New Technology Blocks Digital Cameras

You’ve heard of cell phone blockers in movie theatres – devices that jam the signals so they can’t ring  during the flick?

Now meet the digital camera blocker. It’s the latest idea from a group of researchers based at the Georgia Tech College of Computing and its creators believe it has a good financial future.

Why would anyone want to block a digital camera? The answer centres around piracy, the practice some bootleggers have of taking a camera into a theatre and literally taping a movie off a screen, making copies and selling the less than perfect recreations on the street.

The device incorporates a camera of its own, a computer and other equipment to locate the sensors used in digital cameras. When it detects a picture is being taken, it aims a thin beam of visible white light directly into the lens, effectively blinding the machine and rendering the video unusable.

“Movie piracy is a $3 billion-a-year problem,” researcher James Clawson explains. “If someone videotapes a movie in a theatre and then puts it up on the web that night or burns half a million copies to sell on the street – then the movie industry has lost a lot of.revenue.”

The makers believe there are other uses as well, although some of them won’t sit well with consumers.

Lead researcher George Abowd suggests his blinding technology could be used in shopping malls, to prevent people from taking pictures of their kids with Santa, so the corporation that runs that concession can do the photography – and charge for it.

He admits there’s still some more work to be done to prefect his creation.

“We’re at a point right now where the prototype we have developed could lead to products for markets that have a small, critical area to protect,” he theorizes. “Then we’re also looking to do additional research that could increase the protected area for one of our more interesting clients, the motion picture industry.”

Those behind the idea agree it’s not yet exact – something like a glittering earring could fool the machine into sending out the light. But they’re working on it so that one day soon it might be picture perfect.

Although if it works, that’s the only picture that would be.

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