The paper hosted here discusses the leakage mechanisms for unauthorized copies of major feature films. This paper was presented at TPRC 2003 and at the DRM 2003 workshop at CCS 10 in DC. It will be published in the proceedings of the DRM workshop.

This web page holds further screenshots that show overt evidence of insider leakage of movies. Insider sourced unauthorized copies are important because they are generally far superior to outsider sourced copies in terms of freshness and video quality. Outsider sourced copies tend not to have the combination of freshness and video quality, but may have one or the other. For example this still:

is taken from a potentially outsider leaked copy that hit the Internet at or around the day of cinema release but is very bad video quality compared to most samples we looked at. Specifically this copy was made with a handheld video recording device through air and probably was covertly shot from the side of a cinema judging by the angle the text makes with with the bottom of the image. As a result it is dark, indistinct and an effort to watch.

Often, the evidence that a copy is insider sourced consists of markings present in the copy. The markings involved can be of several different types and can be present in several different ways. Some markings only appear at or before at the start of movie while others can appear and dissappear at any time. Some markings are specifically designed to be a unique watermark and some are just general warnings.

First we show some general warnings that are sometimes found at the start of movies for a few seconds. Every image on this page comes from a small sample of a different unauthorised copy of a movie that appeared in the US Box office top 50 between 1st January 2002 and 27th June 2003. The film buffs among you might like to try and guess the movie that the still is taken from although some are obviously non-trivial, including the first four.

The phrase "For your consideration" and similar sounding text is often used on copies that are attempting to influence awards judges, and we note several examples of this type, including these:

A more general use indicated by markers is that of "screener":

Some markers are more vague and simply indicate who the content in question belongs to:

The following set go to the opposite extreme and have very explicit instructions on what one is to do upon viewing this content, such as calling free telephone numbers like (888) 823-2FOX or (800) NO COPYS. We of course encourage you to obey these instructions at the first opportunity to do so. We hope more extensive instructions will appear over time.

Some markers are of a different type altogether. For example many copies exist with some form of time or frame counter running in the picture, this is for easy identification of any specific point in the content during the post-production process and not neccessarily to mark the copy of the movie itself.

Some markers are unique identifiers of the people to be assumed responsible for the leakage of a particular content copy, in otherwords overt watermarks. The people involved in insider leakage often (and understandably) like to obscure these markers but it is usually still evident that they were once there. For example the following screen shot has a counter in shot as well as a blurred out overt watermark in the top right hand corner.

This image also has a counter and two blurred watermarks, the blurred regions are on the bottom centre of the picture, they are easier to spot in the movie itself than in this still.

This image is from a particular unauthorized copy that made the news. It has black bars that presumably cover two markings on the bottom right:

Finally we note that sometimes an unfinished or otherwise different copy of the movie may leak out, and there is often evidence in the copy of this fact. The previous still comes from a copy that shows evidence of incomplete special effects in other frames. Moving on to a different movie the following frame shows a boom microphone in shot at the top that did not appear in the finished film:

In this shot we also see a boom mike in top centre but this copy also has several other artifacts present in other scenes.

This frame also shows the microphone in top of shot:

There many other hints that the copy might not be the final version but boom microphones in shot are the easiest to detect in general. Frequently one would need to view a regular consumer copy of the movie alongside the suspect copy to find these differences.

We hope you have enjoyed this tour through evidence of successful insider attacks against the movie industry and will be well equipped to watch out for it in future with utmost vigilance. The alert amongst you will already have discovered how to replicate all the observations made on this page in order to verify our results. We believe that analyses such as ours that have important consequences for policy and technology should be verifiable independently and encourage our readers to partake in this activity.

These are the film titles of the images above in order of appearance.