Audio technology company Dolby Laboratories has purchased the digital rights management company Cinea. Cinea consists of many of the engineers behind the Divx pay-per view DVDs sold by Circuit City in the late 90's.
Cinea is currently developing content-protection technology for digital movie theatres to prevent people from making cam copies of movies. The technology would be invisible to the naked eye, but introduce distortion on the video captured by a video camera.
Digital content delivery would give the movie studios much more control over the distribution of the movies than current film copies do. They could, for example, digitally limit the number of screenings per copy. Movie theatres haven't been too keen to switch to digital projection technology, which is alot more expensive than traditional film projectors. The projected life-span of a digital projector is also much shorter than that of a film projector.
Source:
News.com
Written by: Jari Ketola @ 24 Sep 2003 2:37