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.
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.
Fine by me, i hate cam releases!
...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...
When the person next to you, or behind you sees you holding up your cellphone pointed at the screen for 20 straight minutes. Seriously, use some common sense. The people running theatres aren't all dumbasses. They'll put up some rules about cellphone use, and since they won't want to piss off their customers, they'll make the rules reasonable, and in return, they'll ask people to report other people who have their damn cell out for 30 minutes at a time.
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.
What if I txt during the movie? At what point do the house lights go up and the police barge in?
As soon as possible, you inconsiderate clod.
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.
video is not a verb.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
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...
sig goes here!
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.
Perhaps you misunderstood the poorly worded summary. There are two ways to read the summary: 1) You cannot create video footage in a theatre; or 2) You cannot create video footage of a movie that is being shown in a theatre. The statute is as follows (emphasis mine):
The statute states clearly that you can't create video footage of the movies that are being shown on the screen of the theatre, rather than not being allowed to create video footage in a theatre. If you wanted to create video footage in a theatre, it's fine so long as you have the permission of the theatre, and there is no movie being shown in said theatre (unless you have permission from the copyright holder and/or the movie has gone into the public domain). There are no more or less hoops to jump through than before, because recording movies shown in a theatre for the purpose of distribution was illegal prior to the amendment, IIRC.
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.
For everything else, there's Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
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.
I bet a person in the movie theater could have some fun with a 9V battery, a resistor and a red LED.
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.
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.
what's wrong with texting?
The backlight from your phone, which you hold up while you do it, is distracting to the people behind you. Also, even if you have it set to vibrate, I can probably hear it every time a message comes in.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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.
But that's a fundamentally different thing from copyright.
Why is it a fundamental right of yours to control the use of information that you happened to create in the first place? It's not physical property and you don't lose anything if someone makes a copy of it. There certainly never used to be restrictions on making copies of things or using other people's ideas until relatively recently, and building on other people's ideas and extending other people's work tends to be how progress happens.
If I make a copy of something you did, you haven't lost anything at all because you still have your copy of it and you can do what you like with your copy. At best, there might be a lower possibility of you making money in the future by charging for access, but exactly how much you would have made if you applied yourself is uncertain anyway.
But this is why copyright law exists. It's an artificial legal construct to provide an incentive for people to create something in the first place, which it does by letting content creators have a monopoly on their work for a limited time and under certain conditions. (ie. Other people are still allowed to reproduce it in certain ways and for certain reasons.) It's supposed to be a balance for both sides, to allow the creator to benefit from what they've done, while at the same time letting everyone else have a reasonable use of it and (eventually) unrestricted use when it finally moves into the public domain.
The fact that copyright terms have become so ridiculously long just means that authors and publishers get mis-led into thinking that their IP is some kind of real property, and that it must be a crime if it's ever used in any way they don't authorise, even if it's completely legal under law. When authors and publishers start assuming people are criminals because they might be copying something (or even because they are copying something), it also means they're effectively re-writing the law on their own terms in a way that prevents legal copying, and this is what concerns me. If theatre owners don't want recording equipment on their property then whatever, but there needs to be a way to make sure that the avenues for using information legally aren't being cut off because a few publishers happen to be paranoid.
Copyright law is a good thing, and I think it's great to give people limited control over work they produce so they can make some money from it and have an incentive to do it in the first place... but copyright law only even exists so that there is an incentive to create new content in the first place. The problem with content distributors putting physical restraints on the abilities of people to make copies and cryptigraphic constraints on the abilities of people to make now get offended that their stuff comes out of copyright at all, or gets used by other people legally without their permission while it's still in copyright. The only thing you might not have anymore is the ability to make money from people you might have sold it to.