Slashdot Mirror
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.
Last I checked, videotaping a movie was illegal in most places. I'm pretty copyleft.. but why is this story on the front page? 1. Videotape movie in theater 2. ??? 3. Get fined by the government
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
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.
1. They arrested him on the spot with the equipment.
/boggle
2. The theaters each have a unique embedded watermark.
3. The investigation into his wrongdoing took 6 months.
I've seen the warnings that are played before movies since about 2006, but I', not sure if I'd report anybody that was recording a movie. Has anyone else actually encountered this? What would you do?
I dreamed of Freud: What does this mean?
Serves that bastard right for using it for the wrong purposes.
Stay away from my guns though. I reserve every right to carry them around in public.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
Invade them!
Seriously, kinda harsh with the one year ban thing,...It shouldn't be that hard to insert artifacts into each theaters films to see where the pirated ones are coming from. Then stake out that theater.
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?
I thought film piracy wasn't done by taping off the screen (I can't imagine that would produce a watchable result), but by people who have access to the film in a quality digital format, e.g. the DVD "screeners" sent out for promotional purposes.
The judge said "but he has an item that is more supportive of taking something to be used to make a profit." Really? Is there big money to be had in shaky, flickery, low-quality home videos off a theatre screen? Not a rhetorical question.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Fine by me, i hate cam releases!
A person is doing something that a private company does not want him/her to do in their establishment. The company then has the right and obligation to insist that he leave the premises and/or call the police to have him removed (which also includes a trespass warrant against entering again).
Now in Ontario, you can only be 'Charged' with a trespass offence if you do NOT leave when first asked.
It seems to me that the government shouldn't get involved at all. The movie 'owners' (MPAA types) then have a civil obligation to sue him if they have evidence that he tried to distribute their product (making a copy {aka "backing up"} is a different can of worms so lets not go there).
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
...the first conviction under a new Canadian law making recoding a movie in a theater a crime.
Damn. Guess I can't use Nero Recode in the theaters anymore. I'll have to go all the way home to start compressing the video I took. What a pain...
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 am astounded that whatever police force was involved in this would even bother? There are people in the world who traffic in narcotics for relatively paltry sums of money, at the risk of very harsh mandatory minimum prison sentences. Contrast that with this paltry fine? Who is going to care. The audacity of the wasted effort boggles my mind to think that any effort to keep a screener off of the torrents is asinine. The greater the effort put forth to prevent distribution, the greater the reward or prestige from defeating it. Just the thought of all the potential points of failure for to keep a film that has to be distributed internationally for a global premiere of the net is just all kinds of stupid. And here the Canadian RIAA has managed to find/fund some law enforcement to make some kind of example. What a waste. Of course if all you have is a dead business model the only thing you can try to do is resuscitate it.
"There is nothing to do it. But to do it." -Floyd Pepper
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.
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.
Based on this article I don't see why. The article (and even the Slashdot summary) makes it quite clear that under the new Canadian law, it's necessary to prove that there was intent to re-distribute the illegal recording before any charges can be laid.
What happened (if the article's correct) doesn't really bother me. It's a movie protected under copyright law that he was illegally recording in a movie theatre with the intent of re-selling it for his own profit, breaking copyright laws. I can remember stories about people using home video cameras in various places at least as far back as 1993 for selling crappy renditions of newly-released movies on the streets, and I bet it's been going longer than that. The sentence that he got for doing this sounds reasonable to me.
What irks me about this whole thing, which unfortunately still doesn't surprise me, is that the Judge has been quoted as comparing what he did with stealing a cart of meat! From the article ('Skene' is the judge in the case):
Surely a judge would know the difference between stealing and copyright infringement, and perhaps she was just dumbing the whole thing down so a reporter could understand it, but it really doesn't help for the accurate portrayal of information to the masses. All it does is to publicise exactly the same mis-truth that the corporate copyright propagandists want everyone to believe, which is that copyright infringement is the same as stealing and that its damage can be measured in the same way.
"...the first conviction under a new Canadian law making recoding 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."
What if I'm an indie film director and I want to film part of a movie that takes place inside of a movie theater? What kind of hoops do I have to jump through just to line permission?
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
video is not a verb.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Way to not read TFA, or even the summery. He didn't do any prison time.
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
What makes this funny is the comments from the Paramount exec:
From the TFA:
"Canada is a hotbed of movie pirating, which is a billion-dollar loss to the movie industry," Mark Christiansen, executive vice-president of operations for Paramount Picture's motion picture distribution, said outside court after reading his victim impact statement.
- Really? They caught one guy. You had a better chance of winning the lottery than getting caught for recording a movie.
"The perception is that Hollywood stars are the only ones hurt by this, but it affects everybody who works in theatres."
- I'm sure all the high school students getting minimum wage in the theatre believe that in all their hearts, their pay and jobs will be affected by some jerk recording a fuzzy copy of a movie.
Virginia Jones, of the Canadian Motion Picture Distribution Association:
"We would have liked to see jail time, sending a stronger message. We hope this is just a starting point," she said outside court, also after delivering a victim impact statement.
- She delivered a victim impact statement? Asked for jail time? The winner, for best performance in a dramatic role is Virginia Jones.
"Man Caught Taping Movies for Download Forced to Download Movies To View"
Incrementing the demand counter. Very intelligent.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I kind of agree as far as being allowed to have some say in what happens on your property, but in situations like this -- especially where the main use of the property is to publish copyrighted material under controlled conditions -- I think it's necessary to be very careful about how far property owners can go. Letting people impose certain restrictions simply because something occurs on their property opens the door to let businesses infringe on rights that people should fundamentally have. In this case, it's helping content creators re-write copyright laws to suit themselves.
If a movie is only ever published in controlled theatres, should the banning of recording equipment be allowed on it forever? Even if the copyright term expires? (Actually copyright expiry is a bad example, simply because copyright terms are so stupidly long these days.)
What if someone wants to criticise the movie and use an out-take under fair use, but the publisher doesn't give them any avenue to get it? To me it seems as if it's letting creators write their own copyright laws and set new terms on distribution of their work that suit themselves rather than everyone in the community who gave them a temporary monopoly in the first place, similar to DRM in some ways.
If content creators can control access to their published content simply by making people sign a EULA and agree not to take bits of it out before their allowed to see it, there needs to be some serious thought into how that can happen without infringing on the rights that people should already have.
Fined $1495 for illegal video recording -- not extreme.
Banned from possessing video recording equipment for distributing crappy videos -- not extreme.
What if I txt during the movie?
Texting is obviously different, since your phone would be in your lap and not stuck out right in front of your face where everyone could see it.
If you do text with the cell phone glowing for all around to see, I'm not sure if it matters much what with your cell phone either in tiny pieces at the front of a room or stuffed in your drink.
Remember, doing things that greatly annoy others in a small dark room in the middle of a building with multiple exits is just about the stupidest thing you could possibly do.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Even if he was going to distribute it, the fact that it was in English with those annoying Canadian subtitles would have considerably restricted its appeal.
The point of a ban like this is to keep him honest. If he is caught doing it again proving was in a theater, or was carrying a camera, is a lot easier then proving they were videotaping a specific movie. For example, if he deletes the video/tosses the disk before the police catch him, then the authorities don't have to worry about trying to restore it, or proving it was there, because he's still in trouble for having the camera or being in the theater.
Most bans imposed as a result of a criminal trial work under the same idea. The court tries to it a lot harder for the criminal to repeat his crime without being convicted, and hopefully that works to deter him.
17$ more for pop and popcorn ( now we at 27$ )
In what insane world do you spend $17 on a gallon of sugar water and a feedbag of popcorn for a probably-less-than-two-hour movie? Are you planetoidal?
(Setting aside the complete stupidity of his statement, of course.)
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
.
When you ask Willie Sutton why he robs banks, the expected reply is "Because that is where the money is."
Banks aren't doing so very well right now.
Looking elsewhere:
The Dark Knight cost $185 million to produce and in theatrical release sold $528 million dollars worth of tickets in the US alone.
Clean industry.
Skilled labor and high-tech. High-paying on the production side.
Hog Heaven.
Generates billions in export dollars.
It doesn't matter whether your home district is in New York or Toronto, Vancouver or L.A. Protecting this industry is not a tough sell politically.
The genuine Sutton might hit the geek a little too close to home:
"Why did I rob banks? Because I enjoyed it. I loved it. I was more alive when I was inside a bank, robbing it, than at any other time in my life. I enjoyed everything about it so much that one or two weeks later I'd be out looking for the next job. But to me the money was the chips, that's all."
An alternate and more plausible explanation is the following deterrence principal: The magnitude of a punishment must be indirectly proportional to the frequency with with the punishment is used in order to maintain deterrence. Copyright laws have severe penalties because they are very rarely enforced against individuals. The nature of technology and cost of litigation make it difficult to increase the frequency of catching violators, so penalties must be increased to maintain deterrence.
so then a jaywalking ticket should come with a prison sentence because 99.9% of jaywalkers are never caught? it's not just copyright laws that have overly severe penalties, so do corporate libel convictions like the McLibel case in the UK a while back. and copyright breaches against smaller companies with less legal muscle do not come with the same disproportionate fines/restitution.
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.
At least it was only $1,495 and not $185,325 Canadian dollars (based on the MPAA's figure of US$150,000 per copyright violation).
:q!
Your jaywalking analogy is erroneous. Jaywalking is most often a harmless crime (e.g., crossing a barren street), so it makes no sense to issue tickets in those instances. Indeed, tickets are hardly ever issued in such situations. Yet, when jaywalking is dangerous (like at busy intersections near college campuses), higher penalties are utilized. This is similar to copyright laws which usually preserve harsh penalties for the harmful situations (e.g., someone sneaks into a theater to make a bootleg that may very easily be distributed at hundreds of flea markets). Just like cop
Your opinion of what the guy was up to is your opinion. Did you get far enough in TFriendlyA to read that they prosecution did not even attempt to show intent? That there was no record of a similar past offense?
I used to carry a video recorder with me all sorts of strange places -- taking pictures of different places in Japan to send home to the folks. That lasted about a half a year before I realized that maybe some of the people around me were not exactly welcoming the sight of the video recorder. In particular, there are a number of moral issues in recording school events.
The duct tape on the indicator LEDs? Well, if it was pre-meditated for whatever purpose, sure, he's probably going to think about that.
But that still does not say that he was going to do more than, for instance, take it home and watch it again, maybe with his buddies, maybe with his family, maybe by himself. You might say that theorizing a desire to critique the movie for a college literature class would be presenting a strawman argument. (Maybe he's trying to get a degree and get off disability?) But, from the information we have, we don't know that he wasn't.
You can form your own opinions, you can draw your own conclusions. But, for me, innocent until proven guilty is as much about not requiring the law to uphold bad logic as it is about being nice. And I guess I'll have to say this, sure, we don't need more proof that he recorded the stuff. But then saying that we might as well have proof that he intended to make money from distributing is a huge jump.
Just like saying that money made by those who pirate copyrighted works necessarily translates to any kind of a direct loss to the owners of the copyrights, much less the authors of said works, is a huge jump.
If a pirated work is represented as an original, that is a criminal offense against the purchaser of the pirated work. I'll grant that. And there have been some cases where systematic pirating has done more damage in lost sales than it made up in advertising. China, in particular, has a bad record on that score. That is to say, some importers in China have a bad record there.
But this "theft of billions" concept is pure wishful thinking, and the fact that it poisons us to the point we accept this kind of illogical law should give us pause.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
The conviction came as a relief to the motion picture industry, which had lobbied for the legislation that came into effect on June 1, 2007, and conducted a six-month investigation that led to Lissaman's arrest.
She said all movies are distinctly watermarked, which means legal or illegal copies can be traced back to a specific theatre. That led to the lengthy surveillance.
To me, this implies they've found pirtated movies being distributed, studied the watermark, staked out the theater identified by the watermark, and busted this guy recording a movie in that theater. That makes this statement seem more accusatory and less FUD:
Jones and Christiansen said in their statements to the court a single copy of a movie made in a Canadian theatre can be used to distribute both unlimited numbers of DVDs that are shipped around the world via the Internet or other means for distribution.
If that's the case, they should have let him go, followed him around and busted him in the actual act of distributing. Sounds to me like the cops were just lazy and the guy could be getting off easy. That's going under the assumption that the article is telling the whole story, which is doubtful. If it told the whole story, it would be longer than a sound byte and the public would get bored.
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.
From the article:
The summary says the same thing. It is now a crime to record regardless if there is any intent to redistribute, and that is new.
The article goes on to state:
which means that the judge's analogy, implying that the defendent intended to sell the recording, does not seem to be based on any evidence.
I bet a person in the movie theater could have some fun with a 9V battery, a resistor and a red LED.
I think you mean to say inversely proportional.
Jesus loves me, he loves me a bunch, because he always puts Jiffy in my lunch.
However, they'll get a replacement phone and the perpetrator who damaged the phone gets something on their record and a not-so-small bill.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
No sooner, no later. They get a huge bill and a court record, and the person gets a new phone for your efforts.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
N/T
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Jail should be enforced. Period. It's theft. Whether you want to admit it or not it is in fact theft.
Let's say you write a piece of software. I like it burn it on a bunch of discs and go hawk it around the street making money off your hard work and labor. And last year you were making 60k off your software and now this year you are making 1k. Would you be upset?
Now if I get a bunch of people together and we all walked into different stores. Pick up a bunch of candy bars, walk out and started selling them on the street should I go to jail... by your logic this is "brainwashing" and the now-defunct business model of retail has no basis as a common social conception of what is and is not morally acceptable because hey "everyone is doing it"
Look what happened is that technology provided people the means to circumvent the traditional sense of commerce associated with these industries. It's still wrong, and everyone knows it.
Now making a back up of a physical copy you purchased. Well that is okay it's your item you bought it. But doing anything that would circumvent the sales and distribution of the product is wrong period.
People will continue to do it as long as there is no real check on it, and jail time is the way to go.
If you want the song buy it. if you want to watch the movie buy it. Don't piss and moan because the industry that you are stealing from wants it to stop and wants people to understand that there should be consequences.
Anything over 12 grand is typically considered a felony. Steal 12 grand worth of candy bars...it's a felony. 4 plasma screens. Felony.
Recording a Film and uploading it on torrent and having 1500 people download it or buy a bootleg copy is the EXACT same thing.
Now if those 1500 people do the same thing... it gets exponentially out of control.
People need to learn to pay for entertainment. Period. And anyone recording in film should be thrown in jail for at least 2 years.
Don't agree with me. Well if where you work 10,000,000 + people are stealing what you do everyday and your industry is contracting because of it well maybe you would see it differently.
It is morally unacceptable because real people are losing there jobs because of it. And people downloading and recording are to blame. So the next time you go and download a song or rip a dvd off torrents think about the key grip who can't feed his family because there isn't any production work going on or the office clerk who lost her job because of cutbacks.
It is affecting real people and piracy is to blame.
huh?
Have you ever pointed a remote at yourself? Didn't hurt one bit, did it? Now imagine just a few of those blinking at a few regions of the screen.. won't heat up the place at all, but will make any camera recording quite useless.
Presumably, epileptics wouldn't be bothered by this either, otherwise we should have seen people going into shock over TV usage.
Perhaps you're thinking of the IR lamps used in beauty salons / chicken farms.. those do get hot - but then, that's their intended purpose.
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.
Trouble is, legally copyright infringement (while prohibited) is something very different from theft, and she had to know this and see some trouble with the new rules, of which even the Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association admit:
...i.e. convictions now are at least in part for what might occur, while in the judge's own words:
Are you sure that was quite clear?
From TFriendlyA:
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
That's not how I read the article. In fact, if I remember the article correctly, it said something to the effect that, under the new law, they don't have to show any evidence of intent to sell.
The old law, they did have to prove something, and that was why the RIAA wanted to change the law.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Everybody steals a riff or two.
Un-negotiated covers are a stock way to get a start in the industry.
Nothing new under the sun.
All creative work is derivative.
There should have to be proof of flagrant activities misdirecting profits before any criminal charges can be made.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
But the new law says he could have, and the MPAA female-dog-on-a-leash expressed disappointment that he didn't.
So, because he got lucky we should be satisfied that the law is okay?
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Do you keep your IR remote control led for 2 hours non-stop radiating in your face?
IR's are generally also sent in small bursts (I guess to conserve battery life?).
I frankly wouldn't know the health implications of such an IR radiating for one and a half hour non-stop.
Try pointing your camera or anything with an IR filter to the remote control; I used to have those little IR plastic filters to test.
Maybe it would be better if these things would just flicker up every 5-10 seconds making the recording a general nuisance.
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
People who either pirate or buy movies or music created by copyright freaks don't know what is a good movie or good music. There are many movies and music pieces around under free licences by amateurs who really love making movies and music and sharing it freely, and viewers or listeners remix freely. Plus, they are of much higher quality. The amateur scene has more creativity than a bunch of big name directors.
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.
Since we assume that the honorable judge is aware of the fundamental difference between moving the bits or waveforms of an electronic copy of a movie and moving the protein strands of a cartload of meat, I think it might be worth trying to see why she uses an analogy that would appear to indicate the opposite conclusion she appears to be trying to assert.
First, let's look closely at the meat.
When it is stolen, the molecules are gone. You can't get another copy of those molecules. So the store would appear to be out the wholesale price of the meat, plus some paperwork and time/wages for bringing meat in to replace it. If the meat is a specialty item, it may not be possible to replace it, and the store could be out the full potential sale price, as well. Also, since it takes finite time to bring the new order in, the store would be losing the sales that would have been while while the replacement meat is coming in.
If the meat is stolen to be sold, then the money of the sales not made is not only lost to the store, but is transferred to the pocket of the thief.
Of course, we should note that most stores have some insurance against theft of merchandise, so the actual loss would be initially less. The insurance premiums are likely to rise, as well. So, while there is not an infinite amount of replacement, there is replacement, but there are also costs.
Now, let's look at the movie.
In the case of the movie, since moving the actual merchandise is performed by copying from the data server, replacement bits are always available, at very minimal cost. The copying does not make the product in any way unavailable from the legitimate sellers, so there are no lost sales from unavailability. The only paperwork costs involved are such as the sellers, copyright holders, authors, etc., insist on. If they don't insist on suits and criminal charges, there isn't going to be much paperwork incurred, nor time/wages to handle the paperwork and re-stocking.
So, the only money that is lost to the legitimate sellers is that from sales which go to the "thief" instead. Now, as the sellers' association is quick to point out, the "thief" does not have to receive any actual money, as long as actual sales have been diverted away from the legitimate sellers.
In the case of the meat, the amount of diverted sales can be calculated to a reasonable upper limit. The legitimate seller could not have lost more sales than there was meat stolen.
The lower limit, of course, is zero.
We could imagine a court asking the store for records on how well the brand and type of meat which was stolen sold, I suppose, but then we also have to note that any unsold meat would have to be disposed of, and the thief has potentially relieved the store of that cost of disposal.
There is no way to calculate the upper limit in the case of the movie. That leaves us with a conundrum, and one that can't be resolved. We could ask the seller to prepare reports on expected sales vs. actual sales, but the vagueries of the market make any such report extremely susceptible to argument. Popularity charts go up and down without any real logic, much though the producers of commercial pop music want to think they have some magic success formula. We really are talking about superstition here.
One very potent argument is the advertising value of the illegitimate distribution channel. It is known that good art actually generally benefits from the illegitimate channel, because people who would buy the physical product will buy it anyway to support the artist. The only art which does not benefit from the illegitimate channel is bad art.
Now, we all here know these arguments. I find it hard to believe that a modern judge could fail to be aware of these arguments. Is there a possibility that the judge is priming the appeals process with ironic opinion? Maybe to make it obvious to the appropriate court that the law in question is bad?
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Let's say our justice system was egalitarian - how would you expect the outcome of this case to change?
In order to find the answer, why don't we just forget those undoubtedly evil corporations, their holding companies and the million dollar cinema complexes for a while and imagine ourselves on a small independent island, inhabited by 20 people, to get a better perspective.
You are one them, and for a living you are making nice movies for the other people to enjoy. As this is kind of expensive for you, you don't just give copies of your movies to others but instead show them inside your home on a screen for an entry fee. 15 paying people are going to see your new movie every week. It works just fine, you love your job, people love you and life is good.
One day, however, one of your guests starts to record your movie right off your screen. At first, you don't have a problem with it but the next week only 13 people visit you. A week later the number shrinks to 12, then to 11. Of course, your earnings shrink as well and because you have bills to pay, just like everyone else, your budget to make movies has to shrink too. After some time, you get suspicious and start to wonder why this is happening. You decide to follow the guy that still comes to record your movies ever week to his home. There, you find out that he is showing your movies to your former audience for free. When confronting them on the reason they don't come to visit you anymore, they claim that the quality of your movies has gone bad and that they are not worth paying for anymore. You tell them that if they would just continue to pay in order to see them, that you would have a bigger budget to make better movies. They don't care, so you figure that if they had not the possibility to watch your movies for free in the first place, the problem would just solve itsself. You decide to sue the guy recording your movies.
Coincidentally, you are also the judge on this island - what is your decision and why?
Now tweak the varibles. Would you come to a different judgement if the recording of your movies wouldn't affect their quality? Would you come to a different conclusion if the guy earned money himself by showing your movies?
And finally, would it matter if 300 million people lived on the island and not just 20?
Umm..
Don't do the crime if you can't do the time.
IOW, dont' do something illegal if the consequences bug or bother you.
--Toll_Free
i don't really have that big of a problem with the outcome of this case. though i do think the fine is a little excessive, likewise with not being able to have video recording equipment outside of the home. but otherwise it's not really all that unreasonable compared to what Americans get fined for file sharing convictions.
my post was in response to the GGP's question "seriously why the fuck should a person get prison for something like that?" which i assume referred to this statement from the summary:
i don't think any normal person would consider this man's crime worthy of incarceration. the reason why CMDPA actually thinks jail-time is called for in response to such a minor offense can be explained by the same reason the defendants in the McLibel case were ordered to pay McDonald's £60,000 in restitutions for distributing pamphlets critical of the McDonald's corporation.
It's taken a surprisingly long time to actually catch someone using a camcorder to record a movie... since most are stolen from the projection booth. --dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Seriously, this is a downhill battle and I'd love to make the fine into a joke. However, I do want to know what exact movie it was first. I'm not going to contribute if it was High School Musical 3.
Stupidity is its own reward.
I agree he's probably not an amateur, but that doesn't necessarily mean he's selling his recordings professionally either: the sorts of groups that put out pirated movie releases for free online are rather impressively dedicated and organized as well.
I do agree that if he was part of a professional piracy syndicate jail time would be a reasonable option, but we already have laws for that. He doesn't appear to have been even accused of being part of any sort of for-profit criminal endeavor, let alone convicted, so I certainly wouldn't want him put in jail on mere suspicion.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10