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Audio Watermarks Could Pinpoint Film Pirates By Seat
Slatterz points out a brief mention at PC Authority of a story at Torrent freak about using watermarking embedded in movies' soundtracks to reveal the exact location of camera-wielding bootleggers in a theater; the inventors (here's an abstract of their paper) claim it's accurate to within 44 centimeters.
And once it's publicized, is it really all that hard to throw a couple of wireless microphones out there under others' seats to "mix things up?" It would work if no one knew about it, but once it's out...
Pretty much a moot idea.
For this to be useful, the theatre would have to identify who's in which seat, which means
a. showing ID when you buy tickets (and retaining the seating data for weeks or months)
b. assigned seating.
It's almost as if they don't want people to go to the movie theatre any more.
If you don't know who sat in which seat on what showing on what date, knowing which seat a video was shot from isn't going to help you.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I've always wondered why the movie studios care about catching these people. These bootlegs are the worst quality you can find and anyone who would knowingly buy them would never be a customer anyway.
If you know what seat they are in days after they filmed it and released it, what good does it really do you? Ive never seen a theater with assigned seating before.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
um...and they are going to use this info how exactly? Last time I checked I didn't have an assigned seat at the theater.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
Am I going to get treated like I do by the airlines every time I want to watch a movie?
In order for this to track us at all, we'd need an ID to buy a ticket, need to show ID to get into the theater, have assigned seats, and they would have to change the audio slightly on every showing.
Maybe I'll just stay home and download them instead...
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Why not just link the original post from TorrentFreak? "Brief mention on Google News of a story covered by PC Authority of a post at TorrentFreak, that killed the rat, that ate the malt, that lay in the house that Jack built."
I thought they wanted more people to watch movies, not scare them away by requiring people to sign an EULA when they buy tickets.
How else would this invention be useful if they didn't know the exact person which was seated in that particular seat?
What exactly will that achieve ? Since when did you need to give proof of identity to get in, oh wait that will be the next thing that MPAA lobbies for. Movie Identity cards, we welcome our new entertainment overlords.
From recording audio and video in separate and then joining them together?
Recording video is the hard part, since you have to position the camera to stare at the screen continuously, and exposed to being noticed; the only way you can do that (unless you have inside connections) is from the movie seat for which you bought the ticket. An audio bug, however, can be planted virtually anywhere in the room, does not have to stare the screen, does not have to be exposed to sight, and can be small enough to literaly be stuck on top of a pin which you stick somewhere unconspicuous. So while audio signals may help you to figure where the signal originated from, its offset by being much harder to tie that signal to any particular person.
So, they will be assigning seats in the theater? Or are they just planning on using 'Wanted Posters' for these lawbreakers?
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
I'm somewhat skeptical that this could even work for a few reasons:
1) How can they alter the sound so that a camera with a cheap mic can pick up the sound accurately enough for this to work without making it sound worse for the audience?
2) Even if they do somehow make the seat location ID work how will they know who sat there? Unless they assign seats and get the name of each person in the theater this is pretty useless
3) How will they know which theater the movie was filmed at, or which screen in the theater, or which time on that screen? Will every single individual screening have a different audio watermark?
While this sounds cool from a technical perspective, it would be easy to circumvent by plugging a remote microphone into the camera.
Also, wouldn't the accuracy of this depend on the theater's dimensions and acoustics as well as the layout/calibration of the speaker system?
What's the point to this? Unless I'm mistaken (and I did RTFA), they will only be able to work out where the person sat if they listen to the recording. That means either a) they've already caught them, or b) they've managed to leave the cinema, go home, compress and upload the film. Do cinemas in the US record full ID of every person attending, including what seat they sat at?
It's only a matter of time before cinema owners are forced by the big studios to start taking night vision snaps of movie-going audiences before every screening.
We dread to think what else they might catch going on in the dark.
Assuming I have drunk enough beer by the time we hit the cinema they'll catch a fine snap of my naked buttocks and those of half a dozen of my friends pointed in the direction of their camera.
Hack this by changing seats a few times during the movie. Or, slip someone in the movie theater $100 so you can go up into the projector room and film it there... "Our watermarking technology has determined that the movie pirate is... the projector!"
The real question is why? It's not going to help.
I would think having a nice big Infra-red spotlight above the screen pointed at the audience would be a better deterrent. Of course this may put crazy people like this out of business. It's just a risk we'll have to take.
I say don't drink and drive, you might spill your drink. Before you get behind the wheel just stop and think.
What proportion of pirated movies are from in-theater cameras? I suspect it's minuscule, even if it seems to get a lot of attention. The video and audio quality must be way below DVDrip level, using any kind of equipment that can be "sneaked" into a theater.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Most cinemas that I've been to lately have micro-power FM transmitters that broadcast the audio in each screening room, for the benefit of people with hearing impairment who bring their own radios and listen on headphones. If the pirates were to use audio from this FM feed, the camera could be anywhere in the room and nobody would know.
It cannot work. Most of the time they will never know which cinema it was bootlegged from. So.... GG
If Hollywood made movies that were worth stealing, more people would be 'video-ing' movies. Most -if not all- of this stupidity takes place in markets where the videos are turned into cheap, flea-market quality, DVDs that are sold in locales where copyright means that it's alright to copy someone's work. Very few of the massive, high-budget, POSes that are being churned out by Hollywood these days are 'must sees' -let alone 'must buys' or 'must torrent'.
Sig this!
Even if they did they so what? They will still not know in which cinema or exactly when the film was recorded. I fail to see how knowing where the pirate sat will help. In fact if they look at the distortion of the image they can presumably already figure out the angle.
Ok so they track down the seat. Now they have the buttprint of some anonymous person who obviously paid for his seat with cash and the movie theater didn't assign a seating chart. Anyone else seeing that this is probably a multimillion dollar industry to do jack crap?
Infrared photograph of everyone in the theatre. Mark my words, this is coming. For "security" reasons, to fight terrorism, etc.
Just like the outrageous crap in most EULAs, this will be posted somewhere on a wall, saying "by entering these premises, you are consenting to be photographed"
Even if that doesn't happen -- IMO, the amount of energy being poured into technology such as this seat tracking software would be better spent creating films worth watching. Between the smug know-it-all antics of the Hollywood crowd and the deep-as-a-puddle content of most dialog and storylines, there's just no compelling reason to attend.
LOTR was the most recent film I saw in a theatre. At the rate things are going, it may be the last film I see in any theatre.
I've been going to movies my whole life, not one of them has assigned seats. Even if they did, as long as most people pay for tickets with cash, there's nothing linking the ticket back to whoever used it.
They will just photograph the audience (in infrared, so that no one notices). Then they'll use face recognition to identify you when you come to buy your next ticket, and trace you down by the CC number.
1. So do they check your ID when you buy a ticket (and don't look too young) or enter the cinema?
2. Don't you have more than one movie theater in the US?
3. Doesn't a movie get shown several times at each of these theaters?
Any single one of these would completely invalidate the data. By the time the bootleg is distributed, knowing which seat the thing is filmed from doesn't sound very useful.
A lot of people are pointing out some of the obvious technical flaws here: microphone placement, ID/seat assignments, poor quality CAMs suck, etc. etc.
The even more significant issue would be that such a scheme would have serious widespread implementation to be relevant. Which is never, ever going to happen. Cinema's are franchises, it's not like a software update that can be installed everywhere "instantly" fast (within a week for frequently updated systems, years for others...). This system would be difficult to set up effectively in one cinema, let alone a chain of them, let alone an entire city with competing networks, let alone many cities, let alone a whole nation, let alone bigger than that...etc.
This is like the "news" about video watermarks supposedly to be embedded in the films so that the specific theatre/time could be traced. This is like the IR projected from the screen that will make your camera unable to record properly.
None of this could conceivably ever, ever make it past a few experimental test runs in a few random places.
So why is this news? More WAR-ON-DRUGS style propaganda. That is to say disinformation... or more accurately: Utter B.S. that relies entirely on widespread ignorance and a subservient media to not be laughed out of the room. This is like the stories about people injecting Opium (sounds almost plausible except that Opium is a solid) and LSD making people think they can fly off buildings, Reefer Madness etc.
As much as I enjoy wild nerdy speculation about wireless microphones and other espionage imaginings (for financially irrelevant CAMs no less) we should call it what it is: sheer nonsense.
My next question is this: I assume that this is a real company making this "technology" that is important only for its semi-believable bluster. So how do we get in on such a gravy train? I want to write Science Fiction propaganda news articles too!
Stupidity is its own reward.
That would be counter-productive and would drive away customers from an already troubled industry.
That argument never stopped RIAA and MPAA before.
The real issue (apart from the problems in actually tracking all users and treating them like criminals) is whether there might not be more constructive ways for the movie industry to spend their money?
One brilliant idea might be to give scriptwriters the money to write better scripts that are actually worth the cost of the ticket.
Or maybe theater owners try to IMPROVE the theater going experience. There are many things to complain about in a regular trip to the movies. Most are age old complaints like inconsiderate fellow moviegoers that like chatting. Others are newer like getting frisked when going to an early screening of a movie.
Treat customers like criminals and they will behave that way.
Make going to a movie theater worth the price of admission. Make it as easy as possible to go and as cheap as possible while keeping the quality of the experience as high as possible.
There will be some trade-offs, but such is life.
Just don't model the experience on the airlines models. Remember that people are almost at a point where they would rather swim across the Atlantic than use the bloody airlines.
Or just where the microphone was....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This is great. I love any news from anything to do with the entertainment industry or DMCA etc... I have this mental picture : RIAA and their pocket officials: Calling all cars! Calling all cars! All units be on the lookout for movie patron sitting in row 23, seat 4B at Cinimax on main street. Subject was last known to have watched Star Wars 7 months ago. Description? Well, just go to the theater and arrest everyone. Someone is bound to confess to something!
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Setting that up across the nation and keeping it maintained would be a nightmare.
So many differences across the theaters, even identical ones would have to be calibrated at least every show, if not continuously during the show.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'm starting to think that the movie industry is actively trying to destroy the theater experience. Trailers are now around 25 minutes. Before the trailers start, there's more commercials. Ticket prices have gone up. They keep playing those stupid anti-piracy ads in the theater for a movie YOU'VE PAID TO SEE. On top of that, movies come out to DVD or Blu-Ray after 2 months of leaving the theater. With all of this going on, they then blame piracy for loss of sales and put in millions on more ads and in this case more technology to stop piracy. It will never work. The bootleg copy taken by a guy with a video camera in the theater is practically gone. There are same day releases of movies that are taken from DVD pre-releases that were leaked in-house. If they can't even stop people within their industry to pirate the stuff, how can they stop anybody else? There will always be a 2 dollar theater with no security and no hi-tech gadgetry to stop the filming. If all else fails, this will continue to be the source. Just move on. Of course, they never will, but it's just silly to see this battle continue on indefinitely because the movie industry seems so clueless to stop it.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Start with the premise that guys who do this do it a lot, they are serialists. Say they start collecting this evidence and looking at pirated releases. They now go and look at the few seats at each instance of the pirated movie capture thing being triggered, and look for any human face matches. Once they have the same guy in more than one instance, they got a pretty good idea it really *is* him and not the people sitting next to him, the odds of him having the same random neighbors next to him in the seats are pretty far off-and if it is the same few people, then it is a crew effort, bigger fish for the companies to nail. Either way, they work on matches, not a single instance. It's a start on IDing the guy or guys then. The fuzz have most everyone's face in their data banks now with driver's licenses, and they take it from there. Allegedly, this facial recognition tech out there now is good enough for vegas to catch counters already, so if the casinos have that tech and ability to analyze and ID faces, the big studios do too, if they wanted to.
They could also use this if they actually caught (or suspected) the guy from some other slip up, and then went back and looked at their recordings of the identified area in the theater to see if they could find him inside the zero in range they recorded. If they did, it would would then be just some more evidence to throw at him in court.
If course the basic idea from the studio's POV is to get knowledge of this anti piracy tech out in the wild, just to discourage all but the most desperate or most retarded to even try it, knowing they will be the "star" on the in theater candid camera. Mostly, it is just a deterrent, especially if they perfect it and get a few convictions using the tech. The word will get out, that it is just not worth it.
Well... one thing that's stupid.... is that this product focused on the sound and I'd bet you could get way more accuracy from building the technology around, well, the movie itself.
Why do you have to go to all the trouble of a watermarked sound track when you should have the position of the seat very simply by the angle of the screen on the wall in relation to what's on the camera?
In -fact-, you could make it really simple. Assume that your movie won't show in more than 16,000 theaters, that's what, 14 bits? So you have 14 things in the movie, in 14 scenes, that the director uses, say, pepsi as a prop rather than coke. In post production, assuming that all of these clips are in the computer, you could, for each film print, select the various combinations of each of the scenes such that each film is unique.
Send out each film to each theater, and then bam, when it shows up in some street, you know where it came from. Then you can send out the goons, shoot the movie theater owner, hang up all the patrons in cages with vultures pecking on their organs, and then, uh, nobody would go to that movie theater again.
Oh wait... what's REALLY stupid is that, no matter how much the movie companies can trace leaks back to a theater, there's not a damn thing they can do to that theater, lest they lose business. If you are a movie theater owner, why not let everyone bring in a camcorder... at least they all buy tickets!
This is my sig.
If you think about it, this is one of the best technologies to come along in years. This will now entice the mpaa to start investing heavily in time machines to go back and capture these people. With all the money they will invest time machines should be popping up any year now! (stay away from the dynex brand timemachine its known to have a few bugs)
how could they identify which theater the bootleg was filmed in?
You mean the high quality movie bootleg which are made with telecine by insider ? Because pre-release screening or after release screening, those movie are seay to recognize and of crappy quality. Not what you can find as BT even for 0D release.
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Here is a simpler solution...
Look at the angle of the camera with respect to the screen.
This makes no sense. You can -already- tell where someone was sitting from the video itself. The angle of the image, the angle of the top/botton and sides of the screen, etc. They don't even need to do anything extra.
This is either bullshit or just some cockamamie plan that would never have made it to market anyhow.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I hope there are less obtrusive then the watermark images shown. Between having to see those, and the volume being set to 11, I think I will start watching movies at home more.
It is pretty obvious that they intend to send time travelers to the exact point in time and space that the pirate was recording and arrest them.
Either that or open up a wormhole and bring them to the future for justice.
Maybe just sent a telegram back in time to alert the past. But that is not as fun.
The city of Providence, RI is looking to put in listening stations all over the city. They'd be listening for gun shots.
Being the mischievous sort, I think building what I'd call the Shot Box would be interesting. Essentially you could mount it on a car and as you drive around it would occasionally blast out what sounds like a gun shot. It's drive the cop shop crazy.
Maybe they should worry less about pinpointing an anonymous seat and more about actually paying the people who's IP -they- stole (example: Forrest Gump)
When 'Hollywood accounting' ends, I'll actually care about movie piracy. Until then, it's crooks complaining about thieves.
"We need to get over this notion, that, for Apple to win... Microsoft must lose." - Steve Jobs, 1997
Yeah. Do it. Seriously! Kill your industry! It's not dying quick enough.
-Kinsey
Maybe they'd like to contact me about my patent for a device to automatically extract the DNA of cinema and theater goers.
It's a simple device that extracts some DNA from your buttocks when the show starts. If you read the fine print on your ticket, you'll find that you've given consent when you buy your ticket.
Just cover up the license plates on your forehead...
It wouldn't hold up in court, any lawyer worth their salt could establish reasonable doubt that it could have come from any of about four seats. It could have been the person to the left, right or behind you. Nobody in those seats? Prove that someone didn't move to get a better seat. Are you going to have watermarking for the time too? Even if you made this 100% infallible it would take all of about a week for someone to write software that could trim that watermark out. For it to ever be there it would have to be below or possibly above human hearing levels and before I stick the torrent up I would just have to scrub the video.
From TFA: "With a mean estimation error of only 44 centimeters, it might be a seat off every now and then, but those are worries for later."
After all, in the mind of the MPAA - if you're sitting next to the guy making the bootleg, you are equally as guilty.
Oh, pinpointing by "seat," nevermind then. I was really interested there for a second. Really big blowhorns anyone?
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
1)Cant you do this by using the apparent dimensions of the screen to determine the position of the camera? Given that the screen is rectangular and x*y in size you should be able to say "In the cammed version the screen appears trapezoidal. Now we can draw an imaginary line from the center of the screen out to the wall of the theater. The screen appears z large in the image (and maybe use the focus to figure zoom level) and that gives me distance from the screen.
2)SO WHAT if you do know which seat the pirate was in. When was the last time you bought a movie ticket that had an assigned seat associated with it? I've never purchased movie tickets by seat number. Never had the chance to. It's not gonna happen. movie studios have too much invested in "first weekend sales" statistics to risk people saying "Oh, I could only get seats in the far left of the right side aisle. I'll go when I can get better seats."
NOT GONNA HAPPEN.
Though...I guess they could put nightvision cameras into the the theater, center position, just above the screen so they can go back and see who was in which seat during the movie. I kind of doubt it though. However, if anyone knows of this happening please make LOTS of noise about it. I like to know when I'm being covertly surveilled.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ahhh, at last a market for my seat cushion based DNA sampler! And my colleagues all said it was just a pain in the ass... Who's laughing now?
See Das Leben der Anderen. Perhaps the MPAA has trained some Dobermans to follow the scent.
Have gnu, will travel.
How meny movies are ripped from hotel PPV?
Put it this way, family of 4 goes to see a movie one night: two adult tickets $20, two kids tickets $14, two drinks and popcorn $20.
Wow, I just spent $54 and 3 hours of my time to sit in a theater and watch a sub-par movie when I could just rent/buy a movie and watch it at home for a total cost of $1 rent fee, $2.00 for 2L of soda, $5 for 8 bags of popcorn.
AND I don't have to deal with jerk offs talking/texting/ringing in the theater.
Make a better product, and people will pay to have it. When the product is crap, people don't mind if they get a crap version of it because there is no real loss.
If you mean the scratch marks that flash in the top-right corner of the image every half an hour or so: they are to demark the ending of a film role and the beginning of another. It's two flashes separated by 2-3 seconds. Immediately after the 2nd flash, the new film role is turned on. The switch of the role is usually accompaniated with a scene change in the film, to make the non-continuity less visible.
just check the people for cameras at the entrance?
Perhaps by the definition of some I am not a pirate -- just a picky customer/consumer. But I download content through various means on a regular basis whether they are my favorite TV shows or movies. But at the same time, the more that my favorite TV shows are released on DVD, the more I buy those sets and erase them from my hard drives... same goes for downloaded movies. But when it comes to a movie that is still in theaters and the source of the content is a video captured by video camera, I simply ignore it. The quality is almost ALWAYS terrible and there are idiots coughing, getting up and walking in front and all sorts of problems that are just not worth it. And if it's good enough, I will pay to see it anyway... usually... if I have time.
But frankly, with as bad as the quality usually is, I am a little surprised that they would go to such measures to try to prevent it. In reality, all that needs to be done is flashing some infrared light at the audience and it will kill the video quality even more. Here's an experiment you can all do at home:
Get any digital video device whether it is a web cam, a video camera or a digital camera and turn it on so that you can see the video display of what the camera sees. Now get a typical infrared remote control device and point it at the camera and push some buttons. Your eyes cannot see the IR light from the remote control but the camera certainly picks up on it really well where it looks like a bright white light. It would seem to me that all one would have to do to ruin the video camera pirates is to play some games on the infrared spectrum. For that matter, they could easily project some IR message on the screen in much the same way as a laser light show.
All this audio crap is worthless.
If this isnt an example of total insanity on behalf of intellectual property interests, I don't know what is. Going this far to catch cammers? im thinking straight jackets and ambulances for all of IP business interests that have completely lost track of all reality.
Couldn't agree with you more about the cell phones, but wtf is 64-channel Dolby Digital? That sounds awesome!
Even with assigned seating, is there some difference in the identification code that not only shows what theatre the movie is tagged to, but also the time of the showing/recording?
What are they going to do, pull every record for a month and question those who sat around 5-A?
A lot of the higher quality rippers use the hearing impaired headphones that receive the wired or wireless transmitted audio. This sound is of much higher quality as it doesn't pick up outside noises from people sitting around.
For every thousand dollar technology and million dollar implementation there's a $2 work-around that's free to learn about.
It seems in testing the software, they ran some old moon landing footage through the program and were able to determine exactly where the audio came from. Police have no firm leads in their disappearance.
Transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
You know I don't know why they don't just project an infrared image with the cinema's name on it on the same screen as the movie. Standard cameras will pick it up, but the human eye will miss it entirely.
OR how about three IR leds and a fourth one on a post sticking out from the top of the screen? That three dimentionpattern should give you the precise seat location of the pirate.
This technique, and all techniques fail IN CINEMAS WHICH DON'T IMPLEMENT THE TECH!
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
... seen this sort of culture developing and THEN had written '1984'
really is that great here in NZ :) But dont spread the word, lets keep it our little secret!
---
I don't want to support the scum bag cartel that is the MPAA, but I have an idea and I would like to know if it is scientifically viable. If you've ever pointed an infrared light source at a camera, you'd notice that the light is visible through said camera. You can try this with a remote control. :)
Now, what if there was a strong infrared light source in the theatre that either pointed directly at the screen, or shined out from behind the screen? This would theoretically destroy any camcorded versions of the movie. Would the customers be able to see this *in the theatre* though? I should patent this as imaginary property and sue anyone who implements it now.
> the inventors (here's an abstract of their paper) claim it's accurate to within 44 centimeters.
It was someone at the grassy knoll.
CASE CLOSED!
I can also tell you the location of the inventor's brain plus or minus 44 centimeters.
1) I never watch "cam" quality pirated movies. The video and audio quality are awful. I'll just wait a few weeks/months for a DVD rip.
2) I haven't been to a movie theater in about a year, and this isn't encouraging me to go back. 15 minutes of commercials at the beginning, overly loud speakers, people with their cell phones, sticky floors, people kicking the back of my seat, laser pointers, laughter at random/inappropriate times... theaters suck!
P.S. Get off my lawn.
So much effort to stop the unstoppable: movie piracy. They just don't get it: Since years, we are in the digital age. Change the fuckin' business model!!! Officially give your movies for downloading for, say, 1 euro/1 dollar. Now there's a steady income, instead of the multimillion losses for fighting in courts... Damn dinosaurs!
What does this company expect? That everyone is going to have to register with a photo ID and be given assigned seating to every movie?
Besides, I thought most pirated movies were cammed after-hours by actual theater staff/owners nowadays.
That way they KNOW the pirates, they are the only ones left in the theatre! It is brilliant and foolproof I tell you.
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You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
They can make a few high-resolution pictures of the theatre throughout the screening with a camera below or above the screen, then crop out the picture of the person in the seat identified. Then use that picture to pick this person out of the line the next time they visit *any* theatre - probably red-handed with a concealed camcorder.
Of course all they need to do is re-encode the audio files, re-encoding changes the audio in the file and other modifications could be done to make this completely pointless.
Another waste of time and money? I'd say so.
...I mean those day zero one, or even before it air on the theater- The source are usually are from the video sent to academy reviewer for reviewing.
They don't even brother to remove the very obvious subtitle saying that the video is only for academy reviewing process!
I think they should watermark those video instead.
Last time I went to the theater I got to sit wherever I wanted...
Great. So you know where someone sat when they recorded the movie. Once it hits the net, guess what, they arn't sitting there anymore, because uhm they went home. In short this is a waste of money and time.
More importantly, could this technology be used with my Roomba to make it smarter when vacuuming?
XYZZY
They are ridding the world of those awfull CAM's. Bravo.
if you look really closely at the fine print the recommended system specs mention that a time machine is required for this method to be of any use.
lose != loose
Maybe that's why years ago a new Philadelphia movie complex started selling assigned seats for the movies. It was awful; a staffer actually made me move back to a noisy crowd of patrons, when the theater was more than 80% empty. I haven't been back, so don't know if they are still doing it.
-- John S. James www.RepliCounts.org
"With movie pirating completely eliminated"
Yeah, that Blu-Ray security pretty much eliminated the entire piracy thing for hidef movies.
Generally it is not so hard. Algorithm is already know because similar system is used to get the location in USA's GPS system. In a such locating system You have multiple sources generating different waves and only one input, not important if this is anthena or microphone. If You have enough time and computing power you can calculate location (on earth or in the cinema) by knowing the location of signal sources. Checking source cinema is even simpler but you have to write different signature on each copy.
Probably like with GPS it will be easy to damage signal signature if One knows what to search for. To find such 'water mark' it is enough to compare audio copies from two cinemas. So to break this system it is enough to go twice to a movie into two cinemas with a cell phone and record audio only. Therefore probably it will not last long till somebody will write a hack for it.
Accurate to within 44 centimeters? That's enough the make it the person sitting next to me. Not to mention that it won't say who recorded the movie because you can get up and move to another seat at any time. Not as though the theater could even tell who was sitting where in the first place. The technology is useless because it points out nothing useful.
that I now know what the movie sounds like from three seats away.
I wonder if Seinfeld ever noticed this in his pirating of Rochelle Rochelle....?
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
Accuracy within 44 cm? That could be either of two seats. Case dismissed with prejudice!