MovieLabs Challenge

Motion Pictures Laboratories, Inc. (MovieLabs) is a non-profit startup based in Palo Alto funded by the six major Hollywood studios to advance research in areas the movie industry regards as critical.

It’s announced an open challenge offering grant money to people who submit proposed solutions to a number of problems the industry feels need to be addressed.

Promising proposals will receive grants anywhere from $25,000 to $100,000 to continue research. Like CableLabs and DARPA, the only goal is to fund research — they won’t be in the business of bringing the solutions to market, and any successful invention will be the property of the inventor, Weinstein assured.

While there’s no mention of digital rights management on the MovieLabs site, the focus is primarily on anti-piracy efforts, including defeating and detecting camcorders in theaters and identifying copyrighted material , even if it’s been transformed (such as mashups or transcoding into alternate formats).