Theaters to Use Infrared Light to Stop Movie Pirates

Believe it or not, some people still download those horrible-quality movies that have been bootlegged by someone who went to the theater with a camcorder. The National Institute of Informatics in Japan has helped Sharp come up with a way to stop those camcorder carriers from stealing movies.

The new technique creates pulses of infrared light from behind the movie screen that travel through the network of holes that most theater screens have to transmit sound from the speakers behind the screen. The infrared light doesn’t interfere with the human eyes watching the screen, but it’s supposed to cause interference with video camera sensors, rendering the video unwatchable. According to the team working on the project, the ideal pulse frequency is 10 pulses per second. Of course, all this won’t matter if you, like the majority of people out there, don’t pack camcorders into a movie.

Many people have scoffed at the idea simply because a cheap infrared filter could potentially foil the anti-piracy technique. The NII, however, claims that any filters used to bypass the system will only cause the infrared pulses to make the video blurry and unwatchable. Of course, no information was available to explain how that happens, so expect to see a lot of bootleggers using IR filters pretty soon. That is, if you already see a lot of bootleggers in the first place.

This method isn’t aimed to stop digital redistribution because films are already watermarked to prevent digital copying. The infrared light is designed specifically to stop video cameras.

The report about this development cites a statistic from the American Film Institute claiming bootleg film recordings cause $3 billion of damages each year. Frankly, there are a few problems with this statistic and the infrared anti-piracy system in the first place. For instance, anyone who sits through the agony of watching one of those horrible theater bootleg movies is the kind of masochist who isn’t going to buy the movie or see it in the theater in the first place. The theaters and movie studios haven’t lost money to those people because they never would have gotten money from them in the first place.

The same holds true, I would wager, for the people who download the actual pirated versions of the theatrical release (not the versions filmed with a camcorder on someone’s lap). These are popping up reliably on torrent sites, making the camcorder versions a painful waste of time. Again, most of the people who download these movies consistently wouldn’t spend money on a theater ticket anyway, but I guess movie execs don’t see it that way.

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