Hollywood goes nuts

From cinemablend, The Hollywood machine’s war against piracy has now officially reached lunatic levels. Their latest effort to combat piracy may, if true, be their most foolish yet. What’s their latest tactic? Degrade the quality of their product.

They did it on prints of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and if you saw it in a theater, as just about everyone did, then you may have noticed a few spots where the sound mysteriously drops out during the picture. Most of you who did notice those odd silences in the soundtrack probably assumed there was something wrong with your theaters equipment, silently cursed the half-assed projectionist who was undoubtedly slacking off on his work, and then promptly forgot about them before you walked out of the theater. But those silences may not have been accidents.

Late last week, the website Boing Boing posted an email from a reader, who reported spotting a sign in the window of the box office at his local theater, which in short, warned moviegoers that Paramount Pictures had intentionally silenced parts of the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull soundtrack. Their reason? They’re using the mute button as a method to stop movie pirates.

As far as I’ve been able to dig up crawling around the internet, these are called Audio Cap Codes, and it’s basically like Paramount creating it’s own bar coding system. Basically, each theater has its print of Indiana Jones 4 set for the sound to drop out at different places during the show, depending on the print. If someone makes a pirated copy from that print, then that pirated copy will have the sound drop out in the same spots, and thus Paramount knows in which theater the pirate copy was made.

My gut reaction is to assume this is nothing but a rumor. After all, how could any major Hollywood studio be so stupid? But maybe this really is happening. A little further research led me to the forums on a site called Film-Tech. There, the place is in an uproar over this, theater projectionists are gathering together there and getting seriously pissed off. As they should be. Worse, this may just be the tip of the iceberg. Apparently this is something they’ve been doing in Europe for several months. Now it’s coming to America.

Will this actually help fight piracy? I seriously doubt it. It will however, seriously piss off consumers. Forget about losing money from pirates, what about losing money from intentionally degrading your customer’s theater going experience? Quality viewing is really the only thing movie theaters have going for them. People show up at cinemas to see movies in the best way possible. Now, Paramount has chosen to throw that out the window. Instead you’ll pay ridiculous prices to see movies in the best format possible for stopping piracy. Frankly, I find this absolutely shocking. Note to Hollywood: Next time you start whining about falling ticket sales, remember this. It’s this attitude towards your customers that’s driving people away from the theater. You’re doing it to yourselves, you’re killing your consumers. Stop it. Believe it or not, there really are more important things than combating piracy.