A Copyfighter’s Musings

First, the request to allow press into the ARDG meetings was denied.

Second, here’s an interesting AP story on how the movie industry is trying to stop piracy at theaters:

“Cinea LLC, which created an encryption system for DVDs, and Sarnoff, a technology research firm, are developing a system to modulate the light cast on a movie screen to create a flicker or other patterns that would be picked up by recording devices, making the resulting images unwatchable. The disruptive flickers would be unseen by the human eye in the movie theater….”

“Still, the industry knows that whatever technological gains are made over pirates will eventually be thwarted, requiring even more sophisticated countermeasures.”

Gotta love the technological arms race, particularly when the movie studios know it’s not winnable. High quality, easy-to-conceal recording devices are widely available.  So the movie studios bite back with a technological measure of their own.  With each development, we should ask ourselves: will this DRM/copy protection be effective  and how do we define effective? 

As the AP report mentions, even though it’s probably impossible to stop all theatrical release piracy, this flickering (if it doesn’t cause mass seizures first) might be enough to stop your average person using your average devices.  But theatrical release movie piracy, unlike music piracy, doesn’t come from your average person.  I’d bet it’s a much smaller group of people,  and that subset expends far more effort in their piracy than your average person distributing music on a P2P network. 

To use Felten’s framework: unless the movie studios are thinking in terms of the Napsterization model of piracy, this policy doesn’t make much sense; it’s targeted primarily at the most skilled infringers, because those are the only people participating in this piracy now.  At the same time, they admit that the most skilled people will get around it – that implies the casual copying model.  Hm.

Also, this story implies that most piracy of theatrical release movies comes from piracy actually within the theater.  Is that true? Doesn’t a lot of this piracy come from non-theater, pre-release promotional editions?

Finally, can you believe “Hollywood sends enforcers with night-vision goggles into movie theaters and puts metal detectors outside advance screening rooms.”  I had never heard of this – it seems absurd!  Maybe they’ll start doing checks airport security style.  Oh people would love that.

Filed by Derek Slater at 1:09 pm under General news
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