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Woman Filming Sister's Birthday Party Gets Charged With Felony Movie Piracy
A 22-year-old woman from Chicago recently spent two nights in jail and could face up to three years in prison for taping four minutes of the new movie Twilight: New Moon. Samantha Tumpach and family threw her sister a surprise birthday party at the theater and captured much of it on video. Unfortunately, two "very short segments" were enough to make theater managers want to press charges. "Tumpach insisted she recorded no more than three minutes while in the theater — and said not all of the video she shot was of the movie. There's footage of [Tumpach] and her relatives singing to her sister, she said. 'We sang "Happy Birthday" to her in the theater,' Tumpach said. She also took pictures of family members in the theater before the film began, but an usher who saw the photo session never issued them a warning, Tumpach said."
I guess ars didn't think of this when they said that the movie industry won't go down like the music industry did.
It may be 7 digits, but at least it's a semiprime
is everyone in the USA crazy or what? How silly can you get? Are there any adults left? Jeeez...
t's also why a mall owner can't (legally) restrict you from taking photographs inside the mall;
Yes they can. They can ask you to leave. If you refuse to do so then it's trespassing and the guys with the handcuffs, tasers and firearms get involved. They can't take your property (camera) from you or (legally) require that you delete any pictures you've taken but they can insist that you leave.
I learned this in my concealed carry classes. My state has no legal provision for a property owner to post "no guns allowed" signs. They can post them but they have no force of law. All they can do is ask you to leave if they discover that you are armed -- you haven't actually broken any laws unless they ask you to leave and you decline to do so.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
This should be a civil matter, no one should have to spend any nights in jail for even the worst cases of copyright infringement.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
And how do the corporations originally acquire the power to regulate themselves into monopolies?
I'll concede that much of it has to do with being profitable enough to afford great lawyers and lobbyists to effect change in Washington. But the reason that they get into that game in the first place is because of regulation of their own business sector, and once in that position, they use their regulatory power for the express end of reducing competition, which is the only thing that businesses truly fear.
Here is an example of how it works. I am a linoleum floor manufacturer in the midwest, whose business scope is the entire US. There are about 4 other manufacturers that make linoleum with whom I compete. One day, one of my competitors makes a product using too much of a particular chemical and his floors poison house-pets; someone figures out that it is the floors, and "pop!", a new regulatory body comes into existence to regulate my industry. The first generation of regulators is made up entirely of goody-two-shoes bureaucrats whose mission in life is to stop the big bad corporations from poisoning fluffy, and so they put a few regulations in place to ensure that the manufacturing process is clean and healthy. While they are at it, they also put some specific regulations in place about supply chain, materials, and labor, driving up the cost of making linoleum, and therefore making it more expensive. Fast forward ten years. The first generation of regulators has been mostly replaced by new faces, and now that the poison scare is off the front page, and fluffy is once again safe, the primary interested party in linoleum manufacture regulation is, well, me and my industry. Because of this, we have put many of the second-gen regulators on the payroll, and or, put our own employees into the regulatory body, if possible. By the third generation of regulators, the industry magnates can put any regulations that they want in place, and use this power to stifle competition, artificially keeping linoleum prices high, and ensuring that any linoleum-making startup will have to have enormous capital, just to pay its attorneys to spelunk through the now fifteen books of regulations for its manufacture.
This is what most modern Socialists call unregulated free market capitalism. But it isn't. The fact that we have a political/social climate so willing to regulate industry is, ironically, the reason why industry is so notably ungoverned. The best, in fact, the ONLY way to regulate business is with demand. It isn't pretty, and it isn't proactive, but it is the only thing that works.
READ ROTHBARD