Slashdot Mirror
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."
Returning as Sam Fisher, you infiltrate the theaters of the UK...
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
... going to spout off about how they have no right to be observing us? I mean, what gives them the right to spy on us during a movie that we paid good money to see?
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!
Now when the projector gets screwed up or there's no sound, there will be theater personnel on hand to notice!
"It's a wonderful idea. But it doesn't work." -- Tad Danielewski
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.
Pirates will begin modifying their video equipment to look like these devices, thus foiling the ability of pirate scouts to spot actual pirates.
Then, one day, a movie theatre employee will kick out a blind man, suspecting him of pirating the movie.
All matter of hell and lawsuits will spew forth and in the end, only the blind people will suffer.
So, ban movie theatre pirate scouts before it's too late!
I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.
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 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
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.
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.