Külföldi torrent oldalak Movie Studios To Use Bitcoin Bounties To Stop Piracy!

At the end of June, a new company walked away with a top-five prize from the competition SeedStars World, held in Capetown, South Africa. The crowd and Judges were wowed by the offering from Custos, a local startup that promises to solve some big problems in the movie industry.

Their intriguing new idea targets movie piracy on BitTorrent. The product demonstrates a lot of promise, at least for studios happy to pay for the service. Ever since BitTorrent became globally popular, movie piracy has been an ongoing thorn in the side of movie makers. By some accounts, it cost the industry as much as $20.5 Billion in the US alone last year.

Developed by researchers at Stellenbosch University, the clever system purports to “turn downloaders against the uploaders,” but only applies to uploads that originate from pre-release copies. These finished movies are usually watermarked and handed out to an approved list of movie critics, academy members, and film festival judges. Although watermarked prior to distribution, these lists have become so long that when a pre-release film end up on the internet the source is hard to track down.

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"Our media rights management solution offers rapid detection of compromised media, using a unique technology that turns pirates on each other."
Once a recipient leaks their copy, and after its found on BitTorrent, the very first person to download it will see a unique bitcoin public address attached to it. The address will contain a bounty, which can be verified on the blockchain, and is different for every copy that has been distributed.

Depending on the size of each bounty offered, this may be an easy way to make some money. The simplicity of downloading torrents and reporting the upload to Custos makes the reward a tempting offer. In an interview with TorrentFreak, the company explained:

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“Custos embeds watermarks into the analog and/or digital content of media items, which are imperceptible but difficult to remove. Each watermark contains a Bitcoin wallet, with a reward for anyone who anonymously claims it once the media has passed out of the control of the original recipient.”
Although the service could be expanded to include the recording and software industries, Custos has designed their product to target the movie market, offering studios a service that lets them hand out pre-release copies more often, and with far more accountability in the case of a leak. “[The original recipient] could then be subject to financial or legal penalties, or to reduced access to future content,” Custos explained.

While the Custos' solution applies bitcoin to an expensive problem, it only deters copyright infringement during the “Screener Season.” This six week period at the beginning of the year is when movies are being considered for awards, including the Oscars, and copies are handed out to Academy judges.

Throughout the rest of the year pre-release copies on BitTorrent can be quite scarce, and pirated movies primarily come bypassing the Digital Rights Management on retail copies of a movie, or even from people taking a videocamera into a movie theater and simply recording it all in lower quality.

However, the movies released during screener season are some of the most highly sought after and pirated on BitTorrent. The new product would likely have a noticeable impact on the quality of illegally available content, and the finances of the movie makers.

There is one glaring drawback, once a screener is uploaded to the BitTorrent network it cannot be recalled. With prevention a key facet of the business model, Custos would not be likely to pay a second bounty for the same movie. Competition may be fierce, so if you plan to give it a try, make sure you have a fast internet connection and mark your calendar for new year's day.