"Anti-Piracy in Cinemas"

Today we’re going to talk about… my presentation, we’re going to talk about anti-piracy in the cinema. This is not about internet uploads and such, this is about how we look at anti-piracy on the first release.

This is not necessarily where it starts. It may even start pre-first release, on the piracy side. That’s fairly under control today, as studios would tell you. First release is really where we’re focused right now.

I try to, to get people to connect to what the problem, I really like to show what the threat really is. Professionals, we’re not talking about amateurs here. Well, there are amateurs in this business, but we have professionals. This is a… with real rigs. So, they strap cameras to themselves. They find ways to get quality copies. Good cameras. Ways that are difficult to detect.

This picture is a real photo inside the theater. It’s taken with the technology that I’ll talk about in a little bit called Pirate Eye. You can see where that camera is hidden, it’s very difficult to spot.

This was taken in Puerto Rico, this was this fellows last camera. He had been responsible for a lot of piracy. Known as Pito the Pirate. He didn’t think he’d get detected on this round and he’s in jail now.

I don’t know. This was in the last 9 months.

These people that you just saw are not the top dogs in this business, on the anti piracy side. It’s really, they are the bottom line workers. Worker bees are actually hired to go out and actually take these… pirate the copies from in the theaters. These folks are organized by large rings. Large piracy rings. And, who’s money has been made largely on the hard good side. It was pointed out with Pam’s discussion earlier, there’s not a lot of money in download. There’s a lot of money in hard good delivery. It’s so good of a business that it’s more lucrative then selling drugs. As you can see by the numbers here, more profitable then, or as profitable as cocaine, more profitable then heroin.

The upside of it is that there’s no down side. You don’t get the penalties that you do by handling drugs. So, it’s quite an interesting business to be in.

Piracy doesn’t just happen with professionals here. We have agile piracy going on. Well, these are not professional pirates. This was taken again with this technology that I’ll talk about. This was in an AMC Theater in San Diego a few months back.

Casual piracy is something that’s starting to be looked at because that kind of piracy leads to clips on social networking sites, things get shared around with your friends, much more informally. And, on a large scale basis, that starts to have an impact. So, some studios are actively taking looks at how do they address casual piracy down the road?

Now, if you’re a content owner, you have some choices. This is the kind of strategy that content owners have to look at. First, you need to enact laws. You need to be sure that you’re covered on the legal side. That might sound simple, but it’s generally only illegal in English speaking countries right now. I think the French have taken some steps on anti piracy. Possibly the Germans. But, anti piracy is not necessarily illegal in a good part of the world. Excuse me, I said anti piracy, piracy is not illegal in a good part of the world. That’s an issue that has to get dealt with. It is being dealt with but it’s where a lot of energy goes today in just trying to enact laws.

Once you enact laws, then you have to educate your law enforcement side that this is illegal. SO, that might take a year or two before you really start getting that effort out. In the United States where our laws say that piracy is illegal; theater owners and managers are still encouraged to carry copies of the law with them, so that they have to call a law enforcement official in, they can show them that its within his duty to arrest this person. So, there’s a lot of challenges just in enacting laws.

How we find pirates is through tracking theft. So, you’ll hear about watermarking and such, and I think we have a talk this afternoon on watermarking. It’s an extremely important area. Marking the content is actively performed today. You mark film content before distribution and that content gets marked individually. So, prints that appear at a particular location are unique and if the piracy occurs at that location, it can then be traced and say – oh, that’s where it took place.

Now, the usefulness of this is that it helps law enforcement officials understand the patterns of piracy that took place. Through this kind of activity, by tracing piracy, one can then determine the next steps. Where this pirate might hit next. It used to be that patterns of piracy would have to take place just within a city. Now they start taking place across regions of the country and you can start predicting where the next hit might take place.

The actual active enforcement now occurs with organization such as the MPAA. There’s a very significant part of the MPAA is focused on enforcement activities. They’re not looking for trying to protect one particular movie, they’re looking for the hard core criminals who are responsible for camcorder theft. They rely on the marks. They rely on tracking those marks. Then they rely on the predictions for where that piracy takes place. This is a large department under Mike Robinson at the MPAA. Mike himself comes out of law enforcement. A good part of his staff, which is from places around the country come out of the law enforcement area. This is a really highly professional group that is out looking for pirates.

Another opportunity or a strategy in anti piracy is to protect the content. That’s where you’re not necessarily looking for a particular pirate, you’re just looking for ways to foil piracy. Protection is a different kind of strategy and I’ll talk a little bit about that.

If you’re a content owner, one of your strategies available is to simply do nothing. This is sad but true, this is one of the thing that you might have to consider when your budgets are out. All of these things go against a budget on distribution. So, this is a consideration if you’re a content owner. Just to do absolutely nothing in regards to anti piracy efforts.

If you’re a theater, you have some challenges. If you’re trying to find… if you should happen to learn that there’s somebody in your theater who has a camcorder, it can be challenging. Last December, we had a particular case occur where, in a movie code in Chicago, one of the opportunities that this movie theater offers to parents is to rent the theater for birthday parties. So, this family held a birthday party and a young woman was there, I think it was her niece, was filming this event, or camcording this event on her digital camcorder. She happen to catch part of the process… the advantage of doing this in a movie theater is that everybody gets to see the movie after the party. So, this woman happened to catch a few minutes of the movie on her camcorder. Well, part of the policy of the theater is that the take a look at the camcorder and make sure that there’s no movie content on it. Their policy said that if there was movie content on the camcorder that they call the cops. The cops came, the police came. They knew that it was there duty to arrest this person because the law said that they needed to enforce those laws. This woman ended up for a couple nights in jail and this was just a person who was trying to capture her niece on video during her birthday party. She spent a couple of nights in jail. It actually took the movie director to come out and drop charges against her.

This is… I point this out as saying – this was everybody… it’s that everybody in the path of this unfortunate action did their job. That’s one of the challenges that we have actually in anti piracy efforts is that it doesn’t always lead to the desired consequence. So, there’s a lot of challenges in policy and [inaudible 11:00]

On the protection side which is where one would say is a different way to go instead of doing enforcement which is the business of calling law enforcement officials, coming out and arresting somebody. Another way of dealing with anti piracy is to simply say I’ll find ways to foil the pirate. So, in a sense, this is really the Holy Grail of anti piracy efforts is to find ways to jamb or deface the camcording while it’s in process so that the content that’s taken or stolen is essentially useless and not highly marketable.

So, there’s a science to this. There’s lots of effort. No shortage of effort has gone into this at all. There’s many patents around how to go into the jamming, enact jamming of camcorders. They generally fall into these three categories that I show here. One’s called Temporal, where the technique is to project the image in ways so that the frame rate is changing. Instead of having a steady frame rate, the frame rate will change. With digital projection those kinds of techniques are possible. What it does with the camcorders is it will start getting roll bars going through the copy because it can’t lock into the frame rate and read what their casting. So, that creates a defacing for instance, of the camcording.

A spatial temporal technique combines that with the ability to throw in a graphic or a text so that as the camcorder is getting… camcording is getting foiled through some shifting of frame rates or something, something else, another mark is being inserted with it in order to upset or deface that image.

Then, what’s called metomeric is when you try and interfere trhough some other invisible type of electro magnetic radiation. So, the classic case in that is where you bring in infrared light. You flood the auditorium with infrared light, that messes up the camcorder’s ability to… the auto focus element and the light gathering ability of the camera is adjusted automatically. By looking at the light, infrared light, might very well upset that.

Now, that might be true with an older camcorder. A new camcorder for instance, might have an infrared filter in it. So, that becomes part of our problems here in trying to create jamming techniques, is that this is a very high bar to reach. There’s a lot of problems in trying to create something that works on every camera and all the time.

So, I liken this to some of the work that took place about 10 years, 9 or 10 years back in digital cinema. We were looking for an ideal compression on digital cinema. This was related to image quality. We have the same problems here. We’re looking for image quality, we don’t want to impact the quality of image that we see as theater goers, but we want to mess up the camcording. So, it’s quite a challenging thing.

What we’ve found on the… why I bring up the compression side is that… there are all these different techniques in the compression world. So, we looked at all of these techniques to see which one could produce visually lossless, have images at very low bandwidths. What we found is that by the time we got to visually lossless, they were all at the same bandwidth. They all had to reach the same bar in order to show that they were visually lossless. That plateau, it just happened to be uniform. It was one of the most astonishing finds, I think that every came out of that whole study.

It’s a similar kind of problem in jamming. The bar, no matter what technique we try, by the time we reach this bar of not having noticeable jamming, or not having a noticeable impact on the image that’s the audience is looking at, we… and at the same time, we have an unnoticeable element in the audience, but we have a very noticeable element going on inside the camcorder. By the time you create that dynamic, on the image capture, you’ve created something that’s become visible in the auditorium.

So, regardless of technique, this is what has been found. This is through a lot of research by a couple of companies here in town. Some of it’s been funded through movie labs which was a joint effort of the studios to cover and fund camcording and anti theft activities.

So, this jamming, I show the picture here of… it’s the Holy Grail. It’s a lot of money to be made if somebody could come up with a good anti jamming, good anti piracy technique through jamming because it creates a non-invasive technique that would stop camcording in the theaters. We have not really found that yet. It’s a sorry but true statement there.

There’s other solutions that are tried today in the theater space. You’ll see, particularly this takes place on pre-release screening, the use of night vision goggles. You’ll see somebody inside each corner of the theater or maybe in just one corner of the theater, a guard in place, have some goggles on and just be looking. As you saw from those earlier pictures, that poor guy is looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s fairly difficult to stop a camcorder, just with night vision goggles. It’s very easy to spot somebody who is doing this. It’s very difficult to spot somebody who’s got it hidden under their arms. Who’s got some other technique. Hidden under coats, or whatever technique their using to cloak the camera. Very hard to find that camera.

There are other techniques that have been tried as well. In the UK a company introduced a way of identifying cameras through electro magnetic signatures. Each camera has some kind of, gives off some sort of electro magnetic signature, and it’s a very clever idea, except it requires an infinitely large database. You’d have to keep cataloging all of these cameras as they come out. Naturally, when you put these things to work… what kills these technologies is when somebody puts it to work and the camcording still takes place. I believe that took place with that particular technique.

So, there has been a technique that has worked and that’s simply not jamming, but discovering the camcorder. Finding the camcorder in the audience. So, this technique has been brought to us by the same people that brought Sniper Skill Protection Technology into the world. I think it was originally developed by Apagen, a company down in San Diego. It is a very clever technology for identifying lenses. Not lenses as glasses, not other kinds of glasses or reflective objects that might be in the auditorium, but it actually looks for a particular pattern of reflections that are unique inside of a camera lens. This technique has actually been shown to work. It works very well. The pictures that you saw earlier and the captures that took place were all based upon the use of this technology.

Movie Labs, this organization that I described earlier that has been very responsible in funding, finding and funding these kind of activities, these kind of technology developments; they spent a lot of money behind this one. And, it has blossomed into a… from what looked like a rocket science project 5-6 years ago, into something that now looks like a real commercial product and getting down to the commercial product effort now.

And, enough units have been built that the MPAA has put them to work. When you’re in enforcement activities as I pointed out early… part of the job of enforcement activities is that you find those patterns. You discover those patterns of where piracy is taking place. You are looking for where the next… you’re predicting where the next step will be. You want to put your people out there. But, if your only tool is night vision goggles its tough.

Put something like this into place, a picture of it… put something like this into place, you find them. So, this has been… this is actively going on today. There’s a number of these units built. This is being called tactical ways, not fixed installments but what I would call tactical employment.

What I like to say is that while some technologies require smoke and mirrors, this one is only mirrors. You see the mirrors on this one that are used to scan audiences and do the things this technology does.

On this particular version of it that you see here, sitting on a stand, this is what you will see in a movie theater. They’ll install it below the screen, you might not notice it going into the theater. You might not actually see it. But, in where they have this predicative… or predicting that a piracy may take place, or where patterns of activity shows that piracy tends to take place in one particular location, they’ll install these and [tape cut out].

What this technology can do and how this works is… it’s still a little interactive. It does a lot of work on it’s own on just determining a real lens. So, if you have a camera and it’s pointed at the screen, this technology will find you. It doesn’t matter how you cloaked it, if it’s capturing that screen, it will find you. It will take your picture. It will show where you’re located. And, it can send an email to the theater employees… this is what the emails look like. It’s actually taken from a real email and this is from a real capture. I think the guy was stealing the Michael Jackson movie. Fairly recent. This is the kind of information that the employee gets. So now they know, this is where we get back to interaction. The employee has to go into the theater, they know the generally area of where this person is. You can see on the top map, that’s a seating area and the red spot says – this is where you’re going to find the guy. So, they can go in, look for this person who looks like this picture and ask them to step out of the theater.

So, that goes back to those policy challenges and such that theater owners face, but this is the only technique that’s been found to actually work to find pirates today. So, this technique is probably still a year or two away from actually getting exploited widely into theaters. There’s still work to be done to bring the cost down to a point where it could be scaled out widely, but there’s a lot of work going on towards that direction and bringing it out. There may be day where we see these things mounted above screens on first release auditoriums, for instance. Just looking for pirates.

So, just to wrap up here. The three things that I really wanted to get across was that the actual effort that a content owner has to put in depends on their strategies and how they’re going to apply their budget. So, they had the choices of enforcement activities or protection activities, doing nothing. The studio content owner might put all their efforts directed towards just enacting laws in other countries, just as a first step. But, this is the kind of thing that one has to make a choice of when you are a studio.

On the jamming side, while it’s the most ideal way we could sit and find and to stop camcorder piracy, it is a very tough thing to do it. An ideal technique has not been found yet. Camcorder detection is really the only thing that we’ve found that’s worked and that’s the Pirate Eye technology I just showed.