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Canadian Fined For Videoing Movie In Theatre
canadian_right writes "A Calgary man was fined $1,495 and banned from theaters for a year in the first conviction under a new Canadian law making recording a movie in a theater a crime. Until the new law took effect in 2007, prosecutors had to show evidence of distribution to get a conviction; now, recording without permission is sufficient. The Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association was disappointed that jail time was not given." The man was also banned for a year from possessing any video recording equipment, even a video-capable cellphone, outside of his home.
Am I going to be the only one who asks the obvious? Why should he be allowed to record the movie?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
From TFA: he is an unemployed contractor with an aggravating injury that is preventing him from working. It's pretty obvious what he's doing.
I'm not a big fan of either the MPAA or its Canadian cousin, but I don't see this as news. It's not as if they didn't warn you ahead of time that recording a movie within a theater is illegal.
Frankly, the sentence seemed reasonable. FTW, he didn't even get jail time. He should count himself lucky.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
Are they going to ban retinal implants for the blind?
Eventually they might produce quality vision that can be recorded (and of course redistributed):
I suggest you read Slashdot
The house lights were turned on and the movie was shut off and Calgary police arrested him.
I'm sure all their paying customers enjoyed this. Way to encourage honest people to buy your product.
not now, but eventually, the quality of video recording in phones will be getting pretty decent. Am I going to get arrested for bringing in a phone with video recording capability? What if I txt during the movie? At what point do the house lights go up and the police barge in?
because corporations are the new aristocracy. in the olden days committing a crime against an aristocrat was a far worse offense than the same crime committed against a commoner. ridiculously harsh sentences were there to reinforce the difference in status. if you stole from or committed any other offense against an aristocrat/noble they could pretty much do whatever they wanted with you. that was their aristocratic privilege.
as caste systems began to fall out of favor with educated societies people began to seek a more egalitarian justice system. therefore punishments for crimes were the same regardless of the socioeconomic status of either the perpetrator or victim. but like the concept of democracy this egalitarian idealism didn't last for very long in practice. a corporate plutocracy was quickly created to replace the nobles and ruling elite of the past.
and with corporate interests dominating the government & political system in most capitalist societies, the same double standards are again resurfacing. that is why the RIAA is allowed to bully regular citizens using the threat of costly court battles to extort money from innocent individuals, and individuals convicted to pirating music are ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for "stealing" $20-30 worth of music. similarly, non-malicious hackers accused of causing financial damages to large corporations are often punished more severely than violent offenders.
I think I'm more bothered by the fact that he can't possess any video recording device, of any sort, outside of his home, for any reason, for an entire year. Last I checked, most people don't automatically walk into a movie theater the second they leave their homes.
That's a bit rich since the movie industry itself regularly engages in fraud to rip off movie makers and actors. Did you know the author of Forrest Gump didn't make a single cent from the movie, the smash hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding technically made a loss (so the actors were ripped off royalties) and both Rob Schneider and Spielberg and many others have both stolen movie ideas in the past and baulked at paying the creators. So why is camcording a movie a criminal offense publishable by jail but fraud isn't? and in the US why is fraud only ever settled in civil courts without the threat of jail?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
http://www.tmz.com/2007/12/11/aussies-to-adam-you-stole-our-gay-firemen-flick/
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=335127
He's not saying it's the same at all. He's making an analogy. Steal a loaf of bread to eat, they will go easy on you. Steal it to sell it they will not. Record a movie for your own use, they can't even charge you under this law. Record a movie and sell copies, they can!
Would it make you feel less righteous indignation if he compared it to breaking and entering? If you break into a home with intent to rob, they'll throw the book at you. If you are caught in a storm and break into a remote cabin you stumble across, that's a completely different situation. Better?
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
This wasn't a crime where anyone's right to physical security was threatened. Police just took their time to investigate, gathered evidence, and made a case against the accused. I don't see what's wrong with this. I'm GLAD it took this long. It means the police didn't take (m)any short cuts. This is just what due diligence by the police looks like. We still have some semblance of it in Canada.
Good point, I mis-read it and was hasty in assuming she was saying copyright infringement is the same thing as stealing. It still irks me though that she even used the stealing analogy given the topic of the case.
The movie and recording industries would love people to believe the claim of copyright infringement being the same as stealing -- they spend enough time trying to tell me and everyone else. From what's supposed to be a respected legal position, she's giving them a heap of new quotations in connection with a copyright case for everyone to get confused with.
Yeah, society is sick when so many people are thinking, "But he shouldn't have been ..." instead of "Why can't the theatre just confiscate the tape, eject him from the theatre, and bar him from coming back?
As far as we know, this was a first offense.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Setting aside for a moment what the law is supposed to do, we must recognize that it does reflect the common morality.
Two hundred years ago, the common view of the world was a lot more dog-eat-dog than it is now. Malthus was an optimist. Actually, Malthus is still an optimist, but the misinterpretation was considered optimistic back then. There was a prevailing opinion that the only way a person could have a reasonable standard of living was on the back of at least a few someone else's slave labor. Even the guys on the bottom accepted that idea to a certain extent. (Speaking from a "western" point of view, since we are talking about western laws. The moralities and laws of the people that were imported to be the new bottom rung didn't count, which, of course, makes the slave trade that much more evil.)
The revolutionary concept was that we didn't have to be at war with everyone else to survive. That we didn't have to oppress others to have something good of our own. And we've forgotten that concept.
And this law, frankly, is stark evidence that we have forgotten it.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
The Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association was disappointed that jail time was not given
Which is why it is just as well that the prosecutor is not the same as the judge.
The man was also banned for a year from possessing any video recording equipment, even a video-capable cellphone, outside of his home.
Which is what I think is wrong on many levels. A fine is OK, I think - he knew that he was doing something that was illegal and it had to have consequences. A ban from going to theatre might have been reasonable too; but banning a person from carrying any video recording equipment in public is likely to be perceived as wrong. The validity of any law rests ultimately on public support, not on the severity of the punishments, and if penalties are seen as unreasonable, you lose the public support. We can see this in several places in UK - when the police want to investigate even a murder in certain areas, they don't get anywhere, because people don't support them. Whole local communities have somehow lost their trust in the authorities and simply don't want to help the police. From that perspective it may turn out to be a very stupid decision by the judge.
Look, someone with a video camera in the theater is likely not a high-school kid making copies to file share with his classmates. In all likelihood this person had done it before, many times which is why they were waiting for him with cops and all (yes Virginia, movies have theater-specific watermarks).
The only reason people here are supporting this guy is reflexive anti-RIAA sentiment, nothing else.
On this case, they seem to have landed a professional criminal who makes it a business to record movies and sell them for distribution, in which case jail time is not out of the question.