The efforts are paying off nicely though. The night vision goggles helped to spot Batman and Bond pirates and a Virgina teenager was busted a while back for recording a few seconds of the movie Transformers on her cell-phone. The only thing she wanted to do was show it to her 13 year old brother, however, the alert theater staff called in the police and the girl was arrested.

With one of the latest inventions by Prof. Babaguchi and colleagues, catching cammers might become even easier. While video-based watermarks are already used in theaters in order to determine which screen the movie was recorded from, new technology makes it possible to watermark the audio of films too.

The audio watermarks go much further though, as they can pinpoint almost the exact location that the pirate was in when he recorded the movie. This so called spread-spectrum audio watermarking does not spoil the subjective acoustic quality and is fairly accurate in estimating where the offender was seated.

With a mean estimation error of only 44 centimeters, it might be a seat off every now and then, but those are worries for later. To use the technology successfully, however, the theater has to keep a database with info on the identity and seating position of each member of the public so the offenders can be handed over to the police afterwards.

These administrative tasks can of course take place while waiting in line for the metal-detector, and might even come in handy to contact someone who forgot to pick up his phone after the movie ended. The movie-goers can still enjoy a great night out if they pass all the nice security checks and they wont be bothered by any buzzing camcorders anymore.

Everyone wins really.

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This week MPAA chairman Dan Glickman is visiting the UK to talk to UK film minister Margaret Hodge, advisors to the UK prime minister Gordon Brown, and representatives from the UK Film Council. Glickman will probably sum up the familiar made-up statistics we read in every MPAA press release to convince the lawmakers that pirates are in fact terrorists.

Crazy or not, unfortunately it seems like their approach is working. Theater owners slowly start to alienate their customers and go as fas as using metal detectors and night-vision goggles to track down movie cammers. Everyone could be a pirate these days and theater employees are trained and rewarded up to $500 for catching pirates.

As a result, a Virgina teenager was busted for recording a few seconds of the movie “Transformers” on her cell-phone. The only thing she wanted to do was show it to her 13 year old brother, however, under a new Zero-Tolerance Policy, police responded to the call from Regal Cinemas who promptly arrested Sejas.

On a sidenote, Hollywood just had its best summer ever. In a response to this great news MPAA chairman Dan Glickman said “As Shakespeare said, ‘The play is the thing.’ As long as we offer good quality stories that people like and a comfortable place to see them, people will go to the movies.” A comfortable place? Right.

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The recording didn’t cause any losses to Regal Cinemas nor the producers of Transformers, but still Regal Cinemas decided to prosecute to make an example of her..

The Arlington County prosecutor, Richard Trodden, told a Wired blogger that Regal Cinema continued to press the case. “They were saying, ‘Could you get her to admit that it wasn’t right.’ They wanted to make sure the message gets out.”

Indeed, Sejas did later state, “I totally forgot that I was not allowed to do that. I did it without thinking clearly.

In a plea agreement, Sejas pleaded guilty and paid a $71 fine for making an Unlawful Audiovisual Recording of a Motion Picture, a misdemeanor that could have resulted in a fine of up to $2500 and a year in jail. The law was placed on the books in Virgina and 37 other states under pressure by the Motion Picture industry.

Neither Regal Cinemas nor the producers of Transformers stood to take a loss from Sejas’ sharing of a 20-second cell-phone quality clip. The reason it did not occur to Sejas that she was doing something wrong is because she had no criminal intent! Note that Sejas was not charged with any copyright violation, as showing her brother a 20-second low-quality clip certainly would have fallen under Fair Use.

The MPAA decided years ago that copyright laws were not enough in their favor. Instead, the industry had to create new laws that avoided copyright altogether, wait for innocent victims like Sejas to stumble into them, and then make an example of them.

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Sejas and her boyfriend were promptly escorted out of the movie theater, still confused about what just happened. “I was crying, I’ve never been in trouble before.”, she later said in a response to the trip to the police station.

Of course Sejas had no intention to sell the 600 millisecond clip, she wasn’t even planning to put it on YouTube. The only thing she wanted to do was show it to her 13 year old brother, who was dying to see the movie himself. Unluckily theater owners just introduced their new zero-tolerance policy since everyone can be a pirate.

Kendrick Macdowell, a representative National Association of Theater Owners said in a response: “We cannot educate theater managers to be judges and juries in what is acceptable. Theater managers cannot distinguish between good and bad stealing.”

Good and bad stealing? Nuts!, the guy obviously has no clue what he’s talking about. If all theater owners treat their customers like this they will start to lose even more money than they already do now. And guess who they will be blaming? Right, Pirates.

Sejas will go to trial later this month for recording a motion picture without permission, and is facing up to a year in jail and a $2,500 fine. Seriously unbelievable.

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The MPAA claims that New York is a pirate movie haven and with a claimed 43% of all camcorded movies originating from the city, it was just a question of time before Major Bloomberg’s and the MPAA’s anti-piracy campaign – coupled with new legislation – claimed its first scalp.

According to reports, police descended on the American Theater on East Avenue in Parkchester, after warning theater workers in advance that they were about to conduct a sting to arrest a known movie ‘cammer‘ at a sneak preview of the new movie ‘Transformers’.

After waiting until the end of the screening on Monday night, Kalidou Diallo, 48, was surrounded by seven plain clothes officers, arrested and subsequently charged with the new anti-piracy misdemeanor. He had been allegedly filming or ‘camming’ the movie, utilizing a hidden camera and digital recorder.

The manager of the American Theater, Justin Hill, said that the authorities knew that his theater was the source of the ‘cams’. “The movie companies … knew it was coming from our theater,” he said. “We were taking heat for it because we weren’t catching anyone.”

Under the previous law, getting caught meant up to 15 days in jail and $250 fine. The new measures signed in May 1, makes ‘camming’ a misdemeanor offense, which means that Diallo is facing a possible 6 months in jail, accompanied by a $5,000 fine.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.