this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Hijacking to pose another legacy piracy question. My dad would often buy pirated DVDs at the barbershop. You know, with the sharpeid title on the disk. Occasionally we would get a DVD with an unfinished movie in it. It would often have a watermark saying something like “Property of Universal “ and some scenes, especially CG heavy ones, would be incomplete. I assume these were leaked from editing houses or the sort but is this a type of release that’s seen in modern pirating?
Those were from test screenings. From a group screening, or from copies that were sent to people.
The For Your Consideration copies that you'd see sometimes are from copies sent to things like the academy awards and Oscars
That sounds like a workprint. The linked wiki page has notable examples of workprints that made their way onto Internet, sometimes before the movie was even in theaters. I don't think this is typically a sought-after version for pirate groups, their existence is likely more of a convenience situation. Someone got their hands on the workprint, uploaded it online, and it spread from there.
The holy grail for pirate groups used to be screener copies, finished versions of films that are sent to reviewers, promoters, etc. before release. I remember a (relatively brief) time when finished copies of movies were routinely popping up online even before they were in theaters. Such leaks have largely been stopped by difficult-to-remove watermarking of screener copies and workprints. Every such copy that goes to an editor, VFX house or film reviewer gets its own unique watermark trace embedded in the copy. If the studio finds that your copy was leaked online they can fire / sue / blacklist you. It's massively curtailed such leaks.
I wonder if AI could do a number on those watermarks. Have a program like Topaz upscale it a bit and add some noise and grain. That should be enough to destroy however they identify it visually.
The technical issues could probably be tackled, but realistically I doubt we'll ever return to the screener copy glory days. By now everyone who receives a screener copy knows about the watermarking software, and release teams would have a hell of a time convincing them that the watermark can 100% for sure be removed. The person in possession of the screener copy has every incentive not to share it, since the costs of getting caught are so high (fired and/or sued and/or blacklisted in the industry).
I don't have any source for this, but screener copy leaks were so prevalent at one point that I have to imagine that money was changing hands. Release teams behind paid sites were probably bribing recipients of screener copies so their site could have the pirate copy first, and later it would spread to free sites. Given the number of people that receive screener copies, studios realistically had no way to figure out who was leaking them so it was essentially free money for the leaker. The price paid to the leaker was probably not all that high since the risks were so low.
As soon as the watermarks were in, the risks for the leaker went up dramatically and so would their price. Watermarking was actually a very clever solution to the problem. Rather than adding DRM, which would bog down their workflows and piss off their customers, studios added watermarks that made it uneconomical for the leaks to continue.