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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...'"
You mean I won't be able to download those pirated movie captures? So sad.. they are much better than DVDs, since you can actually feel like you're in the cinema. You hear the croud laughing, crying or eating popcorn, and see all the late people who block your vision.
I truly hope pirates will get over this obstacle.
hemi
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/
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.
Epileptic
Seizure
Lawsuit
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I think you got screeners and cams confused. Cam copies are poor quality recordings of the cinema screen using a hidden camera.
Screeners - which you mentioned are copies from media (usually DVD) sent to rental stores, etc well in advance before a film starts showing. They have perfect quality, and dont differe much from the final DVD excapt that they may lack some extra/bonus features.
With people out there who say they can hear the difference between a CD and an MP3, I wonder if people won't complain about this, even if they can't see it.
If you get a camcorder and record a regular CRT and play it back, you'll see all sorts of crazy flickering on the recording. That's because the screen only updates X times per second, and that doesn't always correlate up with how often the camcorder takes a shot.
Generally, people can use a CRT without seeing this flickering. Although if you use a lower refresh rate, most people get headaches, and some will notice flickering or just sense something is 'wrong'.
At the right refresh rate, you could recreate this effect while annoying only perhaps 0.5% of your audience, and if it's just for a few preview screenings, it might be a good idea for them.
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
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!
k-zed writes:
... And WIN.
"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?"
Are you kidding? This is America. Someone will watch the pirated copy and sue the RIAA.
My
Limekiller
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."
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.
The research is funded by a $2 million grant from the Advanced Technology Program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a government agency.
So the government is funding commercial companies (Cinea, Sarnoft) to come up with a technology to help protect the profits of other commercial companies? Not entirely unexpected, I suppose...
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
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
Maybe they're sick and tired of you bitching at them for stuff the MPAA is doing?
Actually they use a genlock to get the TVs and monitors to match the scan rate of the film camera.
The reason Apple Macs used to be seen so much in films is simply that Macs have always had a genlockable video output (along with Amigas), whereas PCs require more work to genlock.
When someone kicks my seat, I turn around, and stand up if necessary, but that works better for me than for most because I'm a big mofo. You might want to take a posse to the theater if you are small and unthreatening. :P
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Maybe the theaters I worked at were different than the ones you saw, but even with the platter system(which is what I assume the huge film plates you refer to are), you still need someone up in the projection booth. Granted, they can be a manager or someone else who has other things to do, but you still need someone up there to do the cleaning and threading. First off, as to your comment about moving the plates around, the film sitting on the platters weighs a lot, it took two of us to carry the film around(the platters themselves generally do not get moved as moving them increases the chances of getting a brain wrap). The film gets threaded through the projector between each showing(you don't have to rewind, but you do have to rethread) which usually takes a little while(not more than 5 or 10 minutes generally) especially if you do basic cleaning of the projector in the process. Thus, they do not just switch the film on and that's it. Granted, it's not an overly hard process to learn, but it isn't trivial by any stretch of the imagination. Also, if you don't want the film to look grainy and dirty, you have to do at least some cleaning of the projector between each showing. The film tends to create a good amount plastic dust and flakes during its run through the projector which have this habit of sticking to the film since it has a pretty good static charge to it. Thus, if you don't sweep the remaining stuff off the projector, you'll end up with a good amount of dust just waiting to stick onto the film. This all doesn't take into account actually building the films. Films come in nice little carrying cases divided up into sections so that it can be shipped more easily. These film strips have to be taped together along with the trailers and whatnot at the beginning of the film. This is also not a trivial task, and when you're done with a run, you have to break the film back down so you can ship it back to the distributor. I've worked at some good sized theaters, and they were all like this. So, in my experience, it most definitely is not just push and go. It requires a decent amount of work to clean and thread a film.
"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