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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.
They actually think they can stop piracy
Technoli
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
I don't know... I think "One Night in Mary Kate and Ashley" would probably be the #1 pirated movie ever.
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. "
All the while, DVD Jon sits in his laboratory funded only with chips and soda. Score: DVD Jon: 2 MPAA: 0
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."
two words: RCA out. Fancy encryption can always be trumped by an a/v signal out into a recording device. It's not the fastest, but it works everytime.
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.
They can spend all they want. As long as the movie is viewable in some form, it can be captured. Even if they were to come out with the ultimate gee-whiz uncrackable encryption, all it takes is somebody to rig up their hdtv setup with a high def camcorder, and it's all over. It's not even a fair fight, because it's one that absolutely impossible for them to win... kinda like trying to keep people from snagging a picture off the 'net. No matter what you do to try and protect it, there are ways around it.
We have enough youth, how about a fountain of SMART?
It's kinda funny. Porn is some of the most-pirated content around, both the full blown commercial infringment (like sites stealing content from one another) and casual consumer piracy. It's also far, far, far more profitable than the regular movie industry, theres a thriving cottage industry of amateurs and an equally thriving industry providing tools (hosting, web applications, cam/phone brokering) to those amateurs. It's actually a very healthy, vibrant economy. The traditional movie houses could do worse than to watch what pornographers do more.
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.
Why not insert a visibly hidden serial number to the film. This serial number could be applied to all releases of the film (pre-theaters reviews one, etc). A unique serial number for each real.
If a pirated moved if found just go to the point in the film where the hidden serial number is located. Then track back you had access to that film. If a theater then threaten not to allow them access to your films any more and sue them for damages for allowing the piracy. If it is a pre-release reviewer edition the same actions can be taken against them.
How hard would it be to just add a serial number to 10 frames here and 10 frames there? Hidden in the back ground somewhere. In stead of just a number it could a colour or the insertion of a special object (IE: Green coffe cup of a specific style.)
I do not think the studios want to really know where the piracy is really come from - their own staff!
My Sig indicates the end of the comment I posted.
Sorry, that's my fault.
I don't go to theatres because they're too expensive. Whenever I see a commercial for a movie that looks good, I make a mental note to buy that on DVD when it comes out. I figure for $3-6 more than a movie ticket, I'd rather have the DVD. Of course, by the time the movie eventually comes out on DVD, I've completely forgotten everything about it, including my past interest in purchasing their product.
I have the same problem with TV. I watch one show, and if it happens to be the one that doesn't suck, I want to purchase the season on DVD. However, they won't sell it to me until they've shown all of the episodes and gotten all the advertising money from commercials that they can get.
Movie piracy does not cost the companies anything. The people who are pirating movies wouldn't pay for them if they were a penny a piece. Claiming this as a loss is just creative bookkeeping (fraud) on the part of the movie companies.
The real harm is being done every day by people like me who could purchase their products, but don't. I'm a bad consumer. I should be taken out and shot for my crimes against the corporations.
"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)
Then why do all movies cost the same? The Matrix, and sequels were some of the $100m+ movies you speak of. Cost $8.50 at the theatre near me. Sin City was $40m, mostly paid up front by Rodriguez, also cost me $8.50 at the same theatre. Gigli was $22m, and though I didn't see it, the price was the same, $8.50. Or taking some older films, Pi had a production cost of about $60,000 (1998 dollars). It was about $8.00 IIRC, though not at the same theatre (hadn't been built yet).
You know, I don't see a scaling of price and movie tickets. It seems to me I pay just as much to see a small budget film as I do a big budget film. This is additonally odd seeing as most big budget films make back their investment. Not universally true, of course, but generally they do. Many of them even make a lot of money.
So, if ticket prices truly were based on costs, shouldn't low-budget indy films be less? Wouldn't it even perhaps be a good business decision? I mean blockbuster effects type films are widely popular and with some marketing, it's easy to convince most people to go. However low budget indys are harder, people are used to high production values and thus often snub them. Wouldn't a lower ticket price help allure them?
Or, could it be, that it's just more of the movie industry being greedy? Remember these are the same people that are mandidating that for any HD movie spec HDCP will be REQUIRED. So be it HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, you'll have to have DVI/HDMI out to an HDCP compatible display. If you go analogue, no HD for you, if it even plays at all.
My bet? Ticket prices are atrifically inflated. The studios do NO competition on price. They've fixed one price, for all movies regardless of source and cost. The only variance is per theatre or area.
The day I start seeing cheap movies for less, and start seeing one production company trying to underprice another, maybe I believe they prices are justified. For now, I think they are in every way as reality based as CD prices: Which is to say not at all.
You have actually hit on one of the open secrets of technology, porn is A. an early adopter and B. a driving force behind large amounts of technology and marketing strategems. I often baffle my friends when I tell them that, besides the obvious reasons, when I go to a gentlemans club or adult boutique (yes yes I am a dirty old man, I admit it) its to see what new tech there is or get ideas for various marketing plans I am involved in. For the doubters I invite them along on my next trip and point out certain things then tell them to watch for it over the next 6 to 12 months. They are amazed when those ideas filter to the mainstream.
If Hollywood would adopt some of the business model of the porn industry they would see a marked improvement in profits. And its not like the quality of acting or writing is all that high above porn anyway...
Honor is like virtue, if you must tell people that you have it then chances are you don't.
I slept with Mary Kate and Ashley before they were famous.