Q22 Experts,

While reviewing the Q22 meeting report, I was intrigued by a comment related to AVD-3541.  This contribution proposes that SATC can be used to block illegal content from being transmitted over the Internet by examining the media flow and comparing that media flow (or some signature thereof) against a database.  SATC would then block content as appropriate.

I would like to comment:

1) I could easily circumvent any such measure, so any such system would prove to work only temporarily; and

2) While a given copy of a digital copy of some content, such as music or a movie, will have a clearly recognizable signature, the same media can be “substantially” altered by merely using a different encoding method (e.g., a different video codec or compression scheme); and

3) Actually attempting to create a database of all known pirated media, including all variations, would result in the creation of a massively huge database; and

4) Maintenance of such a database would be a never-ending chore; and

5) Notwithstanding the foregoing, while such a database could be constructed and flows could be examined, inspecting flows in real-time and trying to positively identify a given flow is a monumental task that will result in significantly negative impact on packet transmission performance, even if a bank of specialized network processors were employed per router or switch

In short: do we really want to attempt this?  While it’s all technically possible (at the risk of turning a 1Gbps pipe into a 1Kbps pipe), I would argue that it’s not going to work.  I would be happy to be first in line to write the software necessary to circumvent such a system.  And I would do it just because I can ;-)

Having said that, the meeting report said that, the meeting report said that “if SATC finds a data stream carrying content failing to match a known signature, it will block the stream or mark it as being suspicious.”

I underlined the text of significance.  This suggests that the database would only be populated with signatures of known good media flows and would only block unrecognized flows.  This seems different than what I read and understood from AVD-3541.  What the meeting report suggests would be a simpler problem with a substantially smaller database.  So, what was actually discussed and decided for SATC?  A system that blocks unrecognized flows or a system that blocks recognized flows?

Thanks,

Paul