The Big City

The film studios have been experimenting with technology that is supposed to detect when someone is using a camcorder to pirate a film. They’ve got this gadget that sits at the front of the cinema and looks around for camera lenses; if it sees one it takes a photo of the naughty pirate and calls the cops. Let’s leave aside the discussions about whether this will work or if it invades people’s privacy - the idea’s insane because it means that they are spending money on quality control for the pirate DVD industry.
At the moment if someone offers you a cheap DVD of the latest blockbuster you’re probably not going to buy it because you’ll assume it’s a crappy copy made with a camcorder with terrible sound quality and someone’s head in the way. If the film moguls could stamp out all pirate camcorders overnight then you’d know for sure that the pirate DVD you were being offered must have somehow been copied from the cinema release. Even if it was quite expensive the chances are that it would be decent quality.
So the studios are embarking on a plan that will increase the value of pirate DVDs and thus the profit margin for the pirates. Why are they doing this? Either I’m a genius for seeing the implications or they are seriously stupid for not. Or maybe they are a bunch of frustrated, bitter old men who can’t stand the idea of losing even the slightest bit of control over their ‘product’ and who don’t mind if that means that the people who work in their industry will lose out, in other words just the same as the record industry.