Ohio Also Passes Law Against Recording In Cinema

madmancarman writes "Following California's lead, Ohio has also passed a law making recording in a movie theatre a crime. A first offense would be punishable by six months in jail and up to $1,000 fine, which is lighter than the legislation introduced in Michigan that would bring up to 5 years in jail and a $250,000 fine. The most interesting quote concerns a study by AT&T Labs: 'Their conclusion: 77 percent of the films came from insider sources, either motion picture companies or theater employees taping from the projection booth.' I searched Ohio Gov. Bob Taft's press releases, but couldn't find any mention of it."

Comments

Waste of taxpayer resources

[Brahmastra]

A movie theater is a private place. They can throw out anyone they want. Why don't they use their own security personnel to throw out people with cameras? Why should tax payers foot the bill for what the movie theater can prevent without new laws?

Re:Waste of taxpayer resources

[AndroidCat]

With the percentage quoted for insider jobs, their own security personnel are probably in on it.

Why don't the politicians pass a law to really throw the book at bank-robbers who double-park during the robbery?

Re:Waste of taxpayer resources

[dirk]

It's also private property in a store, yet it is still illegal to shoplift. Why don't they just throw people out of the store and forget about it? The whole point of making something illegal is to discourage people from doing it. The only way to discourage someone from doing something is to have some kind of consequence. Getting thrown out of a movie theatre is not the kind of consequence that will stop people from doing something. Hell, it won;t even keep people quiet during a movie.

Re:Waste of taxpayer resources

[netsharc]

Shouldn't they be more afraid of the MPAA Mafia? "Ban all cameras, or you'll have to pay 50% more for each film reel we sell to you.", or worse, the MPAA can just stop giving them the licence/whatever to show the films.

To comment on the article, I don't understand why idiots even bother downloading cam-rips, the quality is so shit, you're not getting the real film: the angle is wrong, the color is usually gone, the audio can be good when ripped from source when it's an inside job (ha nowadays an MPAA cop sits in the projection booth, the article claims), but if they used the camcorder mic to record it, that's not exactly CD quality is it?

The only thing it's doing is helping the FUD for those who claim "Star Wars 2 was available on the internet in digital quality 30 minutes after its grand opening.". Digital quality? F'ing idiots.

Re:Waste of taxpayer resources

[AxelTorvalds]

What better way to make good bootlegs?

We should follow the military on this, you want a security clearence you know what they look for? They look at your financials like nothing else because that is how you're blackmailed or instable. Most of the spies that have damaged our country did it for the money, very few did it for ideology. You can probably have DUIs and drug arrests and become a secret service agent easier than having a some late bill payments on your credit.

What do you think goes throught the mind of a projector jockey making $6-$15 an hour showing the same shitty movies over and over and over. Shit, the managers of the places don't make crap. And it's not like the industry doesn't brag about its money, that's all you hear about movies in the news, "record breaking weekend," "record opening," "biggest budget ever." I mean in a recession, a movie and dinner date is what? $50 to $100 depending on if you have drinks with dinner, you think the people working at the theater can afford that with their disposable income?

If I was working at a theater, I could possibly start boot legging, you can buy a decent recorder cheap and then if you had the connections to sell the movies you could easily make a lot more than you'd ever get at a theater. That's just simple economics. You want loyalty you have to fork out some more money. I'm not saying it's right to do it or anything but you get what you pay for and the movie biz is extremely top heavy paying people 10s of millions of dollars regularly where the people taking your tickets and cleaning up the theaters and actually showing the movies make squat.

Jail???

[pragueexpat]

It seems that we are getting lazier and lazier with out punishments. Just throw everyone in the slammer for every infraction. Is jail really necessary for this crime? I think a much higher fine and/or serious community service would benefit society much more...

Re:Jail???

[willtsmith]

Agreed, lots of community service would probably serve the public better. Of course, the MPAA lobby isn't concerned with the public's interest, they are concerned with their own.

The biggest deterrent is probably to just confiscate a $500 camera. This would keep most amateurs from engaging in the activity.

The jail time should be reserved for those who sell bootleg tapes. That's a commercial endeavor. Simple fines won't discourage them. Thats just a cost of doing business for them.

Re:Jail???

[Simonetta]

I agree. We need fewer idiot laws that don't do anything to address the underlying cause of the problem, but throw people into corporate-owned private prisons for chickenshit offenses.

When I was reviewing films for a small magazine, I would often bring a small hand-held microcassette recorder to capture the thoughts and opinions that I had on a scene or sequence as it was playing on the screen. I would review the taped comments afterwards and type up a detailed and helpful movie review.

Now this is a felony?

Plus if theatres are going to put twenty minutes of commercials and psuedo-news about the entertainment industry before showing the movie that we have paid for, then we should certainly be allowed to bring our own entertainment devices like portable DVD players and laptops to make productive use of this time. And since all digital devices today record as easily as playback data, then doing this is now a felony?

Threatening people with serious jail time for engaging in an activity is not really the best way to encourage people to want to do that activity. So why are people that depend on having other people putting their butts into seats watching a movie threatening jail time to people who come to theatres to watch movies? Whether or not they want to record a movie that they're watching is really the concern of the viewer and the theatre owner.

If the theatre owner were more concerned about providing the optimum movie-going experience to his paying customers, he wouldn't have to worry about anyone wanting to duplicate the experience outside of his venue.

The core problem of Hollywood is not how people chose to consume its product, it is that amount of time and money that people are willing to spend to consume its product is beginning to fall while the price of producing this product continues to rise uncontrollably.

Passing horseshit laws about camcorders in theatres doesn't address this core issue, and therefore will do nothing to solve it.

Re:Jail???

[jonfelder]

Why was this modded as Insightful?

When I was reviewing films for a small magazine, I would often bring a small hand-held microcassette recorder to capture the thoughts and opinions that I had on a scene or sequence as it was playing on the screen. I would review the taped comments afterwards and type up a detailed and helpful movie review.

Now this is a felony?


No. Not unless you were -VIDEO- taping the movie. Using an audio recorder and recording your comments does not fit this description.

Plus if theatres are going to put twenty minutes of commercials and psuedo-news about the entertainment industry before showing the movie that we have paid for, then we should certainly be allowed to bring our own entertainment devices like portable DVD players and laptops to make productive use of this time. And since all digital devices today record as easily as playback data, then doing this is now a felony?

Not unless you use the devices to record the movie.


If the theatre owner were more concerned about providing the optimum movie-going experience to his paying customers, he wouldn't have to worry about anyone wanting to duplicate the experience outside of his venue.

Why's that? People often sell these bootleg copies. Furthermore there are always people out there willing to get something for nothing or next to nothing. How can a theatre owner compete with someone selling bootleg copies for $1.00 a piece? These people are already willing to watch a crappy camera rip. I don't see how the theatre experience is really relevant at this point.

The core problem of Hollywood is not how people chose to consume its product, it is that amount of time and money that people are willing to spend to consume its product is beginning to fall while the price of producing this product continues to rise uncontrollably.

Not true. The problem is, is that technology has made better and better quality rips (they still suck though) easy to do. Cameras have gotten much smaller, cheaper, and now they are digital making distribution a lot easier. It will always cost less for someone to video a movie than to produce it. Hence the cost for the bootlegs will always be less. As technology gets better the bootlegs will get better. As you know there will always be people willing to pay for an inferior product if it's considerably less.

Passing horseshit laws about camcorders in theatres doesn't address this core issue, and therefore will do nothing to solve it.

Ah, finally a somewhat true statement. Since according to the MPAA 77% of the bootleg copies are insider jobs, this will do nothing. However one thing it does do is take a portion of the piracy out of the theatre's control. Before the theatre had no incentive to kick people out for video taping movies. Now the police do it. I believe the punishment is crazy. I think confiscating the tape and maybe the camera would be much more reasonable. Reserve jail time for the people found selling the bootlegs. What's really nuts is that the punishment for doing this is worse than the one for a first offense DUI.

This will stop the 53 people...

[gilrain]

...who haven't figured out that you can get high quality DVD rips earlier and more reliably. This seems to be yet another solution in need of a problem.

Over here, over here

[heironymouscoward]

Curiously, when "Master and Commander" came out in Belgium a month or so ago, it was proceeded by a bold notice that anyone caught filming in the cinema would be hunted down, skinned alive, and thrown naked and bleeding to the dogs. And their film and camera would be confiscated and maybe kept for like a week or so.

The hordes of surreptitious filmers immediately ran out of the cinema, where they were aprehended by the local branch of the MPAA.

Not. I have never seen anyone filming in a theater, and the few pirate films I've seen that were made this way were incredibly unwatchable ("cough cough", shadows walking in front of the film, noises of coke being slurped and people making out in row 2.)

I mean... does this actually present a threat to the movie industry?

Surely a balanced law would also mandate prison for people who make movies like Matrix 2 and 3? This kind of crap product is a far greater threat to cinema revenues than pirates can ever be.

Re:Over here, over here

[tkrotchko]

"I mean... does this actually present a threat to the movie industry?"

No, but I think its because the MPAA (and RIAA to the same extent) are looking to shift blame away from certain facts.

People filming in the theater is so absurd that you'd have to be pretty hard pressed for entertainment to watch it.

The real trouble is coming from people ripping films distributed on DVD (I seem to remember an article on the Washington Post about this a few months ago). The trouble is, they won't do anything about the actual source of the leaks, so they blame their own customers.

Same with the RIAA...the big source of problem is organized crime making illegal copies by the thousands and millions. But those guys have guns and will kill you if you screw with them. Catching 12 year-old brittany is safer and makes better headlines and makes it look like they're doing something for their shareholders.

Its all a game, and the only ones fooled seem to be our congressmen and women.

Dont they use DVD Screeners?

[gotpaint32]

As far as I've seen recently, the majority of bootleg movies didn't come from a videotaped recording, but rather from award screener dvds instead. This law should have came in effect back in the hayday of bootleg VHSs when bootleggers relied on taping of the bigscreen. Back in the day you defintitely knew it was recorded in a theater, you could even hear babies crying in the background at times.

Re:This is news?

[bsdfish]

Why does something have to be wrong to be news? Some people may like this law, others may not, but it's certainly newsworthy as it's one of the first state laws of its kind, and the relative laxness of its penalties are also notable.

Interesting how early pirates get in the game

[Fortunato_NC]

For example, the pirated version of The Hulk I saw (on a co-worker's laptop, Mr. MPAA Thug) was an early cut, with incomplete special effects and crappy audio. With movies like Cold Mountain and others being shot digitally and edited in Final Cut Pro, with DVD dailies being mastered regularly, it's concievable that the pirates will be soon beat the studios to post-production! Instead of the Special Edition Director's Cut, we could be downloading the Sp3c1@l Ub3r 1337 H@c|3r's Cut.

And of course, who wouldn't want to see Episode III: The Non-Crappy Version, complete with a Star Wars Kid cameo added by the pirate who actually edited together the flick...

The free market solved this years ago.

[dada21]

Here's a useless law. Government is not needed in this case (as in most new laws, they are not relevant).

If a theater wants to show new movies, they should already have rules about this. Because a theater is private property, they should be able to ban anything they want (free speech, weapons, anything). If they want to ban recording cameras, they're free to.

Maybe a theater may want to ALLOW cameras. In this case, the major movie production companies will probably decide not to show movies there. Smaller companies may want the cult-like home recorded movies and may possibly allow it. The free market has provided this solution already, and government now will mandate one more way for private movie theater owners to run their business.

We are no longer free, we are no longer capitalist. We live in a mercantilist system of oppressive regulation, taxes, and tariffs. None of this system helps the average citizen.

Jail for this?

[WhitehatSystems.com]

Its amazing that our society now days the answer for any violation of law is "Throw them in Jail" seems for minor infractions you get more time then you do for harsh infractions.. Why should the tax payer pay for the Movie company's property rights to be protected? Hrm..

Screeners == digital

[freeweed]

The only thing it's doing is helping the FUD for those who claim "Star Wars 2 was available on the internet in digital quality 30 minutes after its grand opening.". Digital quality?

Actually, while I can't comment on Star Wars 2 specifically, many, if not most movies are in fact available online when the movie premieres, in full digital quality.

No one bothers with cams anymore, because screeners get leaked like there's no tomorrow. These are DVD copies of the final movie sent out for reviews, etc. Someone copies it, uploads to usenet/kazaa, and bam! I've seen many movies as of late that are in fact available days and weeks before they hit the theatre.

Cams are so 1999. And laws like this are absolutely pointless (and assinine), as most movie trading is done using screeners anyway.