6 ms·

This is fighting piracy on the wrong level. Some people must be so afraid that someone could copy their "work" that they put a chain on the most trusted place.

• waterlesscloud 14y ago
  Well, to be fair, if someone found a way to pirate straight from the projector that would be a pretty high quality copy floating around. It also strikes me that this allows distributors to control for unreported screenings, which allowed for unreported income. Probably not as common as it was way back when, but certainly possible.
  • joezydeco 14y ago
    I could be wrong, but has hasn't the business model for showing films changed as well? Theatres used to rent the 35mm prints by the week or month. Now, studios ask for a cut of each ticket sold, don't they? That's why studios are worried about unauthorized showings that could happen "off the books" and go unreported revenue-wise.
    • waterlesscloud 14y ago
      Yeah, the distributors (often but not always arms of studios) take a percentage of each ticket sold. It's usually a sliding percentage- the distributor gets more at first and then the balance slides in favor of the exhibitor (theater) the longer the film has been out. The big chains are all computerized and report back to the distributors and can generally be trusted to be truthful. It's the mom and pop theaters that might have cheated in the past.
• protomyth 14y ago
  Actually, this is the place to fight a lot of the large scale piracy. Unreported screenings and borrowed film prints are fairly big concerns.
• forrestthewoods 14y ago
  As others have said, this seems to be the perfect place to fight piracy. At present time most movies do not have high quality releases until the blu-ray discs are manufactured. When a movie goes to blu-ray 720p and 1080p copies are instantly released online. Having those movies available online opening weekend, if not before opening weekend, could be disastrous.
  • Groxx 14y ago
    They already are in quite a few circumstances. It hasn't collapsed the industry yet - there are other reasons to go to a movie theater than to see the movie. As a concrete example, there are tens of thousands of seeders of Prometheus right now at a couple sites I just checked. And quite a few people I know, who know exactly how to use torrents, went to see it in the theater.
    • ditoa 14y ago
      Several thousand seeders of a CAM copy of Prometheus not a 1080p BluRay rip. Big difference!
      • Thlom 14y ago
        Audio and video watermarking is soon mandatory and playback will be impossible without it. Guess that will stop much of the CAM business.
        • Retric 14y ago
          I don' think you can prevent analog camera's from recording video with watermarking. If you somehow prevent windows from playing back video based on some watermark scheme someone will just write a Linux program that strips / adds watermarks.
          • Thlom 14y ago
            I guess a lot of the CAM pirates works in the cinema business. With watermarking the studios can find out exactly which auditorium it has been recorded in. I guess that will discourage a few pirates ...
• Thlom 14y ago
  My experience is that the only time a key unlocks the movie only 10 minutes prior to the screening is for previews. Usually the keys are valid for about a week. BTW, the screen servers will show when a accepted KDM unlocks a feature and for how long it's valid. I have never seen a KDM that is accepted by the screen server and then "doesn't work".
• raphman 14y ago
  The DCI security specification was modeled explicitly to "control lightly, audit tightly" - exactly because technical problems would cause a lot of trouble to the cinemas. Seems like this philosophy has not prevailed in the actual implementation...