Hollywood Alters Movies To Foil Camcorder Pirates

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the is-this-new? dept

I could have sworn I heard about this years ago, so I don’t know if it’s new at all… but here’s a story saying that movie theaters will soon start projecting movies in a special way so that they can’t be recorded by camcorders (or at least not recorded in watchable ways). They call the system a “forensic watermark” and say it isn’t noticeable by people viewing the film at all – but adds a “disruptive flicker” to the film. I imagine it works in pretty much the same way as the flicker line you see when you film a computer monitor. The article mentions a few interesting things about the system, such as that if the flicker was set too rapidly, it caused seizures in some people. I wonder how they discovered that? They also tried forcing the system to dipslay the word “COPY” across the image – but found that people didn’t care so much. It was the constantly changing flicker that makes the movie unwatchable.