posted 07-04-2004 01:27 AM                    

quote:

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Studios eye new anti-piracy technology

By GARY GENTILE
AP BUSINESS WRITER

LOS ANGELES -- The organization behind the Academy Awards is eyeing new technology to prevent a sequel to last year's embarrassing attempt to protect films by not distributing them to Oscar voters at all.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has endorsed a plan to distribute about 6,000 special DVD players to members. Specially encrypted discs, known as screeners, would be earmarked for a specific academy voter and would play only on that person's machine.

"It's extremely impressive," said academy President Frank Pierson. "It certainly looked foolproof to us."

The player also would imprint an invisible watermark on the disc each time it is viewed. In addition, if someone uses a camcorder to tape the movie as it is playing on a monitor, that image would contain information on the person assigned the machine.

Several studios said they were considering participating in the effort, but no studio has made a formal commitment.

Similar watermarking technology used last year on lower-quality videocassettes helped authorities track and convict an Illinois man who had obtained screeners from an academy member and duplicated hundreds of illegal copies for sale.

The success of that effort led Cinea Inc., a division of Dolby Laboratories, to approach the academy about a combination of encryption and watermarking so studios could once again distribute screeners on DVDs.

The Motion Picture Association of America, which represents studios, last year banned the distribution of screener DVDs and videotapes over concerns about bootlegging. Many of the screener copies are of films that are in movie theaters or are still unreleased.

The studios later changed the policy to allow the shipment of encoded videocassettes to Academy Award voters only. A federal judge, however, granted a temporary injunction lifting the screener ban in a lawsuit brought by independent production companies, which argued the policy put them at a disadvantage for awards.

Cinea will invest several million dollars to make and distribute the DVD players to academy members and possibly to movie critics and other awards groups.

"We feel pretty good about the investment and putting the money upfront because we've gotten a lot of positive reinforcement for this idea," said Laurence Roth, Cinea vice president and co-founder.

Cinea executives said that with enough time and money, a hacker could eventually circumvent the encryption technology hardwired in a single DVD player, but the watermarking will help authorities track down that player.

The discs, by themselves, cannot be hacked, Roth said.

The studios would be expected to pay for a machine to encode its discs and a licensing fee to use Cinea's anti-piracy technology.

Cinea is gambling that the high-profile use of its system will persuade the industry to adopt it more widely to protect films as they pass through post-production facilities - another source of bootlegged copies - as well as "digital dailies" - the snippets of film sent, often on DVD, from a film's shooting location to studio executives or a film's marketing partners.

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posted 07-04-2004 03:45 PM                   

quote: Another Stupid Hollywood Idiot

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"It's extremely impressive," said academy President Frank Pierson. "It certainly looked foolproof to us."

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posted 07-04-2004 03:58 PM                 

quote: Scott Norwood

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anyone who is voting for a major award ought to see the films in question properly in a screening room or, preferably, a good commercial theatre with a real audience. Anyone who makes a voting decision based upon watching a video version of the film is just being lazy.

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quote: Dennis Udovich

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The people involved in the motion picture business and then won't go to a movie theatre to see it. That's unbelievable!

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quote: Brad Miller

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This whole video laziness is Valenti's biggest screwup. (And yes I blame it fully on him, since he blames 92% of all bootleg copies on us.)

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posted 07-04-2004 05:22 PM                    

quote: Coot!

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If I work at Foster Farms killing chickens all day for a living, does that mean I should not got to the supermarket and buy some pre-packed breasts cuz I didn't choke my chicken myself?

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posted 07-04-2004 10:12 PM                       

quote: Phil Hill

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It really doesn't matter if the technology is "cracked" or not, the real plus is the invisible watermark traceability for nabbing those jerks.

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