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A Year In Prison For a 20-Second Film Clip?
PizzaFace writes "It's Jhannet's 19th birthday, so her boyfriend borrows a camcorder to memorialize the occasion, and they head to the mall. They goof around, recording each other in the food court, then decide to catch the Transformers matinee, which started a few minutes earlier. During a big action scene, Jhannet takes the camcorder and records a 20-second clip to show her little brother. A few minutes later, cops who were called by the manager come in with flashlights, arrest Jhannet, confiscate the camcorder, and, at the behest of Regal Cinemas, charge her with film piracy. 'I was terrified,' said Jhannet. 'I was crying. I've never been in trouble before.' If convicted, she could be sentenced to a year in prison and a $2,500 fine. The police say they lack discretion because Regal Cinemas chose to prosecute: 'They were the victim in this case, and they felt strongly enough about it.' The National Association of Theater Owners supports Regal's 'zero-tolerance' prosecution standard: 'We cannot educate theater managers to be judges and juries in what is acceptable. Theater managers cannot distinguish between good and bad stealing.'"
If videotaping in a movie theater is illegal, and if that is what occurred in this instance - and indeed, the person in question admits just that - then why is this acceptable? Why should the theater decide between "good and bad stealing"?
Isn't that for a judge and jury to decide?
Would it be acceptable to record twenty seconds? Two minutes? Twenty minutes? The entire movie?
(Believe it or not, there actually could be an answer here..."fair use" does have specific provisions for how long clips can be, what they can be used for, and so on.)
I realize most here on slashdot probably won't agree with this, and think that "copyright", or at least its current form in the US, which is the basis for prohibiting things like recording in movie theaters, ought to be done away with completely.
But if any claim on content ownership is supportable and valid in any legal framework, mustn't there necessarily be mechanisms to enforce related laws and prohibit its violation? And when there is a violation, and an agent that is party to the violation chooses to press charges for what may be the violation of a local, state, or federal statute in various circumstances, shouldn't a judge and jury be the ones to decide the outcome?
The article says:
"We cannot educate theater managers to be judges and juries in what is acceptable," he said. "Theater managers cannot distinguish between good and bad stealing."
Macdowell said the trade association, which represents 28,000 screens nationwide, realizes there is a difference between "egregious acts of stealing our movies and more innocent ones." But he said that distinction needed to be made in court rather than by theater managers.
Not everyone agrees.
And then comes the predictable reply:
"The movie industry needs to recognize that their audience isn't the enemy," said Cindy Cohn, general counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit group that specializes in digital rights issues. "They need to stop treating their fans like criminals. . . . What they're doing is extremely unreasonable, coming down on this poor girl who was actually trying to promote their movie."
The "your customers aren't the enemy" reply.
But you can easily argue that recording the entire movie and posting it on a torrent site also "promotes" the movie. Or that posting TV shows not available in certain markets "promote" the TV show. In fact, many make just that argument. Indeed, you can find many examples of how online "piracy" has increased or enhanced loyalty to various music, television shows, and so on.
The only problem is, that's not your decision to make. That's the content owner's decision.
The only way to allow the behavior in this particular instance is to make recording movies in theaters legal, or have ridiculous provisions like time limits on number of seconds or minutes that can "legally" be recorded, that theaters would then have to enforce.
Where do you draw the line?
Copyright may not be perfect, and trade and industry groups may vigorously try to protect content. But that is their right under the current legal framework, and absurd examples don't really serve any function in having any real change, other than being able to be used as a rallying cry for people who DO fundamentally believe that we should be able to record entire movies in movie theaters, or entire TV shows, or entire DVDs, and post them to torrent sites, with no fear of retribution.
And I don't think either extreme makes sense.
Why aren't these looked at on a case by case basis... I guarantee this prosecution will result in Regal Cinemas losing much more than the $2,500 if they win. Again, just another example where blindless due to greed creates the desire to sue your customers.
Go up to their ticket office. Ask to see the manager. Cite this case. Tell them you're going to take your business elsewhere. Write a letter to the corporate headquarters as well.
By itself, no result.
100,000 times repeated, different story.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Sorry for what I'm about to say...
Stupid people will do stupid things. She shouldn't have done that. If this is going to be a criminal case, then hopefully she will be let off easy with community service or something. Hopefully there is no mandatory minimum sentence.
he should've known what he was getting into. Yes, he MIGHT be just copying a 20-sec clip... but he could have copied the whole movie and uploaded it to the internet where thousands of people could have downloaded it.
The most ironic part of this tragedy is that it was their naiveness (i.e. innocence) that resulted into the guy being treated as an evil criminal, while an expert pirate would've been much more careful.
A sad but true statement: Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
The length of the slip is one of the key points in deciding whether it's fair use or not.
1) If it was only a 20 second clip, they're covered by fair use provisions.
2) No judge is going to give her a year in prison, even if it was just the first 20 seconds before she got caught
3) Teenagers do dumb things, none of us are any different, and learning to deal with the consequences is part of growing up. Next time, I'm sure she'll be much more sneaky and effective in her attempts at piracy, and I'm sure other teenagers will learn from this example and so will be too.
4) That's ONE teenager with a video camera down, and several hundred thousand, plus the legions of others in less corporately controlled countries to go. Good job, MPAA, you'll have this thing nipped in the bud in no time.
It just goes to show that "Zero Tolerance" might as well be a synonym for "Zero Intelligence."
Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
Back in '39 when I was in the Marines, shop owners and schools and others had leeway and a little bit of good sense. If a kid swiped something in a store, the store owner could call the police, call the kid's parents, or give the kid a bit of a bad time to work off paying for the item or whatever seemed appropriate for the situation. Schools could show some good sense as well; but now-a-days, schools go stark staring berserk when a kid brings in a paring knife in to eat an orange, or the school cops use Tasers on 12-year olds having a tantrum.
The days of having a sense of proportion in the United States are over. "Zero tolerance" is a bad tool, and takes away any shred of individual judgment or good sense. It makes it easy to ruin someone or make them miserable with the excuse of "I was just following orders."
I stopped buying music because I dislike the policies and prices of members of the RIAA. I really don't like the movie theater experience any longer: Dirty theaters, insane prices for bad popcorn, and 22 minutes of commercials before the movie begins. My local library is a GREAT place to check out DVD movies and CD music.
If you do not like an entity's policies or prices, don't give them your money.
Like courtesy. Even if what she did was benign, it was rude to the other people around her. Yanking out a video camera while other people are trying to enjoy the movie they payed 10 bucks to see is rude and thoughtless. I don't care if it was the dumb broad's birthday, maybe just showing a little common courtesy to other people around her would have kept her out of this situation.
Honestly, if someone in front of you opened up a camera and started recording even a short bit of the movie wouldn't that piss you off? It's just something you should have the common sense to not do, moreso because of the people around you than it's piracy.
Why do we treat copyright violations like they are the end of the free world? There is no reason that these civil issues between two parties need to get the federal government involved at the felony level. F hollywood and the legislators who are sitting in their pocket. Completely out of whack. And people think the patent system is bad! Not trying to flame here, but this whole thing really irks me to no end.
I didn't interpret that quite the same way, since it was a question (indicated by the question mark at the end), it seemed to be asking if that eventuality was fair or not.
/. a lot, hell, I've bitched at/about /., however, here's the thing, if they post an inflammatory story, they get more comments, maybe even more pageviews, what does that translate into? Ad revenue! If we *really* have a problem with it, we can do two huge things.
.. yeah I didn't think so.
As an aside.. I've noticed people bitch about
One, submit better stories.. or
Two, go read Digg
Eternity is a time bomb.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Actually, there's a very easy way to verify the truth of the story. Check the damn recording. It's a 20 second clip, I guarantee that it took more than 20 seconds for the police to walk into the theater from the parking lot. If she only recorded 20 seconds when the opportunity to record more was there, that's pretty verifiable.
No, you're just being foolish and unnecessarily nitpicky. The punishment for stealing $100 dollars could easily be returning the $100 dollars and doing community service for a while, that's less than the crime committed. The crime was depriving another person of $100, the punishment is doing, say, 24 hours community service. The $100 is returned to it's owner as taking it from the thief is not depriving them of it as it was never theirs to begin with.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
...they will have devices like in the movie "men in black" where they erase your memory after viewing the movie.
After all your brain is holding valuable IP and you only paid to experience that IP once. Through your memories you could illegally exchange that IP with others or play back parts of it in your mind.
If i have noticed anything its "if we have the technology to restrict it we will".
I'm sorry, but that logic is just as backwards as cruel and unusual punishment. We need to design the law from the standpoint of human nature.
When the punishment is more severe than the crime (i.e. locking a person in a cage for anything short of than physical force), there is no justice. I agree with you there.
However, when the punishment is less severe than the crime, there is also no justice. Why? Becuase the victim is short-changed, no matter how you spin it. Not the government or the lawmakers -- their opinions are quite irrlevant, as they are not the victims -- but the actual individual who is harmed by the aggressor.
The answer is simple: restitution. The is only one moral and just system of law, and unfortunately it has never truly existed in this world: every crime should be punished with complete and total resitution for the actual victim (not the state). Only crimes of physical force warrent locking human beings in the cage, because they pose an actual threat to other human beings; all other crimes should be dealt with according to the loss of the victim (including compensatory damages).
Of course, all of this requires that every crime have an actual, real-life victim, which rules out 99% of what passes as "crime" in the US today. Most "crimes" are not real crimes against real people -- they are crimes against the state, the power elite who control the government and decide the law.
Guilt or not, I don't face the same penalty if I punch you in the face or if I shoot you in the head. There are degrees of guilt.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Make it 20 years.
Seriously, how long will it take before people realize that crimes such as murder and rape are much less severe than threatening the profits of a corporation?
Look, we're a capitalist country here. Money is everything. Nobody cares about your so-called rights unless there's a dollar to be made from it. If you don't like it, I'm sure there's some socialist country up north that you could move to. After you serve your year in jail.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Thank you slashdot, for keeping my "I'm scared of going to USA" feeling active. It seems I really need it.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
The problem with Sharia is actually on the "Islamic protestant" movements that began developing from the XVIII century onwards. These guys disregarded (and still disregard) the more reasonable versions of the Sharia developed in centuries past by the orthodox Muslim scholars, and apply the Koranic laws literally. Nowadays they would remain a very minor sect inside Islam weren't for the fact that Western empires (in the XIX and XX centuries) saw their radicalism as an useful tool in destabilizing Islamic regimes in places they were interested in, thus financing and protecting them. So much that even today USA is still giving tons of money to Saudi Arabia, which in turn uses this money to fund the spreading of literalist Islam.
Stop funding Islamic literalists with one hand while promoting anti-Western hatred in Middle East with the other, and in some decades, luckily years, the non-literal, non-absurd, non-terrorism-promoting, non-evil, orthodox Sharia will become mainstream again over there.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Why not walk out to your car, put the phone in your pocket or wife's purse, and then walk back, telling the doorman that you left it in your car? What are they going to do, search you? If the answer at that point was "yes", then by all means I'd leave and not watch their movie. But otherwise, tell a harmless lie.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Total bullshit. Pirating didn't cost the movie industry anywhere near 18.2 billion dollars, and anyone who believes those absurd numbers is a fool or a congressman.
In reality, it's coming from a much thinner slice of everyone's entertainment dollar, extrapolated over some imaginary numbers to get a huge number that makes people scared. Follow up with a few million dollars thrown around to the right congressmen (shockingly less than $300k per lawmaker that gets a bribe, er campaign contribution), and you suddenly have legitimacy for a very fake number.
Movie receipts are up. Theaters are doing better than ever these days, primarily thanks to something we never saw at a theater before... 10+ minutes worth of real commercials before the show. Remember when you went to a movie and the screen was blank for 20 minutes, then the trailers happened and then the movie? Hah! Now, you get some form of 20 minutes of semi-entertainment features ("the 20" or "screenvision" or whatever your brand has) which is saturated with advertisements. Then the commercials before the trailers, which at worst used to be an advertisement for the concession stand, now it's a cellphone ad, a mountain dew ad, a car ad and who knows what else, the same as you'd see on television. Pure profit for the theater owners with a captive audience that they can measure almost exactly.
Did the price of a movie ticket go down? Absolutely not, I'm sure it's been steadily climbing in very tiny increments (.25 here, .50 there) and so do the concession prices. We all know that your average carbonated beverage costs at most $.25 per liter, yet in the magical boundaries of a movie theater a large beverage (free refills!) will run you $4+. Popcorn? $4 for even a small bag of popcorn that won't even last through the previews.
So, the price of entertainment keeps going up. We don't devote all of our free resources to the same source of entertainment, especially when the quality of the product isn't necessarily consistent.
If a guy has $100/mo he can devote to entertainment 5 years ago, lets assume that he gets a %5 raise every year, and can still devote the same portion of money to entertainment today. Guy has a whole $25 extra per month to spend on things. (this is assuming that at some point Guy didn't decide to buy a house, a new car, start a family, move across the country or discover a new hobby of course and we're assuming that Guy is still quite boring and does the same things today as he did 5 years ago). 5 Years ago, a movie might have cost $6-7, now it's $10-11. A CD was $12-15, now it's $16-17. DVD movies, $15 before, now $20. Even video games that were previously $40-50, are now $50-60. All of the things you spend your entertainment dollar on, are increasing their prices much higher and faster than the rate of advancement for most people's income. So what happens? People stop buying as much of some things. Less video games, less movies, less music, etc.
Unfortunately, the reaction to their own price increases and lowered value is to blame piracy.
"Ninety percent of recently released films that are pirated are done by camcording in movie theaters," said Kori Bernards, a spokeswoman for the Motion Picture Association of America. "It's happening all over.
Okay, so it's happening. We've got it. We saw it on Seinfeld 10 years ago, and it was clever then, now it's not. But is it doing anything? Are the kind of people who download a crap looking handheld camera recording of a movie really the kind of person who's actually going to pay $10 to see the movie at the theater? I've never met the person who's said that they'd rather sit at home and watch a grain
... we need heavy handed tactics like this that affect people from all walks of life to show how absurd our current IP situation is.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Pros and cons of theater:
+ watching it the day it comes out
+ watching it uncut (examples: Batman Begins dvd has Scarecrow CGI scenes reduced and Lion King dvd has Scar vs Simba fight edited into only 3 hits while original was a full blown 5 minute battle)
+ nice surround sound
- expensive ($10 per ticket and lots for food)
- strangers shouting and babies crying
- pimple-faced ushers/managers waving flashlights around
So is it worth it to go to the theaters and put up with the crap? I think it all depends on the individual's set up at home. If you have a nice set up, then staying at home is the better alternative. If you have a 20 year old tv, then go to the theaters. One thing I didn't factor is the movie-hopping experience which WILL mitigate the price issue if you watch at least 3 movies with one ticket.
Every geek has some sort of website, programming or computer project. Here's mine: www.youtasteit.com . What's yours?
Zero tolerance is simply an abdication of responsibility and common sense.
A friend of mine runs ZeroIntelligence.net, which documents this sort of thing.
Hmm... perhaps if the idiot taking the video camera into a theater used a little she wouldn't be in this predicament?
I really don't want to go to the cinema anymore. Me and my family ended up looking in the foyer of a movie theater to see what movies were going only to find notices everywhere that you can be prosecuted if you'd take a recording device into the theater! Well my mobile can record so what do you do? Anyway this arcane threatening combined with being exposed to stern warning about piracy and then a whole load of adverts put me off. We decided against seeing a movie and instead had a fun family dinner somewhere.
Movie theaters are history. Why would anyone would pay the price equal to a good DVD for the privilege to risk being prosecuted in a sticky theater with farting and sweaty people shoulder to shoulder.
There are a couple of reasons for doing so - one is to get your ~$10 back, or possibly to get the manager to tell the goon to let you in, but more important is to keep the management aware that what they're doing is stupid and annoying and will lose them customers.
*Everybody* has phones, and almost all phones these days have cameras whether they need them or not, and it's none of the theater's business to mess with you about them, even though you *could* use them to take grainy out-of-focus clips of the movie. Hassling people who bring in professional-quality shoulder-mounted cameras is a different matter (:-), but even professional-quality stuff keeps getting smaller.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
..is that she isn't being accused of criminal copyright infringement. That law depends on the definition of copyright infringement, which in turn lists various exemptions, such as Fair Use. It's something most peopel are familiar with, and has centuries of history behind it.
Fair Use is not a factor in this case. It's not a valid defense, even though on the surface and to most laymen, this sounds like a story about copyright infringement. It's not. Anyone who says, "Oh, it won't be so bad, because clearly this is Fair Use," does not understand what is happening here.
She's accused of using an audiovisual recording device in a theater, which is a different law and which contains no references to copyright infringement, and has no exemptions. It's like the anti-circumvention prohibition in DMCA, where it simply outlaws a possibly non-infringing activity, without regard for why you're doing it, without exempting activities that most people assume are perfectly fair, since those activities do not harm a copyright holder's market in any way. (Though it might harm their other markets, e.g. selling playback devices.)
These are radical new laws. Common sense and centuries of tradition and common law, do not apply! The layman doesn't even know this crap exists, or he thinks it's merely a refinement or update to copyright law.
It's ironic when some Slashdotters say things like, "the media companies need to update their business models and get with the times." Don't you see? They have. They've purchased new restrictions that go far beyond any normal person's expectations or knowledge. It's happening right under your nose, and the scum who are voting for and signing these laws, go unpunished in elections.
Why would they be punished? Only nerds and pedants care about the details of law, and the principles that it rests upon.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Sure you are right.
But so are they.
The reason being they police their own property, when you don't (want to) comply they have every right to disallow you entry.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
The correct answer to that question is "yes". You will be able to. Whether you are willing to do so or not is a different question.
in the employee room at my theatre, there was a sign saying that any employee who witnessed and reported someone recording a movie, and then gave a sworn statement about it to the police, would get $1000 from the MPAA.
That alone should give anyone reason for pause. If a person making a sworn statement accepts money from a third party as a "reward" for making the statement then it should make the validity of said statement null and void or at the very least *highly* suspect. It is nice to note that in your case you didn't give into the "Dark Side" by selling out the homeless man. Very commendable.
There are also limitations on what they can contractually demand from you, or the reasons they can throw you off your property. If they walk up to you halfway through the film, and say, "I'm sorry, we just noticed that you're black, and we don't want black people to watch this film," the fact that there may be fine print on the back of the ticket allowing them to do this won't matter a bit in the US: they would be sued to the stone age, and possibly even face prosecution. The same for, say, demands for sexual favors.
If there is determined to be a constitutional right to a certain level of privacy, then there are certain limitations that might come into play as far as waiving those rights are concerned. The contract itself could be illegal.