Schemes to prevent movie piracy are released almost as often as new movies. The latest idea is to manipulate cinema projectors so that a movie cannot be filmed from the stalls using high-definition camcorders.
Electronic projectors use red, green and blue lasers to beam a colour image onto the big screen. The Corporation for Laser Optics Research in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, proposes to cut these laser signals for a few milliseconds, up to 50 times each second. This strobing effect is too fast for the human eye to see, but it clashes with the speed at which a camcorder captures pictures. So while a cinema audience will not notice the difference, people watching a pirated copy will see black bars rolling down the screen (US patent application 2005/0018717).
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MIT wants to revolutionise the way we shop online. Its idea is to start an internet shopping site that uses random-number generators to offer discounts to some customers, instead of offering everyone 10 per cent off, for instance. A few could even get their goods for free, but they will only find out whether they are lucky once they have committed to a purchase. (US 2005/0075928).
The entertainment industry knows there could be a good business in selling music videos and movies to people as they relax in Wi-Fi-enabled cafes, bars and lounges. But many don鈥檛 hang around long enough to download large files onto their laptops.
The solution, says Hewlett-Packard, is to split entertainment files into two parts. The larger, silent picture file comes free, and part of it is automatically downloaded every time a registered customer enters a Wi-Fi hotspot that connects them to the net. Once the video is complete, you can pay a fee and quickly download the much smaller audio file, (US 2005/0076057). A similar system could work in cellphones with lots of memory, the company says.
