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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 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.
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
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
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.
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?
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.
That would be true only if the protection scheme relied solely on varying the projection flicker. My impression from the blurb was that Sarnhoff was going to target strengths of video cameras (greater light range sensitivity) and turn that into a liability. For example, many CCDs can see infrared wavelengths (train a consumer video camera at a IR remote and you can see the diode flashing.) If you wanted to screw with the recording, just overlay the projection with a high-wattage IR pulse, preferably in a shifting moire pattern to really mess up the viewer.
However, if you're dedicated enough, all of these protection schemes can be nullified - with a progressive frame camera, shifting refresh rates can be ignored, with the appropriate filters extraneous IR/UV interference can be screened out. And, of course, none of these protection schemes can defend against a projectioninst collaborating with a pirate to telecine a print directly to video, bypassing the need to skulk in dark corners with a handycam...
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.