Movie Theatres Will Fry Us All With Infrared To Stop Pirates
You can’t shoot a film pirate with bullets, but IR light is just fine.
Sharp, at the request of Japan’s National Institute of Informatics, has developed a method to ruin the camcorder footage shot by pirates in movie theatres. By placing mega IR lights behind the screen (which are invisible to the human eye, of course), the light can tunnel through tiny holes that are already in screens for the passage of sound.
The result is a wash of light protruding from the screen, ruining camcorder footage. The other result is that, while you’ll still never buy a ticket to Wolverine, you’ll never get to know how bad the movie really was until, hungover on the couch one afternoon, you catch it on TV or something. [Fareastgizmos]
Note: Unfortunately, the IR blast won’t look nearly as awesome as it does in this photo. I imagine a lame grid of lights, not a reworking by JJ Abrams.
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
this sounds just like when they did something to VCR’s years ago that made them stuff up recordings if they were done via the RCA cables and it was VCR to VCR.. some sort of signal was sent that only the recording head seemed to pick up. it was fine if you used an old VCR for the dubbing, but newer ones prevented such dubbing efforts..
You’re likely thinking of Macrovision, which was actually nothing more complex than making the sync pulses in the video smaller than they should be and injecting a few extra seemingly random ones (but undoubtedly positioned as part of the Macrovision secret sauce). The deal was simply that most TV’s would ignore the extra sync pulses as would older VCRs with ‘dumber’ sync servos. Only the newer decks would slavishly try to follow the sync’s bouncing all over the place and screw the copying process. The solution was a $100 box (or often $50 kit from most electronics mags) that stripped the sync and just put back ‘corrected’ ones.
Translation, its an arms race. If theatres start putting blazing IR sources behind their screens folks will just buy camcorders with lousy IR sensitivity. Or buy an IR filter and screw it on the front of their lenses.
For every measure you can come up with, someone will have a counter-measure. And if there’s a buck to be made you can be sure they’ll try. (And to my mind most piracy is still about shonky rip-off DVD copies sold to the great unwashed not about a few thousand downloads by folk who wouldn’t have shelled out to see a film with bad reviews anyway.)
All pirates would need to do is stick a filter on their lens.. One could probably be picked very cheaply on ebay. Some camcorders have a IR filter in front of the sensor already (which is removed when one toggles the “night mode” switch).