Video Pirates' Use of HashCode Removal Tools Growing, Irdeto Says

Pay-TV operators often rely on conditional access fingerprint techniques such as VCID or HashCodes to "fingerprint" their content for tracing piracy leaks to the source, but a rapidly growing number of HashCode removal tools can in real-time strip away those visual marks from a video feed, blogged Irdeto Senior Director-Cyber Services and Investigations Mark Mulready Wednesday. This tool is often available online for as little as $2,000 and falls into "a legal grey-area'" since it doesn't actively enable piracy but helps pirates mask identity, Irdeto said. The solution is covert watermarking, where a unique user ID is put into the stream, but pirates can't see the watermarks and have difficulty obscuring them, it said. Irdeto said most film and TV studios already use covert watermarking for high-value content, and sports rights holders increasingly are requiring it in new licensing deals.