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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.
Frankly I wonder why theater owners haven't tried placing infrared floodlights all around the screen, so that any cell phones or videocameras pointed at it will only record a washed-out image. I know that some researchers at Georgia Tech have tried building a system that targets cameras and blinds them with directed IR, but that's always struck me as overkill. Just brute-force it with lots of floodlights.
had a row of teen girls in front of us last week (their parent right in front of my 4 year old) at the Madagascar 2 showing... two people asked them to stop texting and the mgmt was not anywhere in sight. my 4 year old was getting into the movie and his feet were kicking the back of the seat (of the parent might i add) and she asked me to control my child kicking her seat... and my response was short and sweet..
I would love to have him stop once the texting by her child (and others) stopped...
I expected her to have them stop... no, she huffed and moved the group up to the neck crick seats (ones like 5 feet away) and which also put her children in plain sight of the finally walking through theatre mgmt person who asked them 2 times to stop and finally booted them...
what a great show it was...
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I agree with your points. I do think that recording movies seems to be a "higher level" offence than simply electronically distributing them. If I were to see someone opening utorrent and sharing a movie, I wouldn't bat an eye*. But if I saw someone set up a video cam to record the movie, I would probably report him to theatre security.
I don't think, however, that he should have received jail time. One upshot of Canada's system of sentencing is that it allows judges to be very creative. IANAL (I am not a lawyer), but IAACS (I am a Criminology student), so here is a quick and dirty lesson on Canadian law. The relevant statute is s. 432.1 in the Criminal Code of Canada, which states:
An indictable offence is similar to a felony. If the Crown (the prosecutor) decides to proceed by indictment, the accused is given certain rights, such as the right to choose to be tried by jury or by judge, the right to be tried in a federal court, the right to a preliminary hearing, etc. In this case, the maximum jail term if the Crown elected to proceed by indictment is only 2 years. If the Crown elects to proceed by summary (similar to a misdemeanor), the rule in the Criminal Code is that the maximum jail term is two years less a day, and the accused does not need to be given the rights mentioned above. I did not read the actual case, but I'm pretty sure that the Crown elected to proceed by summary in order to avoid all the hassle of having a trial by indictment, considering the punishment would be similar either way.
Maximum sentences are extremely rare in the Canadian justice system, and jail time is generally considered a last resort, especially in summary convictions. If we considered the closest possible world (i.e., similar judge with similar leniency, etc.), the sentence for jail time would probably be considerably less than 6 months. Considering that it was his first offence, with no evidence of past or potential future offences, and that he is a relatively young adult, I can't imagine a jail sentence of more than 3 months. Judges often take into consideration the impact that jail time would have on your life (job, family, etc), on top of the already stigmatizing effect of a conviction. In this case, it is likely that the judge thought that a jail sentence would do more harm than good to the individual, that the psychological effect of being put through the system, and that a significant fine was enough to "teach him a lesson", as it were. Considering the fine requested by the Crown was only $2000, it is probably the case that the accused could not reasonably have afforded to pay a fine much higher than $2000, which would make the current fine a significant amount. Plus, as someone in his age-range, I would think that it sucks to not be able to carry around a phone with a video camera, which most new phones have nowadays.
* I, personally, would not bat an eye. Most of the people I have been in contact with (Canadians) would probably not bat an eye. The few Americans that I have talked to (on WoW, admittedly), however, seem to be pretty averse to P2P. I've gotten reactions like "Isn't it illegal?" or "Aren't you afraid of getting caught?" or other similar statements. It seems, on an anecdotal, probably unreliable sense, that the average Canadian is more lenient towards P2P than the average American.