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Automatic Scanning for Cameras in Theaters
An anonymous reader writes "A Florida firm claims to have found a solution for the movie industry to prevent bootlegging in theaters. Tom's Hardware carries a story about Trakstar, which demonstrated its 'PirateEye' technology in a Hollywood movie theater to journalists and movie industry representatives: The technology uses light impulses to detect video recording devices. A second component is an audio watermarking system."
Ahh yes, the solution to bootlegging in theatres. How much of a problem is this anyway, though? I've seen copies of movies taken by some guy with a camcorder... the audio quality is always lousy, people chatter in the background, and there is invariably some big guy who takes a popcorn break right in the middle of the movie. We won't get into the video aspect, which is dog awful. Sounds like someone solving a non-problem, as usual.
The real issue are those screeners, which they've made some progress with (I hear), and the people who work in the theatres, which will be difficult. I doubt someone getting paid close to minimum wage is going to care about your IP. Watermarking sounds promising.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
.. is a brute-force attack against CCD's and other camera optics.
Some sort of electronic/optical flash system that, when activated, overblows CCD's, or otherwise interferes with their operation.
Then I could sell it to guys like this and make a fortune...
(And before you liberties people get started, I believe I have a right to not get my picture taken, when I want not to get my picture taken..)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Okay, reading the scanty information they provide seems to indicate that it does its trick by bathing the room with IR light.
Somehow the camera is supposed to respond to this. My knee jerk reaction was that all you needed to do was put tape over the remote control sensor and you would be good to go.
But they would undoubtedly have thought to create a system more resistant to spoofing than that. So I am stumped. I assume they are relying on some response from the lens? The feature list says it can't be fooled by pinhole cameras or even filters on the lenses, so thats what I base my guess on.
Anyone with more information care to speak up?
Which i thought was pretty funny. Read
- sarcasm is just one more service we offer -
...if it detects a video camera in the theaters is stop the film, turn the lights on, and make an announcement that there is a person in the theater who is illegally recording the movie and this is the cause for the delay. The movie will commence once the perpetrator has been identified and leaves the theater. Come to think of it, this system should search for obnoxious kids and cell phones too.
Is the sharing of "handycam" pirated movies really so much of a problem? This smells to me like a smart company marketing a product to an industry that still doesn't seem to "get" what's happening.
I see news stories all the time about these "bandits" being caught in cinemas with recording devices - but anyone I know who downloads movies deletes anything that turns out to have been recorded this way. Instead, the vast, vast majority of the content available on p2p networks are high quality rips from the screener DVD produced to market the film before its release.
Most of the time, these versions are not only of far higher quality but are available online days or even weeks before the film is even in theaters.
If the cinemas really want to "solve" this problem, maybe they should lean on their distributors a little to change their obscene pricing so the tickets don't need to cost so much and the establishments don't need to inflate refreshments so ludicrously to maintain profitability.
"The impulses are only 20 ms in length. Neurons in the brain need about 40 ms to recognize the light source."
What garbage! By that reasoning, the flash from a camera ought to be invisible.
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