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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.
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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.
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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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?
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.
This might be useful for tracking down unauthorized recordings obtained during pre-release screenings.
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.
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.
Well, outside of Oscar season the percentage of early-run pirated movies which are from in-theater cameras approaches 100%.
CAM shots (normally hand-held camera and the camera's microphone (which is what this procedure would target)) are often first, and I have seen plenty of bootleg DVDs which are this.
TeleSyncs often (but not always) come second. (Sometimes they hit the scene first.) They are normally tripod-mounted cameras and patch-in for the audio (hard of hearing feed, or direct feed if in the projection booth.) These would also qualify as in-theater cameras, though this technology presumably would not affect them, as the time-delay measurement-from-known-speaker-positions-technique would not apply.
Again, I have seen plenty of bootleg DVDs which are from this source.
It is true that DVD rips are the gold standard of "pirated" movies, but it is quite common for those to be the third or fourth release (after TeleCines or R5s or Screeners sometimes.)
I guess my point is that in-theater-camera releases may not be the most popular on bittorrent sites, but they are very prevalent, in my experience, on the streets of Pacific nations.
Infrared photograph of everyone in the theatre. Mark my words, this is coming. For "security" reasons, to fight terrorism, etc
That would be counter-productive and would drive away customers from an already troubled industry.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
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.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I don't know about USA, but here in Norway, only the smallest cinemas don't have assigned seating. I really like this because you can buy tickets on the internet and pick them up 5 minutes before the start of a premiere and get the best seat in the cinema. If there is no good seats left, I'll wait until the day after.
Insert `fortune -o` here
Prerelease screenings are complete clusterfucks. I've seen security people come up into the projection booth to make sure you're not telesyncing, and security people with hand held metal dectectors for video cameras, etc but there's absolutely no assigned seating, except maybe the first or second rows of the stadium seating (below that are the nosebleed floorseating) for the director and PR people. Most tickets are free and to top that off, most (modern) movie theaters don't even have seat numbers. Hell ask a theater employee and you're lucky if they can tell you within 100 seats how many people each theater seats.
moox. for a new generation.
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.
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.
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!
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You raise a valid point there. I also went through that progression: Movie watching (DVD/Theaters) -> Pirate Movies -> Almost no movies
I also know a lot of people who pretty much stopped watching movies these days.
It is really sad. Between all the DRM bullshit (including those warning screens that you "can't" skip), and the overall quality of movies (or lack of), it is simply not worth anymore. I mean, what are the odds a random movie will be good ? 0.1% ?
morcego
Why I don't watch cam rips. It gives me headaches. Waste of time anyway. For a good movie it's worth watching in theater just for the awesome sound system and giant screen. But then again, MPAA isn't interested in making money only from "good" movies. They want people to pay for shit too.
Just cover up the license plates on your forehead...
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.
Citation please.
This smacks of someone just making up crap to support their viewpoint.
He is exactly right, and there is no citation for what goes on in the scene and the street.
If you have spent any time in the scene, even as a leech, you will know that there is fierce competition
to be the FIRST. The timeline is exactly as he said: cams first, telecine and r5's next,
then DVD screeners and finally official releases. If you are the group with a first in any
of these categories, you win. Cams are usually made in the first week of release, and make
it to the street very shortly thereafter.
The street follows the scene. If there is a cam out on the scene, you will see it on the street.
DVD Screener hits the scene, expect it on the street less than a week later. I live in new york
city and they sell boots everywhere, and they cost next to nothing. They sell them in the subway,
laid out on sheets in the street, guys with duffel bags walk around selling them, etc etc.
There is no shortage of bootleg everything here, starting with mass media, i.e. music software and movies.
music lover since 1969
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.
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?
Yep, google confirmed, here's an article on it, complete with screencaps of the burns and the grids (but you'll have to squint to see em).
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.
The cue marks in the top-right corner are not called "cigarette burns" and never were. That was only used in the movie Fight Club, and outside of the movie, nobody calls them that unless they are jokingly referencing it.
No existe.