The technology, called CineFence, embeds date, time and place watermarks into the picture and sound track of digitally projected movies allowing moviemakers to trace camcorder-captured copies back to the cinema in which the illegal copying took place.
Philips says the forensic watermarks, though invisible to the audience, will remain detectable even when the recordings are compressed into formats such as VCD, DivX, and MPEG4, the most common distribution formats.
With piracy estimated to cost the industry around $3.5 billion per year, major studios will be hoping the technology goes someway to eradicating a problem it has so far had little success in tackling.