Hollywood alters movies to foil camcorder pirates

By GARY GENTILE
AP Business Writer

LOS ANGELES (AP) 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 handheld computers ``have an attachment that can record up to 122 minutes,'' said Jeffrey Godsick, executive vice president of marketing at 20th Century Fox. ``Well, that's a whole movie in many cases. 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 discs rather than traditional 35-millimeter 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 funded 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 the fact that 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.

``It turns out that text isn't that annoying,'' said Robert Schumann, Cinea's chief executive. ``Also, if it's just a static image, it's easier for the pirates to take out.''

This technology would be a major improvement over the industry's current measures of trying to block pirate recorders, including night-vision goggles and metal detectors. Some of the piracy is an inside job: A pirate bribes a projectionist to set up a tripod in the projection booth.

``It is a system that will not stop camcording,'' Jacobsen said. ``The best we can do is try to keep it out of the marketplace before a full domestic release.''

Still, the industry knows that whatever technological gains are made over pirates will eventually be thwarted, requiring even more sophisticated countermeasures.

``There is a lot of money in piracy,'' Jacobsen said, ``so it is worth people's efforts to try and defeat security.''

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On the Net:

Cinea LLC: http://www.cinea.com

Motion Picture Association of America: http://www.mpaa.org

(Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)