MOVIE theatres around the world have taken to using night vision equipment to catch bootleggers recording movies on camcorders. But isn’t this overkill? Can people really harm the global movie industry with inferior recordings shot from the cheap seats?
It seems they can. As an example, consider the furtive activity discovered by staff in a cinema in Burbank, California late last year. Ushers noticed a man in the audience who seemed much more interested in a gadget he had strapped to his belt than in watching The Core. They gave him the benefit of the doubt, though, and left him alone. But when he later returned to watch Eminem’s movie, 8 Mile, and again behaved suspiciously, they tailed him home. Later, armed with a search warrant, FBI agents raided his Hollywood apartment and found it full of duplication equipment.
When cornered, the alleged movie pirate threatened to shoot a witness and then went on the run. He has not been seen since. How much of a threat had he been? His notebooks show profits from pirate sales running at $4500 a week. And when the content he’d recorded hit pirate DVD pressing plants in China, Russia, Ukraine, Nigeria and Pakistan, they would make a severe dent in the studios profits. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) estimates that piracy costs the industry over $3 billion a year worldwide. Europe’s Federation Against Copyright Theft says the content on 90 per cent of pirated DVDs turns out to have been shot in a US cinema.
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With statistics like these, it is no surprise that the movie industry is battening down the hatches and harnessing technology such as night vision specs to help them. “We have seen what piracy on the internet has done to the music industry,” says Bo Andersen, president of the US Video Software Dealers Association. “They did not see the threat coming. We do.”
American cinemas are now offering their staff a $500 bounty if they catch a camcorder pirate red-handed. But John Fithian, president of the US’s National Association of Theatre Owners, admits it won’t be easy. Pirates shoot movies using tiny cameras sold for industrial espionage or undercover TV documentaries. And some can be secured to a belt or even a pair of glasses and feed images to a hidden recorder. So it’s hard for cinema staff to see the telltale reflection of light from the movie screen on the increasingly diminutive camera lenses.
As a result, the Warner cinema chain has been pioneering the use of image-intensifying night vision monoculars, like military sniper-scopes. These work by brightening a dark image, making the telltale reflection off the camcorder lens much easier to spot, says Fithian. Indeed, within days of getting the gadgets, staff at two theatres in Los Angeles caught bootleggers shooting the Dennis Quaid movie The Alamo and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of The Christ.
But anti-piracy technology doesn’t stop there. The MPAA is working with a firm called Cinea in Reston, Virginia, on a reliable “CamJam” system. This will spoil a recording by altering the film as it is being projected onto the screen, or by marking it so that the source cinema can be identified. “The pirates have favourite theatres where they know they can make good copies,” says Fithian.
Several such spoilers have already been tried. One technique projects the picture frames onto the screen at a different rate from the camcorder’s recording rate. This mismatch makes the whole image flicker on the pirate recording. Or the colour balance of the picture on screen is changed and while the human eye and brain can compensate for the flickering in the colours, a camcorder cannot. However, few cinema chains have so far have invested in the modified projectors needed to put the technology into practice.
Anti-copy firm Macrovision of San Jose, California has another approach in mind. They hope to combat internet piracy by flooding the net with tainted files, which prevent downloads from finishing, in the hope that people will become frustrated and give up.
If technology cannot do the job, perhaps the lawyers will: Hollywood has seen how the Recording Industry Association of America slashed free music downloads by suing individual users of the peer-to-peer networks. A recent report from market analyst Pew Internet shows how P2P music activity plummeted following the RIAA’s legal threats and legal action (see Diagram). Pew calculates that some 6 million people, a third of the Americans downloading music from the net, have now given up.
So, if technology fails to stem the online pirate tide, Hollywood can fall back on the courts. “We can’t compete with free content,” says Fritz Attaway, an MPAA lawyer. “But the big stick works.”
