Piracy in the Theaters

photo credit: EricGjerde

The movie industry (and music industry as well) have recently become obsessed with filthy, freeloading, artist-livelihood-destroying, rum-drinking, organised crime-funding internet pirates. These enemies of freedom sail the seven ISP’s cutting profits of the honest middlemen with their cutlasses.

An interesting thing popped up today with regards to movie studios trying to discourage pirates. It seems that they are trying out a method to watermark the films – because this idea to make the film undesirable to copyright infringes is quite simply ridiculous for some very obvious reasons…

Their brilliant idea was this:

“Paramount has intentionally silenced bits of the soundtrack of “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” in order to deter and track piracy.”

Deter piracy with a few gaps in the soundtrack? Have any of these people actually seen what a movie looks and sounds like recorded by a consumer-level camera in the theaters? You’d be lucky if the only thing wrong was a few gaps in the soundtrack! People that are willing to watch a movie recorded by a hand held camera in a theater are simply not going to be bothered by this – they already put up with coughs, splutters, shhush’s, hairdos, moving people and a camera man who appears to be afflicted with Parkinson’s disease. In fact, the only people that it’s going to upset are the poor suckers that just paid $15 to watch your crippled movie in the theater.

Seriously bad idea. My idea would be to throw an infrared floodlight against the theater screen. Invisible to the human eye but you can be sure the camera’s CCD will pick it up

In other copyright news it seems the New Zealand Government has been invited to discussions regarding ACTA, the Anti-Counterfiting Trade Agreement. This treaty, in negotiation with UK, US and Canada, has been drawn up in secret and has only just come to light. You can read the discussion paper here and it seems to be just a thinly veiled assault on privacy in the name of Intellectual Property Rights protection.

I can only hope the New Zealand government is not involved with this, as the paper is full of very scary provisions…

“Cooperation” is the “key component” to ACTA, which means governments agree to exchange information with each other about their citizens in order to protect the IPR industry (although the data exchange won’t be limited to that goal)

The big problem I have with this is the fact it was negotiated completely in secret with no transparency. It’s also misleading all the way up to the title. Since when did counterfeiting have anything to do with Intellectual Property Rights (I hate that saying…)? It seems what they can’t put into international law they enforce in trade treaties. For instance an FTA with the USA is almost always conditional on adopting their broken patent system and their draconian DMCA-like laws. Copyright enforcement should be a purely civil matter, not criminal.

This is seriously bad news and can spell major issues for both consumers and other parties such as ISPs and public services should they have to comply. I hope NZ doesn’t touch it with a 10-foot barge pole.

Update: Ars Technica has a very well written analysis of the problems to be had with ACTA. Go Ars!