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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.
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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.
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'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 :)
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)?
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".
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.
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 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?
I wish i had mod-points....These fucking people are idiots.
FIGHT CLUB.. did anyone see the movie FIGHT CLUB!!
Main character splices bits of raunchy shit into the movies, people get freaked out when they see it, but aren't sure it was really there because it flashes too quickly.
ITS A FRIEKIN REFERENCE TO A MOVIE!
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.
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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".
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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.
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?
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See http://www.snopes.com/business/hidden/popcorn.asp for more.
So the solution is not to perform a multipass scan to work around the dots, but to remove the dota altogether.
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.
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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:
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.
Umm, well very rarely are they brown spots. Some 25 years ago, I ran a 35MM projector, showing 4 features per week at a university to several hundred viewers.
Very, very, rarely, did the prints have brown dots towards the end of the reel. Mostly, there were white dots where I, or another projectionist, had scratched the emulsion off the print.
The first set of dots was to indicate that the other projector should be started up (it takes time for the projector to come up to the correct speed) and the second set was the changover signal.
A reel lasted about 20 minutes, so the average film was 5-6 reels.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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...
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?
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.
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."
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.
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Maybe it says something about the movie, if i was paying that much attention to a random flaw on the screen...
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