Digital Cinema and Piracy
Just read an article at Wired about new technologies that take a stab at piracy in movie houses. Basically, the article explains a bit about digital watermarking and how that can stop piracy.
I have all kinds of problems with the article. Here’s the first:
Hunt said several other techniques exist. “We’re not trying to describe specifically what is being done, because the effectiveness of these technologies is based on a lack of knowledge.”
Yup, because lack of knowledge about a system is such a great technique in defending a system in the digital age.
And if the projector is the thing responsible for watermarking the movie (visually or aurally), how, exactly, does the projector know where it is? If I run the projector at 2 am but tell it that it’s actually 7:30 pm and that I’m not in Austin, I’m in Spokane… how has this technology helped anything?
When content moves to digital the content creator loses control. End of story. So stop figuring out how to eke out control for the next few years and start thinking about what besides the content itself is valuable in the system of content-provider/content-consumer. Sheesh, people.