Latest anti-piracy tactic penalises paying cinema goers of Indiana Jones

According to discussion on the Film-Tech projectionist forum, reported on BoingBoing  and now covered in The Telegraph, the new Indiana Jones film is peppered with CAP codes - brief periods where the digital soundtrack shifts to analogue, which, depending on the setup of the cinema, can cause the sound to cut out, dip in volume, or make a loud click. The reason? A new piracy locating tool which gives each cinema their own uniquely corrupted version of the film and would allow Paramount to locate the source of any pirate copies that appeared online, provided of course the pirate hadn't cut together two soundtracks.

It's the ultimate in double think. Penalise people who aren't breaking the law, and degrade the one last piracy-proof area of film - the live experience - in the process. The online backlash has been significantl: one poster to BoingBoing pointed out that the only place to now experience the new Indiana Jones without interfering would be at home with a downloaded cleaned-up torrent. 

One wonders if anyone in the studios has read Cluetrain? The idea that by treating your customers as criminals or idiots will alienate them further and drive them away, while being honest and human-sounding ('if you stop paying for our films, you will kill off mid-budget independent film production, like these great films we know you like') may actually bring the audience onside. Cluetrain's ethos, summed up in the 95 Thesis, proves itself again and again online, and is something which the music industry has only just got to grips with.

Cluetrain thesis nos 36-39:

36 - Companies must ask themselves where their corporate cultures end.

37 - If their cultures end before the community begins, they will have no market.

38 - Human communities are based on discourse—on human speech about human concerns.

39 - The community of discourse is the market.