wwp@yahoogroups.com:
Re: Effective copyright protection
Alexander Forst-Rakoczy 2004-Aug-01 16:16:00
Am 1. Aug 2004 um 12:56 schrieb Madeena 360:
> I consider the following way as THE MOST EFFECTIVE way I've seen
> recently. I
> learnt it from "Interactive Quicktime: Authoring wired media" by Mathew
> Peterson.
>
> Mathew has a couple of pages on how to protect your movie files by
> using a
> sprite that detects where the file is playing from and act accordingly.
>
> You can specify a certain url in your sprite script and every time the
> movie
> is opened, it checks the url. If it is in the right url, you see the
> movie
> as the author intended. If it was downloaded on a computer or moved to
> another url, it disables the video and audio track and shows an
> alternative
> video track showing a warning. It sounds too good to be true, but it
> works.
This was discussed a few times on the QTVR mailing list up to now and,
I guess, will come up repeatedly in the future. From my knowledge, it
was cracked in a few minutes by a Live Stage Pro guru on the list.
Please be aware that with ANY so called copy protection you already
have given the user a working copy of your application/music
file/movie/whatever. What you can do is making it harder for the casual
"thief" (= user that isn't aware of copyright issues) to make a copy.
You will not be able to protect your work against professional thieves
with software alone.
Think about the sprite in the QTVR movie. It was inserted in the movie
most probably with Live Stage Pro. But who says that you cannot remove
it with Live Stage Pro? After all, it's just a few bytes that are
stored in a file. The file format is known. Just disassemble the file
and put it back together without the "offending" sprite.
Of course, this is only possible if the original movie is stored in the
file. If the sprite only references the movie then you might set up
your own web server, use the correct URL and make the sprite THINK it
was loaded from the correct domain.
You can even encrypt the file, it doesn't help. The user must be able
to decrypt the file somehow in order to see the contents. Nobody can
prevent the user from saving the decrypted contents someplace else. You
can make it harder but not impossible.
IMHO, embedding a copyright notice within the panoramic image is a
better way. It is very time consuming to extract the image from the
QTVR, remove the visible watermark from it, and rebuild the panorama.
Removing the watermark cannot be automated easily.
Alex