Coded Anti-Piracy
Coded Anti-Piracy, or CAP, is an anti-piracy technology used to circumvent the piracy of motion pictures, whether it be illegal duplication of motion picture prints, or movies illegally duplicated by a moviegoer recording a movie being projected on-screen, with a camcorder.
CAP is in the form of either a code printed on the sprocket edge of a motion picture print, or a multi-dot pattern that is printed in a couple of frames in various segments of a film print of a theatrically exhibited motion picture. This code is referred to as a CAP code.
There are two styles of CAP code. The original style of CAP code, developed in 1982 by Eastman Kodak along with the Motion Picture Association of America, is a series of dots printed along the edge of the film where the sprocket holes are.
A newer, and more common variation, has been developed by Deluxe Laboratories, and is placed directly in frames of a film print. Deluxe's version has been given the pejorative name of "crap code" by filmgoers, due to it's quite intrusive nature when viewing.
The dots are added to the print before it it sent to a theater, and the dots are usually in a pattern, to identify the particular theater that is playing the print of a movie and/or distributor of the print.
The Deluxe Laboratories variation of CAP are dots are usually placed on bright areas of a film frame, so they can be easier identified, and are a reddish-brown color. They are not to be confused with cue marks, aka "cigarette burns", which is either a black or white circle (or ring) in usually the upper right-hand corner of the frame, used to cue the projectionist that a particular reel of a movie is ending, as most movies come to theaters on several reels of film.
The original incarnation of CAP developed by Kodak is a technology for watermarking film prints to trace copies of a print, whether legitimate or pirated, to its original. The more-commonplace version developed by Deluxe was developed to thwart film piracy from theatergoers with camcorders, or prints that have been illicitly telecined to videotape or DVD.