Sleuthing from public sources to figure out how the Hateful Eight leaker was caught

In 2014, Quentin Tarantino sued Gawker for publishing a link to a leaked pre-release screener of his movie "The Hateful Eight." The ensuing court-case revealed that the screeners Tarantino's company had released had some forensic "traitor tracing" features to enable them to track down the identities of people who leaked copies.

Working from court records, as well as documents from the North Korea/Sony hack, a patent lawsuit against Tarantino's forensics company, and the forensic company's own patent filings, Matthew Fuller and Nikita Mazurov do an incredible job of sleuthing to uncover the interior, technical workings of the secretive world of digital copyright-enforcement forensics.

The paper itself is published in the journal Theory, Culture and Society and frames the investigation in the context of cultural studies. It begins with a lot of theory that I found to be quite a struggle, but the technical detail (which is on pages 9-18) is really fascinating.

Fuller and Mazurov use their technical analysis to make some notes towards a "counter-forensics" of techniques that would defeat the traitor-tracing measures.

This reminds me of the work Ed Felten and co did on SDMI more than a decade ago, in which they presented the general hypothesis that watermarks could be robust (hard to remove) or imperceptible (not so obtrusive as to wreck the user's enjoyment) but not both. If a watermark adds no perceptible data to the signal, then it can be removed with no perceptible loss -- and since you can compare two or more copies of a work to find the watermarks, it's never that hard to find the marks in order to remove them. Read the rest