Slashdot Mirror
Movie Studios Unveil New Anti-Piracy Lab
PaulusMagnus writes "According to the BBC Walt Disney, Sony, Paramount, Warner Bros, Universal and 20th Century Fox have formed a new organisation called the Motion Picture Laboratories. They've also given them a nice tidy sum of US$30m to play with to develop new technologies to combat piracy." From the article: "There are thousands of new concepts floating around the hi-tech community about how to develop tools to fight piracy ... Researching and developing these technologies now will help save the major studios and other motion picture producers and distributors money in the future."
Price your movie tickets within the reach of NORMAL FAMILIES!
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I thought the best "technology" was to make a decent product. Then people would likely feel more inclined to actually pay for it, rather than waste their $$$ on a turd.
Jory
This just means you can kiss all your "fair use" rights goodbye. No mater what they try, it will certainly hobble my fair use rights to make copies of my disks so the kids cannot ruin the originals....
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
Judging from this summer's releases, the studio's have obviously found the perfect solution, only release material nobody would want to copy. So far, it appears to be working. No wonder cinema and DVD sales have fallen off so much.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Seriously, how many pirated copies of TOP movies actually make their way into the world via cameras? I mean, most the cam caps I have seen are horrible, poor audio and poor video, nothing I want to watch, especially on an HDTV. The GOOD copies come from screener versions of the movies. Heck some even have the, if you are watching this call...
Also with new digital equipment at theaters I am starting to wonder if some people working these booths haven't found some new way to offload the movies and possibly make copies that way. It just seems that there are too many HIGH quality rips coming out to possibly be the result of geeks with cameras.
Finally, while ticket prices are arguably high, I do not believe the real problem is ticket prices so much as nothing people are wanting to see. Actually I am more annoyed with the theater to dvd turn around time. I would honestly prefer this get as short as 3 months even on GOOD movies. Once again the digital formats available make this transition a lot more feasible, and most the extras are filmed during production or shortly post-prod anyway. So the three months release time should be enough to clean them up and release great DVDs....
If only the intelligent and tech-saavy people were running these industries nowadays and not the old fossils who developed the industry into what it is...
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
I've got a way for them to stop piracy. It's called not overpricing your product. I used to pirate a lot of movies, then I discovered Zip.Ca, where I could rent 15 movies a month for $25. I could rent more, but I can't watch them that fast. If they would drop the price on CDs, I wouldn't pirate those either. I think the biggest reason for pirating is the cost of getting stuff the legal way. $10+ to see a movie in theatres, $80 for a concert, $20 for a dvd or cd. If they don't lower their prices, people will continue to pirate, no matter how much they try and stop it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The brightest minds in the world being paid to create copywrite protection is NO MATCH for the brilliant mind in some Norweigan country who is MOTIVATED to crack that protection.
It's always a losing game. Maybe think about offering better choices and making it more CONVIENIENT to get music? Oh what do I know... I'm just a consumer!
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
A simple guide for movie executives.
1. Release films worldwide at the same time.
2. Stop policing movie theatres with security guards and confiscating mobile phones as potential "recording equipment" and creating customer antipathy.
3. Release films to DVD within a month of their theatre release.
4. Stop putting region coding and anti-copying measures on DVDs.
And finally, the most important:
5. Stop your own employees from stealing and duplicating your films and selling them to criminal organisations for mass duplication.
"If Coca-Cola accidentally created 100 million cans of faulty Coke, you know for sure the entire 100 million cans would be dropped in the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, without a second thought and irrespective of what that did to the year's profits. What do we do with a crappy movie? We double its advertising budget and hope for a big opening weekend. What have we done for the audience as they walk out of the cinema? We've alienated them. We've sold audiences a piece of junk; we just took twelve dollars away from a couple and we think we've done ourselves no long-term damage."--- David Puttnam, movie producer (from GQ magazine, April 1987)
Circumcision is child abuse.
...it's not what's causing them to lose money. They're losing money because they're making movies no one wants to see. They don't seem to understand that word gets around about bad movies and we're not such undiscriminating cattle that we'll shell out $9.50 just for the heck of it.
I just saw AVP: Aliens vs. Predator for the first time on cable. On the one hand I'm glad I knew to wait for cable (you can usually tell if a movie is dog sh*t from the trailer), but I'm also sorry I wasted two hours last night watching it. It's bad enough that it was crap -- but it's such a blatant attempt to sucker in the fanboys that it's just sickening.
As I think about this, I think there needs to be a Godwin's Movie Law:
When a movie is compared to Aliens in an effort to sell it, it is immediately relegated to the category 'Dog Sh*t' and should not be watched on any medium, ever (even free ones).
Translation: if moviemakers can't make their Sci-Fi film stand on its own and have to try to ride the popularity of Aliens to sell it, then you already know everything you need to know about it: it's crap.
And here are some of my personal movie laws:
- Do not watch a movie based on a video game, ever. It is not worth watching. If you know someone who actually paid to watch one, slap him with a large trout for being such a sucker.
- Do not star in any of the above movies -- it will wreck your career. People sometimes confuse bad writing with bad acting. Don't walk away from such a movie, RUN.
- CGI is no substitute for talent (yes, George, I'm talking to YOU)