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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."
Theater pirates may get lots of press, but most of the stolen copies freely available are taken right from the studios themselves.
Have you Meta Moderated t
We had a set sent to our theater, and have had a bit of fun playing with them. We were amazed to find how many people actually use their cell phones during a movie. Just goofing off I've seen cell phones, laptops, and a gameboy! But no camcorders, yet.
Seriously, how could bootleg piracy videos really hurt their industry?
Harry Potter's target audience isn't the people who scour the net for zero-day pirate releases, and anyone who doesn't go see the movie because they saw already saw it in a grainy fuzzy download, probably wasn't really that interested in the movie anyway.
And the patient will just wait for the high quality DVD rips to be released, especially popular over here in the UK thanks to the excessive amount of time a large proportion of titles take to cross the atlantic.
This is a nice publicity stunt that might (in the unlikely event of it being well implimented) possibly add a day or two to the length of time it takes a poor quality camrip to appear on suprnova, but nothing more
I'm willing to bet it will actually increase piracy by killing off a major source of bad quality product.
It's almost as if they want to make the problem worse.
Personally if I were the MPAA I would let these morons record all so they can flood the market with bad quality DVDs and making it such a bad case of hit or miss that the only way you can be sure of getting a good copy is to buy one.
A smarter move would be to finish hunting down the people in their own industry who are leaking production quality material before the movie even makes it to the theaters.
I used to project films for a local cinama (here in the UK) from the age of 15. Films I wasn't even legally entitled to watch.
Large multiplex cinemas may have well-paid, adult projectionists with night-vision monocles and decent security - but there are thousands of smaller single-screen cinemas where any old kid (like me) runs the projector for pocket money. All it takes is for one of them to bring in a camcorder.
One many years ago when I was a young man I was forced to sit through the movie "Purple Rain" three times in three days. I never once paid for a ticket and I didn't particularly want to see the film. I just happened to be with three different groups of people who were dead set on seeing it and having nothing better to do I went with them. They were paying for it after all.
The first time it was not entirely horrible. It wasn't good of course but I could deal with it. The second time it was starting to get horrible but again I held it together and managed to make it through the movie. The third night I would have passed on it if the girl I was desperate to get into bed hadn't wanted to go see it but that's where I made my mistake.
We sat in a theater next to a couple who brought with them a thoroughly miserable baby who (on reflection I really can't blame the little bugger) wanted to be anywhere but sitting in a dark theater watching Prince. That baby cried through most of the picture. People sitting around them asked them politely if they would take the baby into the lobby. People glared at them while the baby screamed like someone was pulling it's toes off. People moved to other available seats. They didn't budge.
I was hanging on by a very, very thin thread at this point and stood up, turned around and told them that if they didn't find a way to shut that baby up I was going to pick it up by it's feet and beat them to death with it.
They got up and left as people around us clapped. Now, at close to 40 years of age I realize how lucky I was not to have gone to jail. On the other hand these people were terribly rude to make everyone else sit through a movie listening to their child.
You're right though. In recent years I've just asked people to be quiet and gone and brought an usher down when necessary. It's the better choice.
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