For more than a decade, the UK movie industry makes a big deal out of announcing that audiences at the latest blockbuster movies will be surveilled by bored teenagers who get to LARP Buffalo Bill with greasy night-vision goggles that they'll use to catch camming pirates.
With the impending release of a new Bond and Hunger Games movie, the studios have once again sent out their spokesbots to tell us about their high-tech war on camming.
Meanwhile: box office returns are (once again) higher than ever, and most of the pirate editions are leaked by insiders from the studios.
But Big Content will keep on playing alcoholic dad, insisting that their problems are caused by us, punishing the people who pay for movies because they can't reach the people who don't, looking for their keys under the lightpost because it's too dark where they dropped them.
Kieron Sharp, director general of the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), said: "The bigger the film and the more anticipated it is, the higher-risk it is. We have staff on extra alert for that. James Bond is a big risk and we will be working with cinema operators and the distributors making sure we will keep that as tight as possible. We really don't want to see that recorded.
"They [cinema staff] are on alert to really drill down on who is in the auditorium and who might possibly be recording. They still do the sweeps around the auditoriums with the night vision glasses regardless of the film. But sometimes extra security is put in place for things like Bond."
Cinema staff to patrol screenings with night-vision goggles to combat movie piracy
[Ewan Palmer/International Business Times]
