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MPAA Ruins Own Films As Anti-Piracy Measure
WCityMike writes "Steve Kraus, a Chicago film projectionist, noted in this week's Movie Answer Man column that movie studios are quite purposefully putting 'large reddish brown spots that flash in the middle of the picture, usually placed in a light area' in order to ruin computer-compressed pirated copies of films. Among recent films that feature these spots are 'Ali,' 'Behind Enemy Lines,' '28 Days Later,' 'Freddy vs. Jason' and 'Underworld.' (I guess they had to destroy the movies in order to save them ... )"
They've been doing this for years. It's a simple plan: make movies so bad no one will want to copy them.
lysergically yours
Judging from the few movies I've seen this year, I'd say the directors had already ruined them. The brown spot is unnecessary.
I just watched 28 days later the other night (loved it). I didn't even notice that the film was ruined. Just to be sure though, I should probably download a copy and see how much better it could have been w/o the spots?
i don't understand why they don't flash something more useful - like a serial number - so that they can identify where and when the illegal copy was made.
--Slashdot readers delight in generalizing the behavior of other Slashdot readers.
So we have the cigarette burn marks...what's next?
:)
Pictures of a big, fat, cock spliced into family films?
no comment
The red dots were the best part of some of those movies.
How lucky for them that all compression formats are fixed in stone and can never be changed.
Also that the pirating industry doesn't have any resources it could dedicate to changing said file formats.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
I mean, how exactly does one RUIN Freddy v Jason? Isn't that kind of like trying to invent whiffle lace?
You are not the customer.
they should blast the audience with emp energy. take out cell phones and cameras alike. no cameras = no piracy. maybe they can even make one for loud annoying kids.
"Let's see how we can piss off and ailienate our customers some more. Oh I know, let's give them even less of a reason to buy, view or care about movies. That'll teach em."
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
I mean if they keep adding stuff like this, people will start to notice, and not buy moives at all. Which I think is where like 50% of there profit comes from. Sorry guys but I have tons of simpsons episodes on my hardrive, but I still buy the DVD because it looks nicer. Don't mess with the format.
Rants done the right way www.koudijscanada.com
I'm sure it couldn't be that hard to edit the "ruined" frames, no? Final Cut Pro anyone?
The anime series Neo Ranga was converted from a low quality analog format to make the DVDs, and they have so many artifacts that when encoded in DivX, DivX ;), 3ivX or XviD, many large brown spots arise which completely ruin the rips. Better copy-protection than anything I've ever seen...
#define DRM chmod 000
I've been saying for years that the big studios are just flinging shit onto film. Now we have more direct evidence :)
I've seen a couple of these films, and I did not see this. I'm wondering if it's just a single frame (BTW that makes it illegal in the US) or if it's only in certain theaters....
It's actually based on a simply principle that people expect to see typical amounts of red, green and blue in the world. Over time, if the balance in a certain area is offset, the subconcious realises and looks for a pattern in the ionformation.
The Kodak system simply spreads a subliminal message across the length of the film, to convince you that you have enjoyed it. Simple psychology.
Unless these spots are particularly difficult to identify, someone need only write a filter to detect them and fill in the offending space, possibly with the average of the previous and next frame.
It's just Tyler Durden messing around again. Look closely and you'll find it's a penis.
The movie company then downloads the film, see's the spots and tracks it to my theater. Now what? Are they going to shake down the theater owners, untill they install security and metal detectors?
How does this really prevent anything, aside from viewers like me having just ANOTHER excuse to wait until the DVD comes ou and rent that, rather then deal with tampered film (among the other lame problems of theater viewing, like ticket prices, travel, lines, food, seating, etc)?
P.S. Yes, I know I may have just ruined it for a bunch of you too, but why should I be the only one to suffer. (=
I saw the dots on Underworld--don't judge me by my taste in movies, please! I thought the dots might be some form of coded serial number to track the relationship between theaters and films. If someone were stupid enough to send out the film over the Internet with the dots on it, the MPAA movie police might have a better chance to catch the person-- especially if the film gets out before any embargo dates.
Quick, patent this!
[Error 407: No signature found]
And in other news the MPAA will require people to duct tape their eyelids closed before entering the cinema. A MPAA spokesperson was quoted saying:
- "In order to produce decent movies we have to make sure noone sees them".
that movie studios are quite purposefully putting 'large reddish brown spots that flash in the middle of the picture, usually placed in a light area' in order to ruin computer-compressed pirated copies of films
....
Next step: replace the 'large reddish brown spots' with large reddish brown ads for Coca-Cola
-kgj
Um ... so I think I'm missing somthing. Whats stopping someone from using a diagnostic tool (since DivX is multipass now) from finding points where the compression goes to crap and just cutting out the bad frame? Yeah it's a LITTLE more work but as most compressing jobs take on the order of several hours I don't see why the pirating groups wouldn't do it to save the output quality.
It's reel changes, not scene changes.
in order to ruin computer-compressed pirated copies of films
WTF? These supersized cap codes have nothing to do with *ruining* copies of the film. Rather they are used to *identify* the person responsible for leaking the film. These films go to the projection houses long before their release dates and are often seen on the internet often before opening day. So obviously some houses have evil employees capturing the movie into computer video formats and leaking them via P2P networks. All the MPAA has to do is download and look at a pirated movie and look for the cap codes and bam, they have ID'ed the projection house responsible for leaking the film. These cap codes have been in film forever - but only recently have they been enlarged enough so that they show up in low resolution computer encoded video.
How hard would it be to have software process the film, look for large swaths of colours approximately matching the splotches, and remove them? Seems almost trivial image processing to me, although there is a lot of data to crank through.
My rights don't need management.
I SAW the dots in Underworld. They drove me NUTS. I thought it was some kind of problem with the film copy or... I dunno what.
I did not see this on 28 Days Later. Maybe I just missed it, or maybe it was only in the re-release with the new ending.
They are doing this on PURPOSE? Madness. Will these be on DVDs too?
What the movie industry SHOULD be doing, instead of pissing in the wind, is add value to the movie experience. I personally don't go see a movie in the theatre unless it is a 'Spectacular' movie. One where the experience of seeing it on a Big screen cannot be duplicated by any other means and actually plays and integral part of the film.
They should invest, partner, encourage more theatres like the IMAX franchise. As I understand the Matrix has done very well in those venues and cannot be duplicated in any other environment.
Give the movie goer a REASON to see the movie in a theatre, make us CHOOSE the theatre instead of our living room/computer monitor/etc.
There will always be individuals who would not pay to see a particular movie in a theatre, this is something that cannot be changed (and should not show up on any studio's bottom line). These are the same people who would rather pirate them to just be up on the popular culture of the day.
Make Better Movies, make us WANT to go to the theatre, make us excited enough to go, otherwise they will destroy themselves fighting a trend that will never cease to move forward.
--
If they were handling these reels appropriately, according to their cinematic quality, then they would be wadded up and covered in brown streaks.
I can see the fnords!
If I ever download a movie, it's so I can watch some of it and decide if it's worth shelling out the $30 to go see. It's about $30 because:$9 for me, $9 for my g/f, and the rest for popcorn/etc.
Can't bring in outside food or drink anymore. Can't even bring in a backpack, either - post 9/11 fears and "anti-piracy measures" gone too far.
I don't care if the movie looks like crap on my computer. I'm not interested in keeping most movies anyway. If I like it, I'll go see it in the theatre or wait for the DVD.
This really isn't a bad thing. Heck, since the MPAA is purposely altering movies, maybe they should go ahead and let us download stuff and leave p2p alone. If the stuff on p2p is of such low-quality, what is the big problem?
Oh, the problem is that we'll watch it and realize that the movie sucks and we won't shell out $$ to go see it.
I wish I could have my money back from John Carpenter's "Vampires" - aside from 1 hot nude chick, that movie was a total waste of time and money.
Goodness, just stop putting with with the bad plots, where the story is second to the selection of actors. Stop putting up with canned endings, and weak story lines, where you know the entire plot by watching a 30 second ad.
Go to something like the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse or the Acadia Cinema Cooperative, or one of the many in London.
You like Linux or *BSD, because the other OSes aren't good enough for you, why not demand high quality cinema?
The article does not say the blotches are used to screw up compression to ruin the film for pirates, as the slashdot summary suggests. Rather, it is just 20-year old "cap code" technology enlarged to be more easily visible in high-compressed pirated copies.
Cap code was "designed to uniquely mark film prints so that pirated copies could be traced to the source." Originially the dots were small enough that compression obscured them out of usability.
I've seen some pirated movies, and in my opinion, a few splotches on a few frames isn't going to screw them up a whole lot. They already tend to look and sound bad.
Interesting, so they are so desparate to do things against piracy that they are willing to lower the quality of their films, not to stop it, mind you, but just to make an act of piracy to some measure less attractive?
This amazes me considering that DVD movie technology, and by extension, digital movie files, naturally involve a measureable loss of detail and quality over, say, watching it in a theater.
It almost sounds like a desparate measure; as if someone out there threw the idea out without taking into consideration how little quality matters when it comes to satisfying the average DVD consumer.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
We enjoyed the film. Robin (girlfriend) thought it was really funny. Robin's sister went with us, and she also liked it.
Yes, it's a dirty trick if it's really intentional, but that little ugly spot lasting only a fraction of a second is hardly what I'd call "destroy the movies in order to save them".
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Somewhere just beyond the asteroid belt, Jupiter is on the phone to its lawyer...
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I remember an art teacher explaining to us way back in the day what these brown spots were for.
Apparently, they're signals to the projectionist that it's time to change the reel soon. They're definitely are in old movies (especially in long old movies).
Sometimes you see VHS's with the spots still in them. I must admit I haven't RTFA but I do believe there's a good chance someone's just over reacting.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
At the first cue mark, 8 seconds from the end of the reel, you'd roll the second projector and uncap the arc lamp. At the second cue mark, you'd close a shutter on the first projector, open the shutter on the second, and throw the sound feed over the the second.
After you changed over to the other projector, you had to shut off the carbon arc, unload and rewind the film on the first projector, thread it up with the next real, check the carbon arcs, and go back to sleep for 10 minutes.
And yeah, I still always see the cue marks.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
I can see macrovision a little bit -- enough that the pulsating brightness bugs me -- even on my new (within the last 3 years) tv. Turning it off on the DVD player noticably improves picture quality. I had to use a macrovision remover unit to even hook a DVD player up to my girlfriend's TV as it's totally unwatchable (by everyone - not just me) without one. Neither of us even HAVE a vcr. Is your point bogus or am I just a freak?
http://www.vcdquality.com/image.php?id=18919
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Why can't they just put big infrared projectors behind the screen? Wouldn't that knock out 99% of the CCD camcorders?
No, instead you hear the complaints from the people who tried to plug their DVD player into their TV/VCR combo and found that it didn't work because of Macrovision. That one got my girlfriend, she ended up having to bum a 9" TV from her Mom and hook up an RF converter to use her DVD player. She was _not_ happy with Macrovision. As far as I can tell, the tape pirates don't seem to be slowed down much by Macrovision either.
I read the internet for the articles.
Maybe you should see one of these films. I just saw Underworld and was very annoyed by the dots I kept seeing. (Small dots in paterns of 4-6 usually)... And the usually occur right in the center of the screen...
VERY ANNOYING!
DJMD - The fourth man - Planetary
whats worse is that it really doesn't affect joe shmoe set worker. They don't get paid royalties. Only the big rich actors and directors. The little guy gets paid to work and when the movie is done filming, he's done. What happens to it in theaters and after has NOTHING to do with him. He's already working on something new. So those ads seem like blatent lies to me.
When I go to see a movie in the theatre, I pay more for the 'experience' then the actual movie. Why would you ruin a potentially great movie like "Return of the King" by watching some crappy DIVX-over-compressed copy of it?
"If it sucks without butter, it still sucks with butter, only creamier." - AC
So the solution is not to perform a multipass scan to work around the dots, but to remove the dota altogether.
If you read down past the red dot question on the suntimes movie answer man.
You will see a story about a movie taht was ruined by the MPAA.
Here is the question and answer:
Q. I have heard that Fox Searchlight will release Berto-lucci's "The Dreamers" as an R-rated film, instead of unrated or NC-17. If Fox knows that the audience for the film will be adults, and that educated adults will not want to see a compromised version of a movie by a great director, then why are they releasing it as an R? Why not have it be like "Y Tu Mama Tambien" and release it as unrated?
Gary Rancier, Brooklyn, N.Y.
A. The NC-17 rating is unworkable, thanks to Blockbuster, which refuses to stock such films, and the MPAA, which refuses to create an A (for "adult") category that would stand between the R rating and actual pornography. The movie could and should go out unrated.
If Fox Searchlight does not want audiences to see the movie that Bertolucci made, then they should do the decent thing and give up distribution rights to a company prepared to stand behind its films. To buy a film and then cut it because of the MPAA rating amounts to vandalism.
Wise men speak because they have something to say, Fools because they have to say something!!!!
As pointed out beautifully in the article you should have read. Now ask yourself - why would they NEED to enlarge them, if not to screw with compression, in the same way the RIAA has done with sound recordings? RIAA put spikes in that don't play badly, but that really screw with attempts to rip to mp3, resulting in pops and cracks. The MPAA is just combining two technologies here.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
They're not talking about "Cigarette Burns" before reel changes, but unique marking codes indended to allow one to deduce which theatre allowed a given MPEG or DIVX to be made.
In other news, the RIAA is replacing all their songs with white noise.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
It degrades the movie-going experience, nobody wants that.
It is so obvious the pirates could edit it out.
Simple techniques to watermark films would be to add a tiny amount of flicker to the whole frame for a sequence, or to use techniques similar to the (failed) SMDI system to watermark the audio. I really expected more sophistication from the studios than big brown dots. At least at this point, the sophistication of the pirates is not great -- and identifying them through subtle, persistent watermarks could make a difference.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Ok there's not much usefull info in this thread so I'll try to add some :)
Exhibit A: screenshot with dots ...ok that's my only exhibit. Enjoy!
You can see the big T shape in the upper middle part of the image.
Exhibit B:
Funny, I don't recall seeing any language on the ticket stub indicating I'd be subjected to anti-piracy measures that might distract from the presentation itself. And I do remember seeing those weird red dots during "Underworld." What next? Are we going to see an equivalent to a *broadcast flag* at the bottom of the films next?
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
I've seen some of these movies and never noticed the dots. On the other hand, I have been drinking more 7up. Coincidence?
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
I researched this a year ago when working out a fake number to use in a book, and finally have the opportunity to share this worthless information...
I can't imagine the red splotches could be any worse than the occasional bad CAM version of some 0-day films available on the 'net. When will the industry learn that I'm not going to pay to see this crap. Never. I would rather watch a crappy CAM with people coughing and standing up and a lousy audio feed than shell out $12 before I know the movie is worth it. All the industry is doing is screwing the people who shelled out the cash to watch their "blockbusters" and eat over-priced popcorn.
Regardless, the DVD will be error-free, which means the worst-case scenario is that I have to wait 5 months before getting a crispy XVID DVD rip. Ooh, that's tough love.
Oh, and Mr. MPAA Man, we geeks have this wonderful little open-source program called VirtualDub that makes removing bad frames from videos dead-easy. Just so you know.
The article doesn't say anything about the red dots being used to mess with encryption schemes. It is a method being used to track pirated rips back to individual leaked screeners. From what I know of video compression, taking a screener which has this "CapCode" on it would tend to make the spots more noticeable, however it is my opinion that this is more of a side effect than the main purpose in putting these in.
DVDs that you buy in the stores are pressed (instead of burned), so by definition they all end up having the same image.
It's possible for stamped DVDs to include up to 188 bytes of individual data in the Burst Cutting Area. To get an idea of what BCA markings look like, turn over a GameCube disc and look for a fine 1.2mm wide "barcode" that overlaps the inner edge of the data area. Though DVD Video does not use the BCA, the forthcoming DVD HD Video specification may require decoders to read decryption key and serial number information from the BCA and add watermarks to the decoded picture.
Will I retire or break 10K?
They want us to watch these films.
They want us to hear the music.
But at the same time these entities want your money many times over and in as many ways as possible that they'll take such irrational actions such as suing the very people who are buying their products or changing formats the physical formats of the products every decade or so just to "keep up with technology".
Would that be the experience of buying 20 cents worth of popcorn for $3.25 or the experience of reliving your old college frat parties as soles of your shoes stick to the floor that hasn't been cleaned since late last week?
Or maybe you mean the thrill of shelling out $8.75 for the latest "blockbuster" sratting Pauley Shore?
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
I can see macrovision a little bit -- enough that the pulsating brightness bugs me
Traditional macrovision only affects the brightness in areas of the screen that you can't see (either above or below, I forget which). The idea is that this fools the AGC (automatic gain control) on many VCRs into adjusting the brightness of the entire picture to compensate. Unless your TV also has an AGC it really shouldn't be noticeable. I'm pretty sure that there have been additions/changes to macrovision over the years though so maybe there are some additional tricks they use these days (chances are google knows). I'd be curious if using a different set of outputs from your DVD player makes a difference.
Remember DIVX? It was the same idea.
Sorry, I will not buy into a format that requires that some central service authorize my media before I can watch the movie. That central service may go down (again, like DIVX) or suddenly decide.. "Hmm, we're going to re-release _The Lion King_. Let'd disable everyone's copies so they're forced to see it in the theater!"
No thanks. Once I buy media, I want to be able to watch it whenever I want. I urge everyone to avoid formats that require any sort of "authorization" for this reason. If no one buys it, it will fail.
Seriously. Takes a bit longer to d/l and also need a DVD burner but they last longer, look better. And it also feels more like stealing!
I feel much better now that I know I'm not crazy. I totally saw this in Underworld every time a large portion of the screen featured a solid light color, even though my wife insisted I was hallucinating. It looked like a pattern of six dots, two rows of three dots, flashing on the screen. Drove me up the frickin wall.
who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.
Trust me, you're not losing anything.
They're being amazingly stupid by adding even more annoyances.
Don't forget skyrocketing ticket prices (I paid $9.75 per ticket Saturday night), 20 minutes of adverts and previews, and then the cr@pola movie starts.
Movies only need to look as far as the music industry to see what happens when prices rise, choices lower, and tastes merge. I think they forgot that this is an "art." Now, it's merely a business.
Too bad for us.
And have you seen their ridiculous TV commercials? Trying to personalize piracy. Showing the 'guy-next-door' Key Grip or lighting guy - "Actors aren't the only ones affected by piracy." i.e. they want you kill the 'the actors already rich anyway' attitude because it supposedly affects the little people involved in movie production as well. Yet they have no guilt paying Ben Afshit and Gaylo $40 billion a movie while paying the 'little people' with peanuts. I'm supposed to feel bad? How about a little more even compensation, then maybe they'll have a point.
lose conciousness from chronic brain death
I suppose no one can rightfully argue with you on the point that death is chronic.
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
Dvdidle can do that - clear the macrovision off your computer video output. And there exists a patch for ATI All In Wonder to allow it to record input with macrovision. Try some searches...
I would rephrase that as a "no real loss" compression method.
Yes, I bought their album. I am a long time Metallica fan (since the beginning), and the only reason I bought it was because my wife had several gift certificates for Borders, and she wanted to use them up. I have listened to that album twice, and I could barely get through it both times. What a stinker. It also came with a DVD, which I haven't watched, and some special code to get free music over the net (which I haven't used). Why would I want crappy, free music? I paid good money for my crappy music, thank you very much.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Maybe it says something about the movie, if i was paying that much attention to a random flaw on the screen...
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
Those fuckers!
*ducks*
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
No normal capture device captures natively in DivX. So you apply filter to the original stream (whatever that is) as you save the stream in DivX. (original -> filter -> divx encoder) No extra intermediate step is needed. All you need is a smart enough filter, but it shouldn't be that hard to identify automatically (would be a variation of motion detection identifying "flashing" dots.)
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
For those of you who actually know more about the topic, I apologize. For those of you who only read the poorly written /. summary of an article, you should do your homework before posting comments.
The MPAA has been putting dots in films (reels) for years now. They serialize where the film came from if it ever shows up somewhere it shouldn't (eg. auction house, different theater, or yes, your home living room).
Disney was one of the initial big backers of this technology. They are particularly careful about who gets their reels of film once the movie runs. The usual answer: "No one."
Production/Distrobution companies own the reels and movie houses (AMC, Cinemarc, etc) only get the rights to show the reels. Typically they don't own them outright and at the end of their lifespan they have to be sent back to be vaulted up or destroyed.
Anyway, these codes are a newer technology based off of 'cap codes.' The dots are usually put in one or two frames near the middle of the print in a 3x3 grid with only some of the dots showing. (Eg. five dots in a 'T' formation).
The move was because with most current compression technologies will make the whole screen get brighter unless those frames are removed before encoding.
The better pirating groups will usually seem them edit them out by either just dumping the frames and copying the ones before it and after it. (at 28/32 FPS, you won't see the effects) or they take a morph of the two and make an 'averaged' frame.
These are much more obtrusive than the original 'cap codes' but they hardly ruin a movie any more than the 'cigarette burns' that show up which are just as noticable.
Newer technologies which have not been implemented involve a form of visual stegonography where they can slightly alter the frame in certain places to do the same thing without the large brown dots. Infact they can do it throughout the entire film which would make it hard to just toss a few frames.
-- dK
A recent news story says studios may even be discouraged from distributing advance DVDs of their Oscar contenders to academy members, because some of these movies quickly find their way to the Web.
So guess what, it's not us consumers (the ones who are paying the theater ticket prices and rental fees) who are doing the pirating. It's their own people.
Maybe the studios should police their own people rather than give us even poorer quality films and blame us for having to do it.
For thos who would suggest these are the reel markers or other such nonsense, here are several scans directly from FILM PRINTS of this phenomenon.
h ttp://www.film-tech.com/ubbpics/ubb3141b.jpgp ://www.film-tech.com/ubbpics/ubb3141c.jpg/ www.film-tech.com/ubbpics/ubb3141d.jpgw .film-tech.com/ubbpics/ubb3141e.jpgi lm-tech.com/ubbpics/ubb3141f.jpg
http://www.film-tech.com/ubbpics/ubb3141a.jpg
htt
http:/
http://ww
http://www.f
Projectionsit forums have been a buzz about this new version of the Caps Code for months-- and it is recommended if you see these dots, complain to a manager and request that they return the film to their distributor to show that we will not tolerate destruction of the films to prevent piracy.
Demand your money back, or passes- get the theater owners grumbling about this and it will end.
It's interesting you mention the disjointed nature of the songs. Bob Rock was going around mentioning how they recorded the songs and then went and twisted all the bits and pieces around in Pro Tools. He was trying to say it was some sort of art movement.
All it really means is that Metallica have gotten even lazier in the studio and can't even play their own parts good enough for an album. So it's now some "garage art" movement.
"Sufferin' succotash."
m,yeeeasss. Those were the marks we inserted into the reels delivered to the Aztec theater in Springfield.
So how is it going in Springfield?
Debunking the "59 Deceits"
The dots are not to ruin compression, they are a pattern of dots about every 100 frames that given enough frames you can actually identify a certain print so that you know what theater allowed a pirate to copy the movie.
This info came from a Kodak rep on the Film Tech website about a year ago.