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MovieLabs exists to foster the use of cutting-edge technology to facilitate the legal flow ofmotion pictures as consumer media. Our focus is on companies and universities developing technologies that impact the distribution and use of such media. Our strategic efforts and investments are distributed among three areas: (1) promoting legal use of media and deterring piracy, (2) facilitating the creation and adoption of novel means of digital distribution to maximize the output of legitimate motion pictures to consumers when, where and how they want see them, and (3) enhancing personal networking and connectivity for an improved consumer media experience.
Legal Use and Anti-Piracy
A balanced anti-piracy strategy deals with both the manifestations and root causes of piracy. Dealing with root causes is a matter of keeping good citizens honest (promoting legal use) by nurturing compelling, consumer-directed alternatives in distribution, purchasing, and use.
Reducing piracy is a matter of increasing the unpredictability and risks associated with it. Piracy has both production (i.e. camcording a movie in the theater, pressing and importing physical discs) and consumption components (playing back a bootlegged movie on a DVD player). MovieLabs seeks to identify and develop new anti-piracy technologies that address both stages in ways not covered by today's marketplace.
MovieLabs currently is focusing on technologies in the area of:
- Camcording. Novel ways to detect a camcorder in a theatre and secondly prevent the camcorder from recording the movie.
- Content Detection and Permissions. Technologies that not only can detect copyrighted materials on the internet in various forms including clips but also provide a framework for enabling targeted use.
Digital Distribution
From a technology perspective, digital distribution is really an amalgam of many core technologies, including:
- content management and merchandising technologies
- usage and rights access, licensing and activation technologies
- delivery and playback technologies
- interoperability of consumer media devices
- geographic localization and royalty technologies
- market intelligence technologies
A sustainable means of digital distribution must address each of these clusters in order to gain traction with consumers, enhance output of legitimate product and minimize the proliferation of digital piracy. MovieLabs seeks to cultivate the gamut of these critical technologies.
Consumer Networking & Connectivity
There is a common cornerstone for both effective digital distribution and a good consumer citizenship model for media use. It is the flexible use of media across varied, evolving consumer lifestyles. Issues surrounding networking, connectivity, portability, and the changing definitions of the digital home and the expanded "domicile" are central to this flexible use, and are a central focus at MovieLabs. MovieLabs is interested in technologies that provide an innovative way to determine the devices that are owned by an individual/domicile and finding simple ways to identify that a device or media is being used by the members of the domicile regardless of their physical location.
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