Friday, July 20, 2012

Research BLog Inquiry Three: Six


A research study was done at the University of Pennsylvania and Carnegie Mellon University to look for the vulnerabilities of the distribution and production process of movies. For this study, the researchers created programs which allowed them to access movie web sites. After they were able to access the websites they established a list of movies that were the box office top 50 the previous year. (Cronin and Byers, 8) They said, "This process automatically collects and organizes a variety of data including cinema release date, DVD release date, distributor, MPAA rating, box office take. The resulting data set includes 312 movies". For each movie in the data set software was used to search an online content verification site and automatically find all unauthorized copies. Some of the movies search resulted in no hits others resulted in multiple hits. Using what the researchers found on the verification site, they were able to locate on peer-to-peer networks a small part of each relevant copy. They were able to locate 285 relevant hit for the 312 movies in the data set. Of the 285 movies that the researchers were able to locate, industry insiders leaked 77% of them. On average, the movie samples the researchers examined were indexed 100 days after theater release and 83 days before DVD release. While only 7 of these movies were indexed prior to their theater release date, 163 were indexed prior to their DVD release date.
The researchers gave some ways to help stop movies from being and illegally downloaded. One policy that may minimize leakage in the audio production facility mandates that an appointed worker of the company must be present during any use of the content. That person is responsible for ensuring that (the content is always in their immediate possession, or locked in a safe to which only they have access. Another option might be that during the private screening there will be guards outside and everyone must hand over all electronic devices prior to entering the screening room. Long term mitigation to stop the leakage depends on advancements in other industries such as design and manufacturing, legal document management, and finance are currently wrestling with digital content control.(Cronin and Byers, 18) The researcher state,
” Movie artifacts are handled by a limited number of employees in a controlled manner during production and through much of the distribution process. In the later stages of distribution, content is handled by a large and mostly anonymous community. Securing the former environment is difficult but tractable. Securing the latter is nearly impossible. Hence, focusing efforts on insider threats addresses the most costly leakage, and represents the best opportunity for success”
The leakage will be easier to stop in the beginning stages of the film making because less people will be able to get hands on the movie. Once the movie goes to post production and even distribution it is nearly impossible to stop.
When I looked at this paper I knew this would fit perfectly in my paper. I knew I needed to find out what efforts are being made to stop file sharing and if there are any new ways to stop it. With file sharing being such an big part of my paper I wanted to find research on all the aspects on illegal downloading what is it, how it works, and now how to prevent it.
cronin, Eric , and Simon Byers. "An analysis of security vulnerabilities in the movie production and distribution process." ScienceDirect (2004): n.pag. Miami Library. Web. 20 Jul 2012.






No comments:

Post a Comment