Fight Piracy by silencing part of a movie ?

Martin Brinkmann
May 28, 2008
Updated • Nov 30, 2012
File Sharing, Music and Video
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Paramount apparently decided that it would be a great idea to deter and track piracy by silencing random parts of the movie Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. This seems to be a sort of watermarking technique to be able to identify the cinema the copy of the movie was mad, that is if the guys who copy the movie are using the same sound source and not another one.

This is another classic case where the industry is punishing their legit customers and not the ones who copy and download the media. It's the same case with copy protections and DRM. The only ones who have to cope with those things are the customers who purchase the products, never heard of any copy protections or DRM in movies, games or music that were available on P2P networks. Those come free of those repressive technologies.

The commenters at Boing-Boing mentioned about 3-6 random sound drops for a few seconds. Now that would really make me angry and I would definitely ask for a refund on my way out. What's their next ingenious move, blank out a few scenes ? The cinemas themselves do not seem to have a say in the matter. I would bet that the movie that is available on P2P networks does not have those sound gaps. Wanna bet ?

 

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Comments

  1. Angelo R. said on May 29, 2008 at 9:07 pm
    Reply

    @darkkosmos although, if you’ve donwloaded the movie, chances are you don’t really care too much about if it’s really high quality or not.

  2. darkkosmos said on May 29, 2008 at 6:29 pm
    Reply

    It’s very crude but I guess it works if your in front a PC with the sound cutting every second :)

  3. prs said on May 29, 2008 at 4:35 pm
    Reply

    Bad move…only reason people are still going to the movies is because of the quality and experience. When you mess up the sound or something, that ruins the experience…If this really goes down, forget paying for movies.

    I’ll stick to p2p/scene which offers better quality for free.

  4. coco said on May 29, 2008 at 12:30 pm
    Reply

    i tink there is no use. ripper have their way to get around easily.

  5. Wokkel said on May 29, 2008 at 10:10 am
    Reply

    A lot of crap movies are shown in cinema’s today.
    It would be better to make good movies that are worthwild to look at in cinema’s
    They’re pushing cinema’s to use illegal copies themselves…

  6. Angelo R. said on May 29, 2008 at 1:50 am
    Reply

    Already I’ve seen a version of this where random portions of a dvd (Alien vs. Predator Requiem) have been suddenly turned to black and white. It really did bother me. What made it worse was the fact that I rented it from my local blockbuster (yes I still rent movies if I really want to see them). I took it back and complained about it, apparently it was a “anti-copy” feature so that those who ripped the dvd would get random black and white frames. These lasted a couple minutes.

    Once I got home of course, I downloaded a version of it. It was essentially perfect, without the black and white scenes. The only problem was the resolution, which I can live with since I watched it on my laptop.

  7. Geoff said on May 28, 2008 at 11:45 pm
    Reply

    It doesn’t, one of the many decisions made around this movie that were idiotic.

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