Japan Plans to Stop Movie Theater Piracy, With Light!

It appears as if Japan is sick and tired of their medium being pirated from them, so they decided that they are not going to sit idly while there money goes down the drain. Japan’s National Institute of Informatics requested that Sharp develop a way to ruin footage shot in movie theaters by placing infrared lights behind the screen. Infrared is invisible to the human eye, but visible to video recorders; thusly, by placing these lights behind the screen, the image should be washed out by bright light.

There are a couple giant flaws to this method of stopping pirates. First of all there are IR filters one can install on a camera to block IR light, though I’m unsure if this will affect the picture quality. Second, this will have to be installed in every theater, or it will be pointless because one could just go to another theater that does not have this installed and record it there. Finally, it has to be automatic, because the biggest pirates out there are the people who work in the theater, so if they can easily turn it off then it will be pointless. Also, large quantities of IR light have been known to make people blind.

Thanks Japan’s National Institute of Informatics, now I’m afraid of going to the movie theater.

[Via Gizmodo]