Slashdot Mirror
Theaters vs. Camcorders, Round 27
ackthpt writes "CNN is reporting two people, one in Los Angeles and one in Canada, were caught recording The Day After Tomorrow in cinemas, while a third got away. No mention if night-vision goggles, as previously mentioned, were of assistance." Reader azmatsci writes "Tuesday Sony was issued a patent for technology that will attempt to block camcorder recordings in movie theaters. Funny to me because I just came up with the same idea and discovered it while doing a patent search. Only problem with the idea is it will only block camcorders that use CCD recorders, which are sensitive to IR light. Another jamming idea which probably work for all camcorders can be found here."
What kind of provisions does the MPAA have, most likely under the DMCA, to prosecute people who are caught recording movies in the theaters? Will these people go to jail, or just get a slap on the wrist?
They should be fined just out of poor taste.
D
Interesting idea - crank up those IR emitters enough, and people will get hot, and need to go buy more drinks. Maybe the big soda companies have a stake in this too?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
I am not sure what the best solution would be. It's very hard to stop piracy on these types of thigns because of how many hands they cross when being produced. Most movies created these days require outside influence for CGI enhancements. From there it gets shown to have the music soundtrack added.. Include test audiences (and those that screen it for them), previews to movie theater employees and you have so many leaks along the chain you sometimes don't know where to start. This also isn't all inclusive of the movie industry either... The music industry suffers the same fate, albeit the music is a lot easier to take than a full-length movie.
Hmmm.
Maybe i won't have a popular opinion on this, but i'm happy they were caught.
I love all our priveleges and i dig our open source OSes and software, but i don't feel everything should be free.
Let the slashdot hypocracy follow:
do() || do_not();
I do not know too much about camera filters, but I have heard of ones to block IR. Would that not make the system pointless?
As they'd just stick an IR filtering lens on the thing. Problem solved. Cheaply too.
The thing with varying the framerate to introduce distortions sounds cool, but probably overly expensive for the limited scope of the actual problem itself.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Or the movie companies could require the theaters to do what they did in cryptonomicon: put really big magnets in the doorways, so that all of the camcorders are destroyed. They could even post a sign about it to avoid being sued.
Help! I'm being repressed!
Keep releasing bad movies no one wants to bootleg.
Instead of trying to prevent copying, cinemas should just force all viewers to strip naked before entering. As an added benefit, if the movie is boring, the audience can devise their own entertainment.
I don't know how effective the sony method would be. It seems like a dedicated person could filter the IR. I know that they do this in astronomy when using a CCD to look at stars and in high end photography:
high end photography using filter astronomy using hot mirror
Are there just a lot of geeks among reviewers who want information to be free? Are they selling them? It's strange to risk your job over something like this.
-I am an elective eunuch.
(And here's an amusing summary/parody of the thing for those who are up for a little MST3K style ribbing at it.)
In terms of putting UV projectors behind the screen or off to the side, cant you just get a UV filter and put it over the lens, to filter out all the ultra violet light?
And in terms of messing with the projection rate. All of the things they seek to exploit stem from the fact that the human eye doesn't see descrete frames, it sort of blurs them togethor. Couldn't the people using the camcorders decrease the shutter speed to accomplish basically the same thing?
paul reinheimer
Can you say "waste of time and money"? Who is going to choose a camcorder copy of a film over actually seeing it? That's right - those who weren't going to see it in the first place anyway.
If I can't at least check out the film beforehand i'm probably not going to pay at the box office either. Hollywood has pretty much set themselves up for this, with all the crappy movies they let out the door yearly.
I'll wait for the DVD and rent. They get minimum $$ out of my pocket, which is my goal. Most of the sheeple don't have the willpower to do so, sadly. Things might change if they did.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Here's an idea: Security metal detectors! Homeland security will happily oversee who has what when entering the theatre. This will also reduce terror.
Tickets will now read "seating at 6.45. Movie starts at 7.00. Please be here two hours prior to the show due to security measures."
And this must work, since I haven't seen people recording movies on airplanes.
When filming a movie, get a buddy to sit with you with a camcorder as well. Activate the night vision on the camcorder, and scan for the evil anti-piracy guys using night vision. When you spot one of them, and they spot you, activate your camcorder's 1000 candle spotlight and aim at guy, and run for it.
Hmmm... this sounds like a really good Splinter Cell mod. Splinter Cell: Theaters VS Camcorders.
"There is no spoon." - The Matrix
have a blocking filter that will defeat this technique. Surely camcorders will have it as well...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
This wouldn't be such a good "view" for films such as "Star Wars". 300 naked star wars geeks, doing light-saber battles and fighting evil.. it's just too much for my eyes!
Hmmm.
Damn those Linux programmers, if we just had Windows virus/worm writers to worry about, the world would be a much safer place.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
make me want to make a fake camcorder out of a block of wood and some paint and see if I can get arrested...
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
Sony, in addition to film and audio distribution, also make camcorders. How much you want to bet that they are simply going to integrate into their camcorders some kind of wireless "switch", and sell transmitters to the theaters? They could then license this technology to all the other camcorder manufacturers (or if the problem is big enough, give it away?). You might say "Well, I will just bypass it, like with mod chips" - if integrated at some low chip level, without external antennas (or using the "ground" plane as an antenna) - and more powerful transmitter (to make up for the embeddedness) - it would probably be damn near impossible to bypass it (although nothing is a "sure thing")...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Modern digital handheld camcorders can use extended exposure to essentially mimic the human eye's perception, making the frame timing rather useless unless you alter it so much that it looks bad to the eye too. technology simply advances too fast, they wont be successful til they stop the gear from getting in front of the screen in the first place. Add that to the fact that camera rips certainly arent the only source of leaks, this technology will be rather pointless eh? find a cure for cancer or something!
Tonight, at the Sony Metreon in SF: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in IMAX . Now that's the way to see the movie.
Great so they can jack up the ticket prices even higher to pay for the "jamming" camcorders for the very very small percentage of theaters or people that try to record that way?
I just sumbitted a patent for this jamming device.
We'll see how it goes. In tests so far it's been 100% effective.
Wait wait hold the fucking press, cinema recordings are crap, infact they are so crap i actually don't think i could ever bring myself to watch one. If someone gets ripped off buying one then thats their problem, piracy (ie selling for profit) is bad and we have police that go around stopping it, but the only purpose of filming off the screen and putting it on the net is so that people can see the film before it comes out in their country.
Who the hell cares if someone watches a film before it comes out in their country? better yet, who the hell cares enough to stick nightvision in cinemas and go to all the trouble to try and stop cameras from working (which is just an up-hill battle that will go through round after round of expensive research and cheap ways to circumnavigate it).
And giving out serious charges and prision time for this is just total fucking bullshit on the highest level. I can understand listening to an mp3 instead of a CD, i can understand watching a divx instead of a DVD, but if someone actually seriously wants to watch a poor quality cinema video then they're either too cheap to even go to the cinema (so dont bother chasing them) or they are total fanatics who need to see star-wars the very second it comes out and who will likely go and see it in the cinema about 20 times aswell.
I believe in stopping things at the source but this just takes the piss, chuck people out if they have cameras but dont do this to your customers because some of us arnt sheep who will take your bullshit excuses and give you their money just like they take bushes bull shit excuses and wave their flags around or take blunketts crap as he says "duuhhhh i think we should have id cards because they help fight terrorists" or listen to the fucking criminal israeli government as they say "yeah that vanunu is evil, kidnap is ok", some of us don't give jack about jay-lo's failing career or ben afflecks right to have 3 jets, the cinema industry is just becoming shitty like all the other industries and soon they are going to wake up either to a society of sheep who will buy their DRM or a society of people who say fuck you and boycott every
ok im going to sit down now.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
will whole theater go blind after starring 3hours at strong IR source?
Can you say "waste of time and money"? Who is going to choose a camcorder copy of a film over actually seeing it?
There's a huge flea market in the no-mans-land between Dallas and Grand Prairie, Texas, where you can buy just about anything you want. A friend of my daughter brought over "Freaky Friday" and "Freddy vs. Jason" the week they hit theaters -- she told me her mom bought them there. The image was grainy, the soundtrack muted, and of course there were no DVD extras -- you put it in and it started playing.
The problem, in this case at least, isn't us geeks. Our bittorrents and mp3s and such are an entirely different issue. The camcorder copies go straight to the underground economy, sold off the back of a truck at a flea market where if you don't habla el lingo, you'd better watch yourself. And the folks buying these goods often don't know the difference between pirated and legal: they're just buying it, just like they'll buy fake Nike shoes at the next stall.
That's the problem they're trying to solve. They're not trying to bust geeks, they're trying to bust criminals who will sell pirated copies of movies for hard cash.
By the way, my daughter and her friend both got informed, in detail, about what piracy is. My daughter now tells her friends "No, you can't borrow my CD to burn a copy, 'cause my dad won't let me." That's good enough for now.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
I hope the next time an idea like this starts to shine like a bright strobelight in its inventor's mind, at least they'll have a look at some hardly known websites like these:
It embiggened him.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Which one of you got away? Was it extremely difficult to escape the grasp of buttery fingered, 8.25/hr ushers?
Assuming 'Intent' must be proven, maybe a quick ransac^H^H^H^H^H^Hsearch of their homes by the gest^H^H^H^Hauthorities could turn up a system and evidence of previous nefarious activity. I'm sure somewhere beyond the usual warning 'Use of recording devices is forbidden, yada yada yada' there are some teeth to back the warning up.
I also doubt 'Fair Use' has a twig to lean on here..."Hey, I was just capturing it in case I missed a part and wanted to rewind and see it again *during* the movie."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Well, the problem would be that it's trivially easy to put an IR filter in front of the lens?
But ya, Cams suck. I watched a few to see what they looked like, and the quality is poor, the audio sucks, etc.
If you've got a kickass 5.1 surround system with a DLP projection system, there's no reason to waste your time with "copies from theatres" anyway.
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
The quality of a camcorder recording is already crap! Both the sound and video are usually awful. Does anybody really buy these things *instead* of going to the movies? A friend of mine bought the LOTR bootleg when he went to NY, as a gift for me to tide me over until the DVD came out, but I couldn't even bear to watch it, it was so bad.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
Relative to what? Taking a crap on celluloid?
Do ya think that maybe the MPAA had a little influence on this reporter?
WWJD? JWRTFA!
Well, part of that is simply due to inflation and the increased proliferation of theaters, as well as the greater volume of movies released (let's be honest, the more movies you release, the greater the chance you have of hitting a blockbuster - the movie industry certainly doesn't rely on any other factor to ensure quality).
exactly.. and because of this arms race and inability for people in charge to see the wood for the trees, it'll end up like the situation we have with audio CDs (or is consumer opposition reversing the tide yet?), where they're f**ing up quality that humans can perceive in the name of "copy protection", but all that's happening is they're pissing of their customers (you know, the people who pay to go see movies) and not stopping piracy, as someone gets a clean un-fucked-up copy (either before the protection is applied, or by figuring out how to remove it). I already find the dots ("crap codes") annoying - i go to the cinema for the great picture and sound - if you take that away, what's the point? i urge the industry, just in case anyone's reading, not to get into this arms race, for their sake and ours (speaking for the movie-going public, not for pirates). While you're at it, remove the damn "don't copy" messages, and do more simultaneous worlwide releases, please.
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
My cam has a tinfoil lens hood, it is impervious to all attakcks!
Number one, it's copyright infringement, not theft. Look up theft in the dictonary, if the difference still isn't apparant, I'll explain it to you. More important, however, I should be allowed to take my personal property in with me. While the act of taping a movie may be illegal, simply having a cam corder should not be. I should basically be allowed to have any item that isn't already illegal with me, and not have it be illegal just because this happens to be a movie theatre.
This goes double because the day soon approches when things like PDAs will be able to record movies. They have cameras on them now, flash cards are getting bigger, and soon the technology to capture motion video will be on them. That would then make them illegal. So you are telling me that a PDA, which most people that have them carry everywhere, should suddenly be a felony to carry in a theatre? That's bullshit, and a really bad precident for laws.
Days after the initial implementation of this procedure, movie ticket sales have fallen to nearly $0, proof that piracy is responsible for reduced MPAA profits. The MPAA is going to begin suing individuals while lobbying the government to pass more stringent laws regarding movies, because the Constitution states that the MPAA has a God-given right to eternal perpetually increasing profits, and the government has a duty to guarantee that those profits increase by a satisfactory amount each year.