will if and when it becomes a liability (e.g.,
they start to invent things that are novel, but is easily copied).

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bcoughlan
I can't get over the triviality of that flowchart in the article. The system
is well and truly broken. If anything this just allows Microsoft to extract
money from any other company trying to prevent piracy on their cloud storage.

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andreareina
Doesn't Dropbox already do this? IIRC they let you store anything, but block
sharing a file if its hash is found in some blacklist.

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PrimHelios
Flip a LIB somewhere in the file and it works fine, though.

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falcolas
Just for a moment, combine this patent with Microsoft's announced willingness
to look through your content.

> we will access, transfer, disclose, and preserve personal data, including
> your content [...] when we have a good faith belief that doing so is
> necessary to: > > protect the rights or property of Microsoft, including
> enforcing the terms governing the use of the services

Sounds like a potential nightmare, especially if they can't tell the
difference between legitimate backups and pirated software; of which the
difference is only whether you've bought the original or not.

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ComodoHacker
Looks like Microsoft urged to file the patent in 2013 when DropBox started
doing this. Either as a potential weapon for patent wars or "just in case".

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JustSomeNobody
Thank you Microsoft! Everyone will start licensing your technology so that now
there will be only a single point of failure. And, because you're Microsoft,
there will be a failure.

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jasonkostempski
What are they doing this for? Even honest people don't want to work with
tattletales.

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faragon
Pirate countermeasure: store encrypted files and decrypt "on the fly".

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ForFreedom
So as the file is downloaded it will check or while its being played?

That is a bad move by windows.

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panzer_wyrm
No news. This is for cloud services. It is not on windows from what I
understood.

If it has the side effects of people rolling their own clouds - the better. We
really need something better anyway. The last major innovation was bittorrent
in 2004...

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CommanderData
So where will this be used? On bing or Windows 10?

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NTripleOne
>The company aims to use the patent to disable prohibited content and identify
repeat offenders in service provider storage systems.

So onedrive, more than likely.

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madshiva
My new patent 07-875545-99: [ SOMEBODY READ THIS ] -> [ PROFIT]

