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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...'"
Granted there's always a market for somebody who would like to see the Matrix Reloaded captured on someone's pen-camera, but is that really the demographic that the movie industry is losing money from?
http://www.remix.net/
Actually, whether or not the rest of what you said is true, it seems to me that digital projectors would in fact offer at least one benefit: artifacts, or the lack thereof.
If film artifacts are removed from the original film before it's encoded onto the disc, then they're gone for good. No degredation of the film over the period from release date to final showing due to handling and the simple running of the reels through the machine.
Plus, and this is totally unresearched, it seems to me that digital projectors would eventually pay for themselves. Imagine if the theater could hire just one person to que up the discs for movies to be played in a theater over the course of a day, week, or month. Then, that same person sits in one central 'control room' and presses a button to start and stop movies. This means no one sitting in the projection booth, forgetting to switch reels, or forgettiing to change the audio levels, or God only knows what else (Fight Club, anyone).
Ack!
First off, this technology is only for digital cinemas. Not very many of them right now.
This also shows how little the MPAA and their minions know of film piracy culture. Most cams are nuked anyway, since they usually are unwatchable. Telesyncs (a tripodded cam with direct sound source) are a little better (and can be very good if shot properly), but are typically released if they are the only option - for the past six months, most films released eventually have Screener versions released. If the first release is a Cam/TS, that is usually superceded by a Screener within a week or two. Hey Hollywood: fix the leaks in the studios and your post facilities first before you attack the lowest of technologies. A PDA cam with a tiny surveillance lens? Please.
Before Oscar season, almost any popular film was available in DVDRip format, since the studios felt piracy was less important than gathering Academy votes, and they issued tens of thousands of Consideration DVDs to Academy members. If piracy of their most popular and valuable assets was secondary to winning awards, why all the fuss now about Cams?
There are also rips taken directly off the DigiBeta which are absolutely stunning. Again, this is an internal studio problem, and $2 million in taxpayer money will do NOTHING to stop that.
This is like fighting cocaine importation by attacking the kids on the street smoking cheap nickel bag weed.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
This technique doesn't involve subpoenas to ISPs to get the identities of p2p users.
This technique doesn't involve scare tactics targeted at network admins.
This technique does not involve arrests, fine, or prison sentences.
This technique does not involve some cockeyed "protection scheme" that renders the product absolutely useless in certain circumstances.
What the fuck do you guys want?
HI, MY NAME IS ISAAC.
The latest batch of pirated movies that I've seen around Hong Kong and southern china are DVD quality ripoffs from DVDs that the movie studios send to journalists, academy / awards voters and other folks that need to be appeased in the PR process.
Video cameras in movie theaters are now obsolete. The process of pirating movies has been perfected with social engineering.
"imperceptible to the viewer in the theater"
Just like flourescent lights have an imperceptible flicker?
Just like security cameras have an imperceptible high-frequency audio hum?
Just like mp3's have imperceptible audio distortion?
Just like city water has an imperceptible aftertaste?
Just like Microsoft has imperceptible security flaws?
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it does."
Education is the silver bullet.
I think you are the one with the mindset problem. "Ownership" is an abstract idea that cultures choose to enforce through the mechanism of government. It makes a lot of sense for items that are fundamentally scarce... material goods, livestock, land. It may make some sense for encouraging innovation and the collection of data that would otherwise not be collected. Maybe. It makes little sense for cultural artifacts... things like music, art, and stories will be produced inevitably, and it's been that way for millennia, and some of our greatest cultural treasures have been created by copying and building on past innovations. But I guess the way you see it, Shakespeare "stole" all his materials and should tossed into the slammer with other murders and rapist.
Let China do whatever the heck it wants to do... maybe it's better, maybe it's worse, but we don't have the grounds to tell them what their culture should be like. (And if you haven't noticed, an awful lot of people in Western culture rationalize the "theft" of music... perhaps our laws should be changed to match our actual beliefs, and not the economic will of corporate content controllers.)
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
Don't be a smart-ass... the people who believe in complete, total cultural relativism are just as naieve as the people who believe that their culture's values define a universal ideal to which all other cultures should adhere. In reality, morals emerge from the day-to-day experiences of human existance. E.g., "do unto others as you would have them do onto you".
Things like murder, rape, and violence have been universally condemned by every culture. That's because it makes people feel bad. Of course, not that every culture has also had exceptions to these rules... things like "justified homocide", "holy war", "preemptive strike", prostitution, marital rape, and the "he-had-it-coming" defense... the badness of the experience is absolute, but the rules with which a culture encodes it vary widely.
It's a wide world though, and cultures start to have a greater number of opinions on things like "nonmarital sex", "blowjobs", "dissedent speech", "spitting on the ground", and "pirating music". My point in the previous post was that we should realize that there is a great room for flexibility here, and it's ultimately up to the Chinese where they want to take it.
I, for one, think humanity as a whole would be better if we severly curtailed the role of copyright and patents. It's probably not optimal to abolish them altogether, but I we should radically rethink them. Think about it: if no copyright existed, people would still be making music, art, books, and software (open-source is a good example of the latter, but it is by no means the only example: a lot of software that is produced is done so because it will pay for itself). If no copyright existed, we might have less quantity and less special effects and less pop-garbage merchandise. But it might be made up for in terms of stronger culture and localized talent with richer variety.
Stepping even further back (and ignoring my particular stance on intellectual property), I think there's a lesson here about globalization: globalization brings with it legal and cultural homogenity and more centralized control. This is bad... the human race will be more robust if reasonably-sized regions can experiment and evolve independently (much like the U.S. gets an advantage out of different states experimenting with different policies [e.g., notice how all the lawmakers have rethought deregulation of the power industry after that little experiement in California failed]). WIPO's ideas about intellectual property may be ideal (*cough*bullshit*cough*), but I'd much rather us find that out by having different nations experiment with different IP models than to have WIPO impose its will on the world and have reform come only decades later after reform, revolution, or revolt have had sufficent time to brew.
The only thing we have to fear is a world where nothing can change...
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction