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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.
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.
I have copies of Bolt and Quantum of Solace. Neither are out on DVD yet. Yes, I admit that they are pirated copies acquired through less than noble means. I had no intention of ever seeing either movie, and frankly, the rating on Bolt is a pretty big fuckup.
Neither are cam copies - they are rips of the copies sent by the studio to the Oscars for consideration. (QoS has the subtitle "For your consideration"; Bolt has "property of Disney - do not copy".)
I'm not sure why the studios are ripping their own movies and putting them in... places, but they sure aren't cam copies.
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This might be useful for tracking down unauthorized recordings obtained during pre-release screenings.
Or it might be another scare tactic attempted by the MPAA to stop piracy of their movies--just like the stupid pat downs by goons in maroon jackets wielding hand-held metal detectors. Yeah, those are my keys and that's my mobile phone. No, I don't plan on recording the movie with Qik and no the offer of a free movie isn't worth you searching me more thoroughly off to the side. I'm just as happy to leave and not watch your shitty fucking movie ahead of time and instead wait for the free rental through Redbox and the associated websites which give me free rentals.
The movies used to be a place where I enjoyed relaxing for 2.5 hours. Between the high prices (even during matinees) and the gestapo bullshit at the prereleases, it's like going to the airport at Thanksgiving. While I don't bother to pirate movies anymore I might start to again just to piss the cocksuckers off.
I like US-style non-assigned seats. But I just took a trip to Israel, and the theater at which I saw Slumdog Millionaire (packed!) assigned seats, and it was actually good in one way -- the people you're squashing on the way to your seat have less growling resentment when they know you're trampling them only to get to the seat you've been assigned, rather than because you're an idiot ;)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Don't even need a remote mic, just sit in the handicapped enabled seat that has a mic jack for headphones. as an added bonus your .CAM just became a .TELESYNC
I went to New Zealand last year and went to a movie in Christchurch. It was a pretty odd experience. It had assigned seating.
I ignored it since there were only like 4 other people in the theater but the seats were awesome. Think lazyboy. And the aisles were large enough for someone to walk past you with out moving, or them even needing to turn sideways. I would say there were less than 200 seats in the theater. And it was a medium sized theater. Oh yeah and the ticket price was ~$7 US and the food was normally priced.
I don't know if that's indicative of your average NZ theater, but it does live up to the "assigned seating" requirement.
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.
No, the theater industry will implant a life-long RFID tracking device in your neck, like in "Escape From New York." When you enter the theater, all your movements will be tracked, and you are ok.
However, if you do not renew the lease on the implant often enough, the device will explode, blowing your head off. Just like in "Escape From New York."
Please go out to the lobby, and buy some popcorn . . . and we mean that seriously. Thank you, enjoy the film.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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.
Seconded. I started downloading movies so I did not have to listen to Manny talk about why downloading movies is bad. Aside from that, I am not thrilled at all to pay $9.25 to watch 10 minutes of commercials.
This sounds pretty much like buying tickets to a live performance.
A night out with the kids.
Harry Potter without waiting in line.
Reserved lounge seating at the restored Art Deco era Riviera.
The cinema for grown-ups.
I could live with that.
They've been doing that for quite a while, actually. Ever seen a bunch of red dots flash onscreen for a frame a couple times during a movie? (if not, you will now - sorry) Those are to determine what theatre a leaked cam copy came from.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
As I stated later in my post, this comes solely from the DVDs I have viewed, while in what I called "Pacific" nations. China, The Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Mariana Islands.
I'll admit to buying some, but the vast majority of ones I have viewed were provided by "hotel rentals" from the front desk. I was shocked the first time I saw one, as the disc was silver and had a silk-screened label.
As for "crap to support my viewpoint" - I didn't realize I had an agenda to push.
I appreciate the apology. I read about it a year or two ago and now I HATE going to the theaters. Those red dots are really distracting, and take away from the movie experience. Granted, they are only a small flash every few minutes, but it's enough to just BUG me!
Maybe it is not aimed at cinemagoers, more projectionists?
> 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.
Also, which showing. That seat will be sat in for several showings per day for several weeks. Also, people (in the UK) don't always sit in their assigned seat if there are a lot of empty seats, which has been the case for every movie I've ever seen. How are they doing to prove you were in that seat? And won't it be easy to screw with the audio so as to defeat this nonsense?
In that case, it sounds like this "watermarking" would make it easy to identify if it's the projectionist making the copy rather than a patron.
Even if they could get every patrons' ID for accurate seating charts of every showing of every film across the country (idea-stopping problem one), I would still be more than a little skeptical of such "evidence" were I on a jury.
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.
Numbered seating isn't all that bad. I've been to cinemas where they do, and where they don't. Cinemas without preassigned seating never get completely full, because people don't like to choose a seat next to a strange when another seat is available. So you end up with "holes" of 1-2 seats between each group that are hard to fill. With assigned seating it is usual (for a popular film) for every seat to go.
I'm used to cinemas without assigned seating, but on the few times that I've been to cinemas that assign first the atmosphere has been better. In terms of catching people with camcorders, as other people have pointed out if you paid cash then it won't help at all.
On the cellphones, one of your other replies moaned about people using cellphones in movies. That must be a cultural difference. In the uk answering a mobile phone during a film would be a lynching offence. I've seen people try it, and an entire cinema full of people baying for their blood.
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So I wonder when the studios will start CGI'ing objects into the movie to identify it? A vase on a table in the background, a reflection in the store window, the face on a sign, the color of a dog's collar, etc. If there were a number of these, they could use them like bits to identify a location. You'd need more than one copy of the movie to remove any of them, and if enough of them were the same in the two copies, you'd miss some of those, allowing the MPAA to at least narrow down the origin.
Not only would it not be hard, it could probably even be automated with sufficiently advanced software.
Of course, I've already patented this idea, so do even go trying to steal it...
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Thats just the first step.
The easiest step to combat current day technology for in seat recording is a bank of IR emitters aimed at the audience area.
Do you realize how cheap - and easy - it is to blind most CCD cameras? A decent sized bank would make it look like the cameras were pointing at the sun.
With stadium seating, this is very easy to accomplish even with the placement of the movie screen (ie: so the emitters are not in front of or blocking the view of the screen).
The most people would then get (recorded onto a cam) is a crappy audio track and a nice white image.
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