Foiling Movie Pirates with White Light.



Gregory Abowd and colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a prototype device to foil pirates who record movies in theaters using handheld cameras:

The prototype is able to locate the position of a digital camera, before overwhelming it with white light to render any recorded images useless.

The technology works by looking for the digital camera’s image sensor known as a charge-coupled device (CCD).

Once found, the system floods the CCD with white light from a projector to "blind" the camera.

"The biggest problem is making sure we don’t get false positives from, say, a large shiny earring," said Jay Summet, a research assistant at Georgia Tech who helped build the device.

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Posted on June 20, 2006 at 1:04 pm by Alex
Category: 1 Other Neat Things, Crime & Law

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3 comments to "Foiling Movie Pirates with White Light."

  • sixlocal
    June 20th, 2006 at 2:15 pm

    Time to buy video cameras with CMOS sensors!

  • NeonCat
    June 21st, 2006 at 1:31 am

    This is one of the more retarded ideas out there. I would say a tiny percentage of pirated films come from in the theater camcorders used by a ticket purchaser. I would bet most come from theater managers or projectionists, who will, after the theaters waste money on this project, have to go to the trouble of turning off the system before recording the film.

  • Mike
    June 21st, 2006 at 10:15 am

    I guarantee this will be so easy to defeat that it will be virtually useless. It’s worthless against SLR cameras, as they don’t uncover the CCD until just before the shot is taken. Plus, all sorts of shiny objects will confuse the heck out of the sensors. Nice try, guys, but no cigar!

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