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Night Vision Goggles vs Pirates
Cormorant writes "It was reported in The Guardian that Warner Brothers has sent night vision goggles to cinemas across Britain for ushers to don and scan for camcorder pirates during the entire length of the movie [the new Harry Potter], along with watermarks and codes displayed on screen during the film. Mr Graham said "Video piracy is rife everywhere, and with the UK screening the film four days before the rest of the world, Warner was concerned the movie would end up on the internet. Warner sees the investment as negligible compared with the threat to the whole industry."
In fact, the awards screener DVDs are only one source. (A "screener" is a promotional preview videocassette/DVD of a film provided by a film company, or its distributor, to video store owners or movie award voters prior to its general release date. Selling, trading or distributing these "screeners" is frowned upon by the MPAA)
Every point in the production cycle where the movie transitions from print to electronic version is a possible leak.
Screener traces are already in place. And there was a notable incident this year where an Acadamy of Motion Pictures member was caught bootlegging his screeners by the trace technology.
Have you Meta Moderated t
You are correct in your understanding of watermarking. However, one of the main requirements of a good watermarking system is that the watermark should be preserved in the presence of image modification (compression, cropping, rotating, etc.) This means that many watermarks themselves are not implanted once, but repeated many times throughout the frame. There is currently a lot of research in the field of watermarking because it is a difficult problem to solve, and the ramifications could be great. (I recall seeing a slashdot article where a man was arrested for pirating movies because the movie studios watermarked each screener DVD differently and were able to trace the internet release to its source.) Some watermarks operate in the frequency domain (such as the fourier transform, or discrete cosine transform DCT) which recognize patterns in the image, and describe the image as a summation of waves. Applying a watermark in the frequency domain means one bit worth of data changed is distributed throughout every other pixel in that row/column of image.
In summary: Im absoultely positive the MPAA is using watermarking techniques, and I am sure that they have put tons of research money/time into defining watermarks that will survive the MPEG or DivX encoding algorithms.
And btw:
A serial number in a random frame can be blotted out easily or the entire frame can be cut out by someone compressing the video stream to an mpeg or divx.