Foiling Cinema Pirates

minesweeper writes "According to this Associated Press article, in fighting the piracy of advanced-screenings of movies, Hollywood has deployed agents with night vision goggles and placed metal-detectors at theater entrances. Nevertheless, video cameras are still being smuggled in and the recordings smuggled out and onto the Internet. Now, the latest attempt to fight piracy will be to show the movie with a particular flicker, imperceptible to the viewer in the theater, but making any video recording unwatchable. Quoth the article, 'Cinea LLC, which created an encryption system for DVDs, and Sarnoff, a technology research firm, are developing a system to modulate the light cast on a movie screen to create a flicker or other patterns that would be picked up by recording devices...'"

Comments

Re:Don't forget...

[kingkade]

Or you could just quit being such a pussy...

zing, you are the clever wordsmith. The post was a joke nothing that ever really happened, when someone kicks your seat it's usually an accident, and if they do it more than once I will ask them nicely to stop because sometimes people really don't realize that they're annoying someone in a subtle way like that.

And what are you going to do, threaten the girl drinking vodka or the crying kid to stop -- that's what kids do, it's the fault of the parent for making them come...It's cute that you enjoy seeing yourself do this and that, but when it comes down to it, I'm sure you would write such a thing because you do the exact opposite and say nothing.

If someone were sucking face right in front of me I think I might elect to give them a simultaneous wet willie.

God, give me a break testosterone boy. Then again, maybe it was you I saw making out with your ugly girlfriend, hehe.When someone kicks my seat, I turn around, and stand up if necessary

That was a good one, "if necessary". ack, you're a joke.

Screw 'em

[Rabid Cougar]

Here's my take. Actors are overpaid. They think their profession is more important than everyone else's. They think they are so important that a terrorist attack on them is emminent. They think their opinions are more important than anyone else's. They think it's okay to demand millions of dollars to make a film, spend all their money on opulent living, and then preach to us about the homeless. They think that by putting together a celibrity phone-a-thon after 9-11, they have done their part. It's one thing to hit up regular Americans for donations, when what they could afford to donate collectively would dwarf what the rest of us could afford to donate.

So what is the end result? They make movies--most of which suck. Then because it costs so darned much to make a movie, we pay out the nose to go to the theater. They hype up crappy movies, pay other actors to pretend to be people coming out of the theater after seeing the movie to tell us how awesome it was, falsify rave critical reviews in some cases, and trick us into helping support their version of American royalty. The worst part is that after paying too much to see a lame movie, is not only are you screwed out of your hard-earned money, but you've just wasted a couple of hours of your life. You can't get either one back.

Maybe that's the real problem. Maybe people are tired of it and are willing to watch a crappy bootleg in order to decide whether it's worth their money before shelling out for the real goods. With only a few, notable exceptions, most stuff coming out of Hollywood these days sucks.

I'm a student with a wife and 2 kids. For what it would cost for me to take us all to the movies and buy concessions, I could pay for Dish Network for a month or get a month's worth of DSL or cable internet connection (my current ISP is a dialup and it's going as soon as we can afford to upgrade). You tell me, which option is a better value for my money? Hollywood can rot in hell for all I care.

And they can just shut their yaps while they're at it. I don't want to hear them telling me stupid crap like, "War should be avoided at all costs." --Nicholas Cage. I thank God that Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and George Washington weren't that utterly freakin' stupid. Some things are worth dying for. But he's an actor. Poparazzi follow him around and people with no lives fall at his feet and scream and weep because they got an autograph or simply close enough to touch him. And thay pay him millions of dollars to make sucky movies. Therefore he MUST know what he's talking about, right?

Anyway, I'm done. I hope that by trying to shut down piracy that they wind up shooting themselves in the head like the RIAA is doing with their not really CD's. Treat the symptoms, not the root cause. I wish I could be that smart...