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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."
That seems like a waste of time.
All a pirate has to do is pay the kid making minimum wage running the projector a couple hundred pounds to let the pirate sit in the booth and record from there!
I think this is the first time I heard of studios providing NVG to prevent piracy in theaters.
However, I also think this is doomed to fail.The quality of some cam recording lets me think that some pirates may be friends with a projectionnist, thus giving them access to "private" screening with no audience except a camera.
And what of the ushers themselves. Surely quite a number are in facts students with part-time jobs. The same students that download films on p2p. what's to prevent _them_ from camcording the film ?
The only real defense against this would be releasing the film the same day everywhere
None of them actually do ticket or piracy checks whilst a movie is being shown. Night-vision goggles aren't going to help much.
Especially if they're copying the movie themselves during late-night private screenings.
I don't know about the UK, but in the US movie ushers are teen-age kids. They're far more enamoured with getting steet-cred for getting a clean copy of a popular film then they would be with making their boss look good by catching pirates.
If the studios want security guards, they'd be better served by hiring security guards.
TW
Bingo. It's in the best interest of the *IAA's to thoroughly convince everyone that any IP theft is taking place outside the studios, paving the way for things like DRM & DMCA. These measures are necessary because the theft is obviously taking place out in the public, beyond the studios' control.
The Dalai LLama
...hey, can I score a pair of those googles?...
My sig could be your sig!
Anybody that wants to take the time to download and watch a poor quality pirated copy shot in a theatre is a huge fan. That person is also going to go watch the movie themselves, probably more than once.
Warner Brothers is delusional if it actually believes that it's losing money because of theatre copies.
Learn to read. The parent says nothing about screener copies. Since they started embedding screener IDs, "screener copies" are a non-issue (and really, never have been much of an issue).
There are, however, many many many points in the chain within a huge studio where the picture can be quietly spirited away in perfectly clean DVD form.
Think Inside Job, my friend. And againe, taking a page from your diplomatic book, LEARN TO READ!
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck