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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"
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.
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 you think that jail time is remotely acceptable, such that not getting it makes him "lucky", speaks volumes about the level of brainwashing that the RIAA and its global cohorts have managed to inflict upon the public.
In the digital age, copying a film or music track should be a misdemeanor, given that the principles of the rule of law instruct that the ease of the offense, its commonality, the view that the general public has of it and the mindset that people have when they do it all have to be taken into account.
Assigning jail time to an action that is as socially innocuous as copying an MP3 violates all of these. It is obviously only there to protect the now-defunct business model that the recording studios live by, and has no basis as a common social conception of what is and is not morally acceptable.
Which, when you break it down, is what the law is supposed to be; commonly accepted morality. We as a society have become so socially sick that this fundamental concept seems odd to even state.
I hate printers.
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
Nope, I'm not brainwashed. However, I am minded to reply to your comments.
1) The ease of the offense: We're not talking Ctrl-X Ctrl-Y, we're talking about a man taking a digital camcorder into a movie theater, setting himself up in a good vantage point, taking pains to conceal the camera (he used a sock or something, IIRC, to hide the recording indicators) -- are all these easy? Would the average moviegoer do this? You tell me.
2) Commonality. Again, the average person knows how to copy files. The average person does not bring a camcorder into the movie theaters, the last time I checked anyway.
3) The view that the general public has. Again, I haven't polled the general public about this but even given the comments I've seen on this article on /. (duh, serves him right, etc.) I think that it's obvious that the 'general public' would consider copying a file a bit more mundane than actually bringing in equipment to record a movie.
4) The mindset that people have when they do it. I'm not even gonna touch this one. I think we have all formed a pretty good opinion of what his mindset was - and it wasn't to make an archival copy to watch later. Although I will be the first to admit that I don't know this for a fact.
So, in my eyes, your argument that assigning jail time to an action 'as socially innocuous as copying an MP3' appears to beg the question of whether setting up video recording equipment in a movie theater is equally socially innocuous. I would hasten to argue that it is not. These are two separate kinds of actions.
The question of whether it 'protects the now-defunct business model' is moot.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
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.