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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...'"
I first noticed it when I got an insta-migraine 30 minutes into a bootleg of the perfect storm - there's a barely perceptible flicker from the 24fps of film going to 30fps of video; it's not enough to be noticeable, but it causes me all sorts of problems and aftereffects (like if i walk around in the moonlight afterwards, the brightness level "pulsates" for a good 15 minutes). i imagine this will be a lot more severe, but still, the existing problems have already turned me off to videotaped bootlegs.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
I don't really understand why this is a problem for the film industry. Watching a semi-focused and shaking image of a movie with mono sound on my TV in no way substitutes for going to the theatre for a movie experience. Not to mention the time it takes to d/l from any p2p service. It is nothing like MP3 music which, although not perfect, at least provides comparable fidelity to the 'real thing' you can buy on CD.
So this is going to stop cam releases of movies? who cares about cams anyways, I'll take my dvd screener rip thanks.
To combat camcorder piracy Cinea and Sarnoff will develop methods of encoding films with artifacts that are invisible to the human eye, but play havoc with the electronics of a camcorder.
I suppose that given the natural latency of the human eye, this could work. When I pick up a TV screen in my old-style video camera, the picture has bands of light and dark in to, presumably due to the scan rate of the camera matching the scan rate of the television.
In the movies, when you see a scene with a television in it, why are there no such artifacts? Is it due to shooting with film, camera speed, ?? I would think that adding some sort of latency in a video camera to emulate that of the human eye would render such protection schemes useless.
As expected, the article nor the follow-up links had any information regarding HOW this protection would work (or at least none that I could find).
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
If the story is a duplicate, don't comment on it. I know it will take discipline not to cut and paste previous highly rated comments, but something has got to give here to make the editors take notice. I say, ignore the duplicate stories. No comments, no interest. There is no point voicing disapproval as it is generally ignored. Therefore I suggest voicing nothing at all.
I don't mind if they hire thugs to guard the doors or pay good money to render the screens unrecordable so long as they keep shipping perfect copies in the form of DVDs (screeners) to people who vote in awards shows a few weeks or months prior to the actual theatrical release.
...what does that tell you?
This is what my grandmother would have referred to as "closing the barn doors after the horses have already left."
Hmmm. $50 to take four children (and myself) to go see Ice Age or invite over every neighborhood kid on the block to watch it on our HD for free before it hit the theatres. That's a tough call. Well, "free" isn't strictly true. $5 for a metric ton of popcorn.
I don't know what is wrong with the RIAA. If people are willing to watch a shitty copy (Cam/Telesync sucks) of a film instead of shelling out the loot for the full whiz-bang of a theatre experience
The truly stupid would say "it tells me we need to hire thugs to guard doors."
The moderately stupid would say "this means we need to lower prices."
The bright would do nothing.
The enlightened would see an untapped market.
My
Limekiller
no, but people will claim they can hear it.
and, yes, if the mp3 is of a low enough quality (128kbps or lower, in most cases) and provided a good sound set-up and armed with an idea of what to hear for, you too can detect errors in the audio stream that you otherwise wouldn't hear. I know I do it all the time.
same applies here:
people will claim they can see it.
and, yes, if the flickering is of a low enough quality, and provided a good visual set-up and armed with an idea of what to look for, you too should be able to see the screen flicker... or at least fade and brighten slightly.
and they'd probably be correct.
but this edit isn't supposed to affect the populous at large.. only the people who look for this sort of thing should notice it.
which means 99.9999% of America will probably not notice a thing,. and that's exactly what they want.
One very simple possibility to deny bootleg videos is to install a high power
infrared light source. Most video cameras pick up infrared just as good as
visible light. Thus the bootleg copy is just garbage.
However, photography accessories include infrared filters, which may cut down
on quality (hey, what quality???), but enable the bootlegger to continue his
job. Also, to my knowledge there is no study about the medical effects of
beaming high wattage infrared light right into the eyes of cinema visitors
(including children).
Marc
If you have ever filmed the front of a remote control with a camcorder, you know that the infrared LED can be seen pulsating when you press buttons. This leads to the conclusion that the CCDs inside camcorder catch a broader spectrum of light than the human eye does.
So I don't know how this cinema solution works, but if a friend asked me to equip his cinema against "pirates", I would just install a infrared strobe light somewhere - job nicely done.
I agree. Also I wonder when people start complaining about all the headaches, experiencing random nausea and such after a movie screening, will the MPAA blame this on the pirates too in some roundabout way? (The video cameras emit RF radiation etc. etc.) Or will they just try to pay the susceptible people silence money?
we discovered a new way to think.
Just like the Macrovision protection in DVD's, there we go again, paying the REAL pirates for that they pay other bandits to DECREASE the quality of images we pay to view. Or anyone believe that this, or DVD Macrovision for that sake, does actually mantain image quality as the perpetrators clain?
-><- no
Personally, I think that a movie seen at a theatre flickers quite badly even today.
If you are bothered by a 60Hz monitor with a white background you are probably going to be bothered by a white scene in a cinema as well. I hope that this technology will not worsen the effect too much.
I recently visited Los Angeles and was invited to see two prescreenings (The Italian Job and Bruce Almighty). In both screenings they searched bags and wanded the patrons.
They had a list of 'disallowed' items including still cameras, video cameras, and cellphones. In practice, they didn't do anything about cellphones, as most people had them and would be unwilling to leave them at the door.
As for the cameras, I didn't know the restriction at my first screening, and I had my digicam with me. I put it in my jacket pocket and held my jacket in my hand when I held my arms out for wanding. They didn't notice a thing. I didn't use it at all, but it was pretty silly how easy it would be to get a camera in.
The second time around they felt my jacket pockets and found a lump where I kept my paperback book. They peeked in to the pocket and said, "What's that?"
"It's a book." (under my breath, "It's what we used for entertainment before movies.")
Anyhow, it's nice if they can block recording in select theaters. I recall an earlier slashdot story a year ago about this, and how it would be useless unless they got it in *every* theater. At least in prescreening situations, this technology seems a lot more useful.
Kevin Fox
I'd like to see the studios (and yes, I know they're too dumb to do this) release a screener copy of say, Matrix Reloaded, to the P2P networks themselves, and then see if people don't still flock to the theaters. I mean, they keep saying it's hurting sales so much, so if a good divx copy is widely available at the same time as the release in theaters, nobody should show up. But I think most people want the big-movie-theater experience with a movie like that.
I agree. A friend of mine's son has Epilepsy, and can't even look at a computer screen at less then 70 hertz for more then a couple minutes. Introducing a flicker into movies I'm sure will be an eyesore for most people (think: 60 hertz, high res, hours or more looking at the screen) and an obstical for others that prevents them from seeing movies in theaters at all.
If this becomes a problem for the bootlegging market, I see some demand emerging for motion picture film cameras (if they can find one on eBay that's quiet and small enough) as they would not be effected by FPS rates or sneaky scrambling techniques. They film the thing in the theater, maybe at a really late night showing on a Monday night when it's not too crowded, leave, get the thing developed, and capture the pirate-able motion picture onto their computer one way or another.
They could possibly accomplish that by projecting it onto their own screen and videoing it, then capturing that video into their computer, or maybe some sort of a negative scanner that can scan a couple hundred thousand negatives automatically in a reasonable period of time. What do you think? Genius?
Before the days of digital electronics, they'd paint matte layers by hand and project in the TV footage with the original image in a multiple exposure.
See "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951) for a good example of this. There's a TV news anchor reading
at his desk, shot from the side (right profile.) On the desk is a TV showing the synchronized front-on view of the same news anchor. Then the scene you're watching switches to the front view of the news anchor: they shot the scene with two (motion picture film) cameras, and used the early footage from the second camera composited on top of the TV shown in the footage from the first camera.
"The Day the Earth Stood Still" is not a movie known for being loaded with special effects. However, Robert Wise got a lot out of what he did have to work with: it's a wonderful flick.
I really hope it hasn't.
I was at the Boston Common theater last night watching A Mighty Wind - which I wouldn't suspect to be a wildly pirated movie.
It was driving me crazy because it had a flicker over it the whole time - almostly like it was missing a frame, but not entirely, sort of a haze.
I asked my friends if they noticed it and none of them did.
I'm hoping that maybe I'm just nuts and it isn't that I somehow am part of the population that can see the flicker and therefore get fucked over and can't go see movies that do this.
It was really fucking annoying. It didn't matter too much since that movie is one that isn't really a visually stunning film - but if I watch the Matrix and it is like that, I will likely just burn the whole place down.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Of course, it doesn't concern me. Last time I was in a theater was to see "Bowling for Columbine." Which is, as far as I'm concerned, about the only movie worth seeing this year. I'm not sure anything that I've seen in the past about 3 years has been affiliated with the MPAA (Brotherhood of the Wolf, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon) but I'm definitely not contributing to the blockbuster machine. I'm not seeing the next Star Wars flick (Didn't see the last one either) not seeing Lord of the Rings, not seeing the next X-Men flick and I'm not seeing the next Matrix flick because I don't like the MPAA and I don't like their tactics. And if I waver on the whole MPAA thing there's still always the fact that you go and drop $9 on a movie and have to sit through half an hour of commercials before the movie starts.
For a few dollars more I can go see a live play and be much more entertained. The play won't have some corporation trying to ram its merchandise down my throat either.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Have you searched Kazaa et al for "Matrix Reloaded"?
I have, and found many different file-sizes near 700 MB. So I decided to download a few (cable modem is very nice), and the titles I got were:
Someone is having fun poisoning the network -- but they're poisoning it with valid movies, instead of output from /dev/random!
The last movie, Lustgarden, is a foreign (Swedish?) 3-hour fuckfest. Don't let your kids use Kazaa!
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
The article speaks about disruptive patterns. This won't be cheap nor easy, and who will pay for it? Most likely the people who buy cinema tickets, DVDs and merch - the consumers.
Without the monopoly on reproduction that the state grants with copyright, the market value of those movie tickets would be lower. The "industry" uses techniques that lower the use value - the value for society that the movies actually have - in various ways, just to increase the market value of their movie tickets and DVDs even further. (For example, they lower the transportability with region codes, they lower the copyability (which should be inherent in all digital media) with various technologies, and now they even lower the picture quality (if ever so slightly) with subliminal (according to the dictionary definition) patterns.
Making a product worse, less accessible, just to be able to increase it's market price is in my opinion very immoral, and that's what I called economical sabotage.
I didn't misspell it. I don't call myself a spelling master in any way, and english is my second language, but please don't distort what I write to make my arguments appear less valid. (By the way, I didn't see a single counter-argument in your post. If you agree with me, why don't you say so instead of resort to unfriendliness?)
Yes, I use warez already, but I have no problems justify it. That copying and sharing movies considered wrong is a testimony to the pro-copyright hegemony that continues to surprise me.
Robert Anton Wilson once claimed that "what the thinker thinks, the prover proves", meaning that people will justify anything, but no matter how hard I think or try to "prove", I can't justify the way copyright looks today.
I'm surprised at the lengths some people will go to defend practices of the same corporations who would do almost anything to make a buck.
Your analogy is stupid.
Using moral criterea, it can be universally agreed upon that murder is a crime. The same cannot be said for stealing, as ownership becomes less and less justifiable as the items in question become less and less tangible.
There are no moral bases for the copyright laws that exist in a country. Why is a song copyrightable, but not speech? Why a sequence of bits of some length copyrightable, but not a sequence of two bits? There's no question the criteria used determine such laws are arbitrary, its just a question of whose ass they've been pulled out of.
If some sort of law is required but one based on universally accepted morals cannot be found, the determinance of that law should be deferred to the next closest thing to universiality, culture.