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."

Comments

Re:You Just Don't Know When to Shut Up, Do You?

[Grishnakh]

Well, Irak was of the same opinion. It seemed to stand not so very well against a properly standing army, not against the USA one at least.

Last time I checked, US troops are still dying in Iraq left and right. In fact, many more died there after the defeat of the Iraq's regular military, due to the insurgency, than before, IIRC. Apparently, a bunch of rag-tag Iraqi freedom fighters were able to take a heavier toll on America's best-trained troops than Iraq's regular army. And this makes sense too: it's a lot easier for an advanced military power to defeat another lesser power on an open battlefield with advanced weaponry, than to go door-to-door and fight people in their own homes.

On that mood, do you think the privately owned weapons by USA civilians would be of much use against the USA army power, nukes and all included? I don't think so.

You sound like another liberal moron. Why would a country's government nuke itself? Just mentioning that shows what an idiot you are. How useful are nukes in Iraq? Oh wait, we haven't used them...

You can't control a populace if you kill them all. And you can't kill them all with the military unless the military agrees, and they're not going to if the populace includes their own families and countrymen. Yours is just a stupid nonsensical liberal argument against gun ownership.

Re:You Just Don't Know When to Shut Up, Do You?

[commodore64_love]

>>>And under true free market, profit oriented corporations are more than able to *buy* regulations.

Under a "true" free market, corporations wouldn't even exist because they are a creation of government, so if the government takes a handsoff approach to the economy, the Incorporation License would be a non-entity. Instead you'd have private citizens who are directly responsible for their business transactions. No corporations.

Anyway:

I'd like to know why this lady spent two nights in jail for a *civil* violation. If she did infringe upon copyright, the punishment should be doled-out by a civil court procedure, MPAA v. Citizen, not by the police.