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Amazon Patents Anti-Pirates hidden watermark

shower08

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Hello I wanted to ask you in relation to this article if afterwards we can still download the videos and if that bypass their new protection?

Code:
https://torrentfreak.com/amazon-patents-technology-to-track-down-streaming-pirates-201121/
 
Unless you plan on using AnyStream to download items and then upload them to the illegal warez scene you've got nothing to worry about. That technology is targetted towards users that download items and then upload them for "the masses" to download illegally. I doubt this is anything AnyStream will handle, as pirates are not its target audience.
 
Hello I wanted to ask you in relation to this article if afterwards we can still download the videos and if that bypass their new protection?

Code:
https://torrentfreak.com/amazon-patents-technology-to-track-down-streaming-pirates-201121/


Good, the better their fingerprinting tech is the closer we are to DRM-free video, after all, when various sites started offering DRM-free music, the music industry didn't go bankrupt! But for now, we have AS.
 
Anystream rips will have these watermarks since it's a real web-dl.
Which means if you want to share them you could end up having legal troubles that go far beyond a sole ban from Amazon.
 
Anystream rips will have these watermarks since it's a real web-dl.
Which means if you want to share them you could end up having legal troubles that go far beyond a sole ban from Amazon.

AnyStream was never intended to be used as a tool for piracy, so I don't see what the problem is...
 
I made this post to just inform myself, not to mention illegal or other things
 
Nobody said you did. ;) As i explained above, that hidden watermark is targetted towards tracking pirated uploads (by whoever did the uploading) to the person that did the uploading. If you keep the downloads you do with AnyStream to yourself (and don't go uploading them on the web for the masses), even IF they add that hidden watermark they won't be coming after you. Since you wouldn't have uploaded anything.

That new watermark itself has ZERO effect on the ability to download something, it's purely aimed at tracing an illegal upload (thus something that was already downloaded from prime and then uploaded somewhere else illegally) back to whoever did the uploading.

Download stuff > keep the stuff to yourself > you're in no danger.
Download stuff > upload stuff to torrents for example > They may very well come after you if they spot the upload.
 
I dont want to share it but I asked if we maybe loose the feature thats why I have done it.
 
I dont want to share it but I asked if we maybe loose the feature thats why I have done it.

Then you're in no danger. As stated, that new mechanism only affect ppl that download and then upload to the web. It has NO EFFECT on the actual downloading of content.
 
Indeed, we hold these truths to be self evident,.....

BTW, there are other tools that serve a similar purpose as AnyStream with the same streaming services but each resulting file has its own visible watermark intro / outro splash screen with accurate individual user data. This makes it clear to the end user that they could be easily tracked down should they engage in illegal uploads.

Its a bit of a heavy handed approach IMO. An EULA should be sufficient, no need to visually mar each file. Also, one should be able to exercise a modicum of common sense.
 
Amazon anyway has been trialling various watermarking technologies for some time, this is just one more I assume
 
Let me give an example of how they can use this tech (I'm actually surprised amazon was able to get a patent on this, I've described similar things before).

It's difficult to encode videos for many users (companies don't want to put overhead on the data path, as that makes it less easy to use a CDN), so even sticking in extra metadata can be problematic. However, look at MPD files (or m3u8). These manfiest files defines the movie you are watching as a bunch of "packets/chunks" that are downloaded in sequence. Imagine instead of having 1 copy of every chunk, they had 2 (corresponding to bits). So, they can now store 2 copies of every chunk on their CDN (doubling storage costs, but not sure that's a huge deal). They can then generate a manifest for each individual user that contains a unique set of chunks from the 0 and 1 bits. if a movie would take 100k chunks, that gives them 12.5K bytes to encode whatever they want.

a possible work around would be to get manifest files from different users and randomly pick from them which manifest you will pull a particular chunk from thereby messing up the encoding.
 
Let me give an example of how they can use this tech (I'm actually surprised amazon was able to get a patent on this, I've described similar things before).

It's difficult to encode videos for many users (companies don't want to put overhead on the data path, as that makes it less easy to use a CDN), so even sticking in extra metadata can be problematic. However, look at MPD files (or m3u8). These manfiest files defines the movie you are watching as a bunch of "packets/chunks" that are downloaded in sequence. Imagine instead of having 1 copy of every chunk, they had 2 (corresponding to bits). So, they can now store 2 copies of every chunk on their CDN (doubling storage costs, but not sure that's a huge deal). They can then generate a manifest for each individual user that contains a unique set of chunks from the 0 and 1 bits. if a movie would take 100k chunks, that gives them 12.5K bytes to encode whatever they want.

a possible work around would be to get manifest files from different users and randomly pick from them which manifest you will pull a particular chunk from thereby messing up the encoding.

Ah that makes sense wouldn't be very hard for them to do and not encoding the entire video for every user. Since AS is lossless decryption why can't you just download the exact same stream from 2 different Amazon accounts and do a file compare on the h264 stream? Wouldn't that conveniently point out the watermark and enable you to zero it all out? That's of course you really want to remove it but doesn't sound to robust to me as long as there is lossless decryption apps.

That article is just talking about recording the uncompressed video and taking screen shots, that's on the analog level.
 
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