British Movie Theater Staff To Wear Night-Vision Goggles To Combat Movie Piracy 279
Ewan Palmer writes: Movie theater across the UK will be required to don military-style night vision goggles in order to help crack down on movie piracy ahead of the release of potential box office smashes such as Spectre and Hunger Games. The initiative is part new measures to combat piracy as in recent years, pirates have found new and inventive ways to illegally record movies while using a smartphone to film through a popcorn box. Kieron Sharp, director general of the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), said: "The bigger the film and the more anticipated it is, the higher-risk it is. We have staff on extra alert for that. James Bond is a big risk and we will be working with cinema operators and the distributors making sure we will keep that as tight as possible. We really don't want to see that recorded. They [cinema staff] are on alert to really drill down on who is in the auditorium and who might possibly be recording. They still do the sweeps around the auditoriums with the night vision glasses regardless of the film. But sometimes extra security is put in place for things like Bond."
This is why I don't go to movie theatres (Score:5, Insightful)
and only get my movies at the pirate bay. No hassles. No real spying. God loves AMERICA! The POPE is here!
Re:This is why I don't go to movie theatres (Score:5, Insightful)
The movies pirated at theaters are usually low quality and not very interesting to watch due to all the quality issues.
Also consider the possibility that piracy of movies at the theaters may be performed by the employees themselves whenever that happens.
Re:This is why I don't go to movie theatres (Score:5, Insightful)
So basically all this will do is increase the quality of pirated movies by weeding out the poorly-shot cellphone movies, and give the theater staff some cool toys to play with while they're pirating the movie.
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The high quality pirated movies are shot by theater employees using a camera on a tripod in the projection room (so the screen isn't distorted from a perfect rectangle) with a direct audio feed (so you get only the movie soundtrack - no people talking or coughing)..
Where did you get this silly idea from? Sure there are movie theater employees that do this but a lot of the movies you torrent are screen copies made for reviewers in the media. Some come from the special effects houses. You can find plenty that are marked as internal studio copies (doesn't cover the screen, but is in the letter boxing if you watch on a 4:3). You can even download the movies before they hit the theater in many cases. I haven't seen a pirated movie like you're talking about since Star
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There is a major difference between CAM/TS/TC and SCREENER/WP releases that you don't seem to be aware of. Almost all popular movies have CAM releases. There are currently ~22 movies with no better release available than a CAM.
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It's called a telesync, or TS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I just checked and there's plenty of TS releases in the last week.
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The movies pirated at theaters are usually low quality and not very interesting to watch due to all the quality issues.
Also consider the possibility that piracy of movies at the theaters may be performed by the employees themselves whenever that happens.
I agree 100%, what kind of a miserly dork would watch a pirated movie recorded with a smartphone in a cinema. The amount of effort spent by the paranoid dickheads that seem to rule the media industry on preventing this sort of piracy is completely out of all proportion to the small amount of damage it does. It's a bit like swatting flies with a 12 gauge shotgun.
Re:This is why I don't go to movie theatres (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This is why I don't go to movie theatres (Score:5, Interesting)
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I wouldn't feel much sympathy if the major movie studios and anyone who does business with them were to burn.
Me neither, but then again I don't watch big Hollywood movies.
If you do, your comment makes no sense.
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We have staff on extra alert for that. James Bond is a big risk and we will be working with cinema operators and the distributors making sure we will keep that as tight as possible.
If SMERSH and SPECTRE couldn't deal with Bond, how are these bozos going to accomplish anything?
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So you're alleging burger flippers have less rights to go to the movies than anyone else? How gauche.
Going to the movies is now a "right?"
Or... let there be light! (Score:3, Interesting)
... the pirate's cameras often rely on infrared light. Several bright "invisible to the human eye" infrared lights pointed at the audience from behind the screen or even around it ought to do the trick. Just trying to cast light on the topic.
Re:Or... let there be light! (Score:4, Interesting)
How do they know it's a camera in the popcorn box? (Score:5, Funny)
What I don't get is how the cinema staff could be sure that it's a camera that is in the popcorn box. Suppose there's a man sitting there in the cinema. He has a box of popcorn on his lap, but he isn't eating any of the popcorn, and he's holding the box with one hand on each side. The cinema staff use their night vision goggles to pick him out of the crowd as a suspect. They confront the man, and ask him to open the popcorn box. He complies, and all they see is popcorn. Still convinced that he's up to no good, one of the cinema staff puts a hand into the box, and starts moving the popcorn around, searching for the camera the staff are sure is in the popcorn box. But after shifting around the popcorn, this staff member doesn't find a camera at all. Instead, all he finds is the poor cinemagoer's cock and balls, which for some inexplicable reason have been stuck through a hole in the bottom of the popcorn box. Not immediately realising what was going on, the cinema staff member's hand thoroughly fondles the poor cinemagoer's cock and balls. As you can imagine, this is a pretty awkward situation for both the cinemagoer and the cinema staff to be in!
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As you can imagine, this is a pretty awkward situation for both the cinemagoer and the cinema staff to be in!
It also explains why the popcorn is salty and sticky at the same time
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IR spectrum is not good for your eyes. Not as bad as UV, but still in the "not recommended" category - and especially as your pupils will be more open than when outside in daylight. If a cinema was caught doing this, there'll be a moron and his/her lawyer somewhere willing to sue. If they win, then bye-bye to IR lights behind screens.
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That's incorrect. Concentrated IR (eg a laser) will heat the internals of the eye, just like a visible laser. There would be hell to pay for everyone with an IR remote control and the Nintendo Wii/WiiU sensor bar. Non-concentrated IR is no more harmful than visible light. The ways to mess with the IR sensitivity in a camera is to make the IR light alternate between strobeing and solid from a LED bank in the ceiling pointed towards the seats at a 30 to 45 degree angle so it ruins the recording and can't just
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Rather than having filters and processing, they let it all in, and visible light dominates when it's available, but when it's not, the IR receptors dominate. They work in the absence of IR and the absence of visible light. But both are required for all features.
Re: Or... let there be light! (Score:4, Insightful)
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But it's not "required" that there be any IR light for the camera to work
You are deliberately being obtuse. Yes, it's 100% required that cameras accept IR and record it. If not, then they won't work. Period. Though by "work" you mean won't do one specific thing, and by "work" I mean do everything listed in the manual. If it doesn't do what the manual says it will, then it's broken. If you bought a car with no rear door handles, would you take it back as defective? After all, you don't need them to get in the drivers seat and drive away, so the dealer should tell you to fu
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You are deliberately being obtuse. Yes, it's 100% required that cameras accept IR and record it. If not, then they won't work. Period.
The more expensive and better quality the camera the less IR is normally let through. Don't confuse looking into the IR spectrum and recording the IR spectrum. They are not done by the same sensor.
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Actually IR recordings are typically done with the same image sensor as visible light recordings. What high-quality cameras do is have an IR filter in front of the image sensor that is automatically moved out of the imaging path when the camera is switched into a low-light or nightvision mode (In many cameras
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And then, they could pulse them in a manner that would indicate the theater and showtime, so any screeners would fully identify the recorded time and place.
Re:Or... let there be light! (Score:4, Insightful)
I've seen people in the theater recording films with their smartphone, and the theater staff do nothing. The way you do this is by making sure that theater tickets assign seats, and have a "snich" app that reports the film, showing and seat of the pirate. eg "2 rows ahead and 4 seats to the right (of me|row)" and thus allow the theater manager to call law enforcement if needed.
And how can you be sure they're actually filming it rather than just obnoxiously holding up their phone (using IM or something) without using the camera?
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how much lost really? (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone is so cheap that they will watch something recorded from a cell phone I'm guessing they will never be paying customers no matter what happens.
Re:how much lost really? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why this phenomenon has never interested me. I mean really? A bad shaky out of focus version of a movie that I will be able to see on NetFlix in less than 6 months? Sure...
Re:how much lost really? (Score:5, Interesting)
it's a ploy to sell night vision goggles from a specific provider.
they found a stupid enough exec and bribed the idea to him: *boom* money.
the exec had to be stupid enough to not know actually how the bootlegs people download were recorded.
hint: not in the UK and if there's a direct audio feed then it's prooobably not a regular movie goer..
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I disagree.
It's yet another instance where the copyright cartel has made government and private industry responsible for policing copyright.
So basically huge multinational corporations have everyone else doing their bidding and wasting their time and resources to ensure the profits for those huge multinational corporations.
If those corporations want their copyright policed, they should be paying for it. This is just another example of how we
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Six months is too long to wait for some people. :P
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Re:how much lost really? (Score:4, Funny)
What did you expect? FACT were the retards who produced this [youtube.com] (it's not a spoof; it's on some of my DVDs). Not exactly the brightest lightbulbs.
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well the movie theatre owners wife & kids watch that stuff. he thinks he is so smart you see.
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Of course they watch poor quality video. Not everyone has the time or money to catch the movie when it came out in the theatres, or when it's not released in their country yet, and many less wealthy fans of a franchise will grab and watch poor quality video because it's immediately available.
There are even plenty of $5 DVD vendors, in chap Asian markets, who will sell them burned to DVD from carts or backbacks. It's a very real market: visit some poor neighborhoods some day to see the sales.
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What I think is a better question is why they think anyone is doing this in the UK... Most cam copies I see are either from Slavic states near Russia or from somewhere in Asia. Most western world copies of movies tend to be screeners and other video sources and are in fact rare since companies started watermarking them. The only good use of a cam copy is pretty much deciding if the movie may be worth the hassle of a real theatre to go so or wait for a release copy.
Re:how much is lost really? (Score:2)
I can see a movie once and then see it over and over again without further charge. It's called memory. Let the MPAA try to use night vision to find me memorizing stuff.
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I can see a movie once and then see it over and over again without further charge. It's called memory. Let the MPAA try to use night vision to find me memorizing stuff.
And like most of us you have a perfect photographic memory. Obvs.
Really necessary? (Score:4, Insightful)
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I'm thinking that they are doing this as a ploy to try to get fun toys while getting subsidized by the MPAA equivalent. This isn't going to help anyone, as they could just go to another theatre if this is known to happen at their normal one. A smaller theatre likely is not going to do this, or care about doing this. Smaller lines, but less likely to have an ICEE machine that works.
Yeah, this. A good set of night vision glasses is $5000 or so. Even cheap ones are well over a grand. I can just see the minimum wage usher walking out of the theatre, never to be seen again (so to speak).
What is the incentive to the uploaded? (Score:2)
I understand the incentive to watch a movie online but what is the incentive for someone to risk prison time to illegally record a movie
and upload it to pirate bay? What is the uploader getting out of it? Back in the BBS there was a barter system where you could get
credit by uploading something wanted that didn't exist yet but what incentive is there today?
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I think in the case of cam-rips, they're usually not uploaded at all. Private trackers won't take them, and no one is going to download them on public trackers unless they're desperate. Most cam-rips, from what I understand anyway, get burned to disc and sold on the street rather than put online.
Re:What is the incentive to the uploaded? (Score:5, Interesting)
There seems to be a certain measure of pride amongst some folks in having the latest movies. I know people who boast about having terabytes of new movies on their hard drive, all cams.
Myself, I find them to be unwatchable garbage -- if I wanted to see a new movie that badly, I'd go to the theater and see it. But to them, their collection of grainy cams with bad audio is a treasure.
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Yeah I don't get that. Why get a cam when the BR rip or HDweb rip won't be that far behind it. Chances are there will be a pretty high quality copy with korean hard subs in it within a month of theatre release even for the top grossing films.
Re:What is the incentive to the uploaded? (Score:5, Informative)
I understand the incentive to watch a movie online but what is the incentive for someone to risk prison time to illegally record a movie and upload it to pirate bay? What is the uploader getting out of it? Back in the BBS there was a barter system where you could get credit by uploading something wanted that didn't exist yet but what incentive is there today?
Altruism?
Why do people volunteer to do anything? Maybe it's because they get some kind of satisfaction by helping people. Maybe they like the prestige of being a notable pirate. Maybe they think the media industry is evil, and they feel like they are making the world a better place by denying profits to them.
I suppose it doesn't make sense if you think the only compelling reason to do something is for personal monetary gain.
But there are lots of other motivations people can have other than money.
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Whether they pirate movies, music or software, pirates seem to be mostly driven by moral considerations. They also tend to have a strong moral code of conduct - don't attribute other group's releases to yourself, always provide the necessary cracks, add an "if you like it, buy it" clause, and so on.
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Whether they pirate movies, music or software, pirates seem to be mostly driven by moral considerations. They also tend to have a strong moral code of conduct - don't attribute other group's releases to yourself, always provide the necessary cracks, add an "if you like it, buy it" clause, and so on.
User name gives you away, Jim laaad.
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I suppose most of this pirate porn is made around September 19th?
So (Score:5, Insightful)
Pirates will just switch from crappy low-res idiot-talking-on-the-phone theater recordings to high-quality pre-release torrents.
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Why? (Score:2)
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I've been in workplaces where some recent movie is the chatting subject at the water color or the cafeteria, If everybody is talking about the flick, and your budget is tight or you lack the transportation and time to catch the movie in the theatres, you can feel left out and be happy to catch a pirated copy.
Believe me, when you have kids or expensive pastimes like family with medical expenses, movies in cinemas are a real luxury.
Customers are evil! (Score:2)
Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
All it takes is for one lapse in security, not necessarily in your theater or even your country, and all the time and money spent trying to prevent that movie from leaking is wasted.
This would be like buying a car alarm that self destructs if any car in the entire world is stolen.
Potential Smash... The Hunger Games? (Score:2)
Boy, you people in England really have to wait a long time for movies, don't you?
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We used to. Now we just torrent things before they reach the cinema anyway.
"...James Bond is a big risk..." (Score:5, Funny)
irony (Score:4, Funny)
It's ironic that you can't take high-tech spy gadgets into a James Bond film.
What if I'm turning up in costume? Then I *have* to have them.
I predict a new rash of crime... (Score:5, Funny)
... of disappearing night vision goggles and some very happy teenage boys.
I call BS (Score:4, Interesting)
1. There's lots of light in a cinema, a big bright image lights up the audiences faces. I would have thought ample light to run a regular inexpensive CCTV camera pointed away from the screen toward the audience. That not just locates offenders but provides evidence too. More light can be added in the form of IR as others have noted.
2. NV goggles are expensive and having the staff roam around in them adds even more cost.
3. Once the NV goggles have the sensitivity turned right down to allow for the brightness of the screen, I would have thought that would render them not much better than human eyesight.
I imagine this is a scare tactic and nothing more, maybe there'll be a couple of sets of rented goggles moved from theater to theater and "paraded around" to scare people off.
Honestly - piracy is an inalienable right (Score:3, Interesting)
There is a conflict between the natural and inalienable rights of people and the attempts of governments to curtail the resulting actions. It's neither novel nor resolvable.
Ones and zeros. Any series of ones and zeros can be represented as a number, understandable by human minds. It is the natural and inalienable right of humans to communicate, thereby sharing, numbers. Humanity, throughout history, has attempted to suppress the ability of others to communicate freely. Every attempt to curtail communication is a battle against the natural state of humanity's need to communicate. Attempting to suppress a natural right always, always, always results in greater suppression of rights or failure.
Most of us appreciate the outcome of limiting sharing in order to concentrate value. We like multi-million dollar movies. What we don't like are the inevitable outcomes where people are punished in ways that seem unreasonable. The problem is that the two issues are inextricably linked.
Possession of a number, and sharing of that number should never logically be illegal. Making sharing a number illegal goes against natural human nature. Thus we have a conflict with the historical approach to encouraging innovation and creativity and the natural law that humans must be free to share information. Technology hasn't created this problem, but has made it more obvious. Human nature is also to acquire power so we're pitting two natural human activities against either. Of course the natural right to communicate will eventually prevail over the power acquisition impulse, but not without conflict. Right now the impulse to acquire power is grounded in government enforcement, but the natural right to communicate will always find an expression, thus government censorship (copyright enforcement) is destined to fail.
In the future, regardless of attempts to prevent it, free sharing of information is inevitable. Acquisition of power will adjust. Movies will be paid for by trailers created in order to generate pre-creation funding. You'll see trailers for movies that haven't been created yet, based on subjects you're interested in and directors you trust. If you like the trailer you see, you'll pledge money taken in escrow. If all goes well, you'll get to see the movie, but otherwise you'll get your money back with a trivial amount of interest. Everyone will get to see the movie for free if it gets made, nobody will make movies that flop and nobody will be punished for sharing numbers.
It won't happen soon. It won't happen without conflict. Laws will come and go. People will be unfairly punished, movies will fail. Inalienable rights will eventually prevail because law cannot suppress human nature.
Unchecking "Post Anonymously" because I've had just enough beer to stop caring if people are upset by the truth.
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That's not the most logical argument. Freedoms and rights are not the same. I am free to kill you, I do not have a right to do so. Just because you're free to do so does not mean you have an inalienable right to do so. If you don't understand this then keep drinking, I've spelled it out as clearly as it can be.
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I don't think I said rights and freedoms are the same thing.
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Inalienable+rights
I'd agree that freedoms and rights aren't the same thing. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are all things that can be taken from someone, but the fact that they can be taken doesn't keep them from being rights. Freedom is a right, an inalienable right, that can be taken away. The natural state of man is to expect freedom and to rebel if deprived of it. Sure, you're free to ki
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Freedom of speech means freedom to repeat speech.
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Movies will be paid for by trailers created in order to generate pre-creation funding. You'll see trailers for movies that haven't been created yet, based on subjects you're interested in and directors you trust. If you like the trailer you see, you'll pledge money taken in escrow. If all goes well, you'll get to see the movie, but otherwise you'll get your money back with a trivial amount of interest. Everyone will get to see the movie for free if it gets made, nobody will make movies that flop and nobody will be punished for sharing numbers.
Trailers are notoriously misleading.
If everyone gets to see the movie for free if it gets made, why would anyone pay money up front?
Most seriously, how would you encourage more experimental or controversial movies if they were dependent on pre-funding based on people's pre-conceived ideas of what they want to see? That is not a good basis for creating challenging works of art.
I see several flaws in your plan, but at least you haven't fallen back on the "well they can always sell action figures to mak
One problem (Score:2)
What happens if they look at the projector or the curtain?
So they already fuck the colours and.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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(english in not my first language, and I have to revise better my posts. When reading them, I am painfully aware of where are the mistakes)
Your post made more sense and contained fewer grammatical quirks than most on slashdot written by people with English as their only language, so I wouldn't worry too much.
Reversement (Score:2)
In Soviet UK, movie watches you!
Bother (Score:2)
Total BS of course (Score:2)
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this is not new (Score:5, Informative)
i live in the uk and my local cineworld did this briefly about 5 years ago after a commandment from on high. The staff found it embarrasing and stupid and i remember seeing them wandering in with the goggles on and staring at us for a few seconds then walking off again. They only did it for a couple of weeks.
This isn't new, and it isn't really a sustained procedure of audience monitoring. It's a publicity stunt to make people think they're being watched - make a giant fuss about how they're watching everyone in the dark and hopefully that will scare them into not filming the screen.
They do it long enough to make people aware of it then stop again. Then in another 5 years make a big hoo-haa and break out the night vision goggles again for a couple of weeks.
Just avoid the cinema... (Score:2)
The approach I take is to not bother going to the overpriced, customer-hostile and noisy cinema. There are very few films that are so amazing that I can't wait a few months until they come out on DVD/Netflix/Amazon etc.
The bottom line is, the media companies have an over-inflated opinion of their product. I'm happy to wait a bit and then watch it in the comfort of my own home. And if this means that the cinema industry dies, then so be it. Cinemas need to attract customers, not treat them as potential crimi
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This
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The approach I take is to not bother going to the overpriced, customer-hostile and noisy cinema.
Agreed. But then, I go to matinees, at a theater that kicks noisy/disruptive people out. Some movies are best seen on a big (bigger than my 60") screen, with a great audio system. I'm selective about the movies we attend, so we only go a few (maybe half-dozen) times a year, treating it as a lunch date with my wife. Otherwise, I wait for it to come to cable.
How about (Score:2)
Instead of patrolling on behalf of the movie studios they patrol on behalf of their paying customers and eject people who are on their cellphones, excessively chatty, or bring screaming kids into the theater?
And they wonder why people have stopped going to the movies.
Do people really watch CAM rips? (Score:2)
Looking in the wrong place (Score:2)
Almost all of the pirated movies that I have seen were stolen at the studio, not the theater. Some of them even had the production information still on the screen. And some of them were the complete DVD/Blu-ray movie package that was yet to be released.
The studios know their own people are stealing, but they keep blaming the general public.
Re:The Stupid Brits can do what they want... but.. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, government is just the publicly-funded private police for the corporations. Thank Milton Friedman for that!
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I'd rather watch most movies at home than in the theater. If there were copies available for purchase at the same time the movie came out in the theater, there is zero chance people would refrain from making and distributing free copies. It would be very tempting to just download a free copy rather than pay for the official copy or see it in a theater.
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A friend of mind owns a few theaters, the closest one is in [redacted]. I often go down as they're closing and go watch a few movies by myself or with a few friends. I no longer drink but I used to get really trashed while I was there. We'd use one of the smaller rooms off to the side and often ended up chilling in the projection booth for a while to do other things. I usually pay a handsome sum for the various snacks and they make a fresh thing of popcorn before they leave. The owner, his wife, or the mana
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The theater I go to (Cineplex here in Brisbane, Australia) plays a message on the screen before the film telling people to switch off their phones and not use them during the film. And as far as I have observed, people do that.
I have never observed crying babies in any movie I go to. Some chains here in Australia even run special sessions for parents/etc with babies where they keep the lights low (rather than off) and have change tables in the back.
As for commercials, sometimes the commercials can be useful
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That is one of the many reasons I refuse to go to Event Cinemas. Their rip-off pricing is another.
I live in Beenleigh and my closest cinema is Logan Hyperdome (also an Event-owned operation) yet I will go all the way into town for Cineplex just to avoid their operation.
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We get a few rotten people in Queensland as well unfortunately.
We were at a local cinema - near Brisbane, Australia - (Event Cinemas [used to be BCC] in Indooroopilly) and we in fact had a lady with children who encouraged one to take a piss in the isle on a seat about 2 rows down from us. Giving credit to the staff we did actually get a voucher to go see the movie again but I can see why this behavior would turn people away from the cinemas.
Wow, I'm impressed that you have even worse behaved kids in Oz than here in the UK. I thought that was one area where we were still world leaders.
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Why bother, slip him two C-notes and have him record it for you.
Or pay the regular entry fee and watch the film like everyone else? Or isn't that edgy and disruptive enough?