Canadian Fined For Videoing Movie In Theatre 382
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.
Re:Your Movie Rights Online. (Score:3, Interesting)
Not sure that it's so much that the recording shouldn't be illegal (it should be, IMO, you're paying for a one view license, at that specific time, technically, and stuff even states that,) but rather the punishment being that extreme.
Re:Your Movie Rights Online. (Score:0, Interesting)
Shouldn't you be able to record anything you see or hear with your own eyes, short of in cases of invasion of privacy?
It's just on a tape instead of synapses.
What took so long? (Score:3, Interesting)
2. The theaters each have a unique embedded watermark.
3. The investigation into his wrongdoing took 6 months.
Videoing Movies at the Cinema (Score:2, Interesting)
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?
Re:Your Movie Rights Online. (Score:0, Interesting)
You may joke, but pretty soon it's going to be the situation - do we transcend our humanity and become something better, or do we let retards in the movie industry decide we shouldn't? We _know_ where their biases lie - borg, replicators, terminator, matrix, scary cyborgs in general.
They HATE AND FEAR transhuman/posthuman technology and want to brainwash us to hate it too. Except for the japanese of course, they just go "ooh it might be good, it might be bad" (see: ghost in the shell).
I say fuck the movie industry and fuck copyright and patent law. The irony is I don't even pirate their shit. But damned if they should be able to prevent me having an artificial visual memory superior to base human abilities.
Why not place IR floodlights around the screen? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
The judge's comments annoyed me in this one (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Your Movie Rights Online. (Score:4, Interesting)
and as soon as you can record those synapses and download them off the internet we'll be hearing about mind wiping devices.
I am assuming in 2040 we'll be hearing something like this, "We wanted to wipe people's brains before, it's just up until this point the technology hasn't been available to enforce our rights. You have the right to view our movie only once, not remember it!"
Re:Phones will be getting good video (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
Re:And thats it... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Is this any surprise? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Your Movie Rights Online. (Score:2, Interesting)
And they say the consumer has too few choices...
*lifetime of the storage media
Re:Your Movie Rights Online. (Score:3, Interesting)
Most if not all cameras are vulnerable to being partially blinded by IR LEDs. I wonder if it would be possible for theaters to use these to ruin unauthorized recordings without spoiling the viewing experience, either by emitting from behind the screen or reflecting them off the screen along with the normal image.
Of course enterprising pirates would eventually figure out how to work around this by filtering IR frequencies or whatever they would need to do, but it would stop casual recording and reduce the number of people who are capable of creating pirate copies in theaters, meaning that each arrest has a more significant impact on the scene.
If you want to see the movie for free so bad, just wait for the DVD/Bluray rips to show up a day or two before it's in the store. If you really need to see it opening weekend, it's worth paying to see.
Re:Your Movie Rights Online. (Score:2, Interesting)
Seriously? Lame.
You just grab a random sentence and posted inflammatory, trollish statements that have little to add or do with the article, story, or anything other than getting a rise. And not a very good one. Begone, foul beast!
-----
Back to the article.
The recording was not so innocent a blunder, but not so bad either.
The interesting point was the ban on recording devices *anywhere* outside his home. The rest of the story adds weight and background for personal opinions: How much should copyright be valued? How much do the circumstances change your opinion?
Re:Isn't it just like a EULA? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:What took so long? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's 1 month to build the product and 5 months to play Doom...
Scratch that, 1 month to actually collect evidence, and 5 months to convince the DA/judge/jury with the requisite court procedures.
Litigation/prosecution is far from fast. We may think "speedy" in terms of nanoseconds, but you can't shrink the legal process down (yet) similarly to Moore's Law because the legal process also exists to protect the rights of the accused.