Hollywood alters movies in effort to stop pirating

By Gary Gentile
Associated Press

LOS ANGELES — Hollywood sends enforcers with night-vision goggles into movie theaters and puts metal detectors outside advance screening rooms, but still the industry can't stop pirates from recording films and selling illegal copies before their theatrical debuts.

The problem is that the pirates are adopting ever more sophisticated technology, using tiny camcorders in purses and digital recorders about the size of a fountain pen.

Some hand-held computers "have an attachment that can record up to 122 minutes," said Jeffrey Godsick, executive vice president of marketing at 20th Century Fox. "You can take the attachment and run it through a small hole in a tie or a shirt."

This is big business. The Motion Picture Association of America estimates studios lose more than $3 billion per year from piracy in various forms. So the movie industry is trying to fight back with a high-tech solution of its own.

Cinea LLC, which created an encryption system for DVDs, and Sarnoff, a technology research firm, are developing a system to modulate the light cast on a movie screen to create a flicker or other patterns that would be picked up by recording devices, making the resulting images unwatchable. The disruptive flickers would be unseen by the human eye in the movie theater.

The "forensic watermark" system is designed to be used with digital projectors, which show movies stored on computer disks rather than traditional 35 mm film. Only a small number of theaters have digital projectors, although it is expected that most theaters will go digital by the end of the decade.

The research is financed by a $2 million grant from the Advanced Technology Program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a government agency.

The technology takes advantage of how the human eye and camcorders see the world differently. For example, a computer screen constantly refreshes an image, creating bars that travel across the screen. A camcorder picks up those bars, but not the naked eye.

Researchers are mindful that creating too rapid a flicker could trigger seizures in some people. They also discovered that using the flicker to write words across the image, such as "Copy," are not disruptive enough.

This technology would be a major improvement over the industry's current measures of trying to block pirate recorders. Some of the piracy are inside jobs: A pirate bribes a projectionist to set up a tripod in the projection booth.