The panelists at the FCC discussion told a story about a teenage girl getting arrested for filming a 20 second clip of Transformers in order to encourage her brother to go see the movie. I almost didn't believe it, or at least felt like the anecdote must have been exaggerated in some way, but Dave Weigel looked it up and it all checks out: "Sejas faces up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $2,500 when she goes to trial this month in the July 17 incident."
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No Recording for You
02 Aug 2007 04:22 pm
Comments (47)
This graf from the Post story was particularly egregious:
“Copying a motion picture from a theater performance is a felony under the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005, punishable by up to three years in a federal prison.”
Even if one was of the opinion that the dirty hippies of the web should never, ever be able to get their hands on Steam Boat Willie and the last half of À la recherche du temps perdu, doesn’t charging this girl debase the value of “felony” as a concept?
Why is copyright enforcement a criminal instead of a civil matter? If a company breaks a patent, they have to pay the value of the infringement (triple if it was intentional.) No one goes to jail. Under the same rules, there'd be no case here because a grainy 20 second video has just about zero infringing balue. Why should copyright IP be different, enforced by locking people up?
Aren't conservatives supposed to be against frivolous lawsuits? Where's the outrage by Cato, AEI, etc.?
No, she shouldn't go to prison for this (if she was just filming a clip), but please, she either is oblivious to how serious piracy is and what the penalties are, or was actually trying to pirate the whole film.
Anyone with a computer can get lots of clips and ads for Transformers, and if the scene she wanted to show isn't available, then try describing it with words.
In terms of my outrage meter, this ranks relatively low.
Cue Petey to tell us that copyright infringement is theft and of course this girl should go to jail, what she did was the exact equivalent of stealing your car.
Cue HeiGou to write some long, indecipherable post which he probably rereads at 4 in the morning and jerks off to.
Hopeless, did you read the article? She got to the movie late, and she wasn't approached until "minutes" after she shot the clip, which was only 20 seconds long. You really think there's a possibility she was trying to shoot the whole film?
I don't find it particularly unbelievable that a young person today, for whom taking photos and videos is a normal part of social life, would not be thinking that using the camera might cause her to be sentenced to prison. Copyright laws have become insane, and not everyone is aware of how insane they are.
It's not clear to me whether prosecutors are asking for 1 year/$2,500 fine, or whether that's the max the could charge her with if they chose to do so. The movie theatre manager is basically passing the buck, saying let the courts decide. This isn't unreasonable. They don't know whether she's telling the truth.
Who cares? Spirit of the law, not letter. Let her off 100% right fucking now.
PS: How old is teenage?
I actually have connections with movie exhibition business, and am well versed with the ways movies are filmed illegally.
One of the ways is to have different people film different sections to avoid detection. More difficult to pull off in some ways, but when only shorter bits are done, then combined later, it can be easier to pull off.
And as in the proverbial innocent "mules" (like in Maria Full of Grace) who smuggle drugs, some pirates are now paying less conspicuous looking people to do the filming, so they can claim innocence and other excuses for what they are doing.
I am NOT saying that this is what happened here - but the theatre manager had every right to be vigilant about this and turn the matter over the authorities. Hopefully if it was just a dumb teenage move, it gets settled with a slap on the wrist. But she should have known better.
I notice that the federal law (at least, I don't know about the Virginia law) has no fair use exception. You record any portion of a movie at a movie theatre, for any reason whatsoever, and you face up to three years in the federal pen.
Al, if you're going to have both sane and insane identities commenting, you might want to choose different names for them.
"Cue Petey to tell us that copyright infringement is theft and of course this girl should go to jail, what she did was the exact equivalent of stealing your car."
More or less. I think a zero tolerance rule for recording in theaters basically makes sense.
Obviously though, all zero tolerance policies are problematic in that some folks get punishments that are unfair, given the particulars of the situation.
No precisely sure what the answer is here, but without a pretty damn strict policy against recording in theaters, it's going to be impossible to provide a window for viable theatrical distribution.
I continue to be mystified that anyone would watch bootlegs shot like this if they were free, much less that people will pay for them.
This is so bizzare. The transformers movie is available on the pirate bay, so what purpose does it serve to prevent someone from filming in the theater now? So friggin' pathetic.
Cue HeiGou to write some long, indecipherable post which he probably rereads at 4 in the morning and jerks off to.
Thank god I have some backup in reining in HeiGou these days. I was riding the train alone for a long time.
I'm wrong, though; HeiGou is probably some wingnut-rigged machine equivalent to a 1000 chimps on typewriters. There's no way a human could be that tenaciously stupid and simultaneously robotic.
"Thank god I have some backup in reining in HeiGou these days. I was riding the train alone for a long time."
He really frightens me, for the precise reasons Gregorian Chants lays out:
There's no way a human could be that tenaciously stupid and simultaneously robotic.
Reading his posts is like trying to read tapioca pudding. It just makes your brain hurt.
It's already 6 pm, and Matt still has 3 more references to The New Racists to go to meet his daily quota of 8 or more Marty's Minions posts. Please don't crunch them all into the last hour, I hate when you do that Matt. Spacing all 8 out evenly over the day makes for a more pleasant reading experience. Getting the final 3 The New Racists posts so late at night will upset my stomach. I know you are at the GreatOrangeSatan convention, but please think of your readers, if not your bestest boyfriends over at TNR.
The best HeiGou quote ever:
There is no evidence whatsoever that America is creating any violence, poverty or terror any where in the world.
Doesn't fair use apply here? Isn't a 20 second clip for the purposes given almost precisely that? A news network can run a 20 second clip from a movie, can't they? What exactly is the illegal act here then? It must be the act of filming the movie in theatre, b/c I'm pretty sure you can publish a 20 second clip of copyrighted material under fair use. But that is pretty bogus, in my opinion. I certainly wouldn't have known it was a felony to film a 20 second movie clip with no intent to distribute. At the very least they should be required to issue warnings if the punishment is going to be that severe. On the other hand, there are so many specious warnings about such things thrown about these days that they have lost their effectiveness anyhow.
doesn’t charging this girl debase the value of “felony” as a concept?
I don't know about you, but I certainly don't want that woman casting a vote or owning a gun. She used a camera phone! To record a movie clip! In a theater!
Which, sarcasm aside, was an extraordinarily stupid thing to do.
Petey,
I'm going to ask you to actually defend your position. How does a zero-tolerance policy make sense here? You acknowledge the trade-off in punishing undeserving people. But generally we consider it to be a pretty bad thing to send undeserving people to jail. So you must think this is a pretty important issue. Not only that, you must think that a zero-tolerance policy is absolutely essential to addressing the issue effectively. That is, you think that if the law were allowed to take intent into account, for example, that would prevent the law from preventing theatre filming with the intent to distribute illegally. Can you clarify why you would hold such a position? And in that vein, how would your respond to the fact that this law (according to the article) has only been used once before to prosecute someone? Seems to me that its not exactly a big part of any enforcement effort.
A news network can run a 20 second clip from a movie, can't they?
Presumably what the news networks run are promotional clips voluntarily provided by the studio. It's not like the movie reviewer carries a little handheld camera into the theater to record clips.
I am a musician and yet, I believe in the free, unfettered exchange of all forms of Art by any means necessary. Transformers is not Art. It is fArt. Pirate at will, and if Shia LaBoeuf must starve, so be it. Keep the wolves of Commerce at Bay. Michael Bay. At the moon. The tides. My period. Miasmatron!
"But generally we consider it to be a pretty bad thing to send undeserving people to jail. So you must think this is a pretty important issue."
I'm a moderate here. If this were Singapore, we'd execute her instead of sending her to jail.
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Again, I'm not sure what the optimal punishment strategy is here. All I know is that it must have an effective deterrent against recording in theaters to serve its purpose.
So I'll endorse the current policy until a better one is proposed.
A whole lot of people download pirated material who would never commit other crimes. The reason why is exactly stories like this, which show that the people who run the movie and music industries are greedy bastards who treat their fans like criminals and exploit them as much as they can. (DVD region codes, ahem.) I have no compunction about "stealing" back from people who are out to steal from me. I also support the artists I love by buying their merchandise and going to their live shows. And if I know that musicians own their own labels, I'm happy to buy their CDs at full price.
The more stories like this come out, the fewer twinges of guilt will be felt by downloaders across the world. It's just like driving 65 mph in a 60mph zone on a straight road with nobody around...it might be illegal, but it's not unethical.
I think these guys in the biz have forgotten the importance of moral, not legal, power. There's an open box of candy in my office cafeteria with a donation box for a charity next to it. It's been sitting there for months, open and unguarded, and nobody yet has taken anything without dropping the suggested payment in the box. A lot of those same people, including me, download tons of copyrighted material.
It's amazing...when you treat people fairly and honestly and avoid ripping them off, they generally do the same to you. There's a reason why hundreds of millions of people around the world don't feel any moral obligation to the movie and music industries.
"It's amazing...when you treat people fairly and honestly and avoid ripping them off, they generally do the same to you."
Right. It's why most car thefts are done to make a point of how badly the thieves were treated by the car manufacturers.
"There's a reason why hundreds of millions of people around the world don't feel any moral obligation to the movie and music industries."
Yup. They think the risk of prosecution is miniscule to non-existant.
The reason punishments must be strong enough to form an effective deterrent is return entertainment consumers to the same relationship with the entertainment industry that car consumers have with the car industry.
You don't avoid stealing because of your warm, happy feelings about the industry. You avoid stealing because you don't want whatever punishment comes along with getting caught.
Hey Petey: Whenever I approach questions of the law vs. individual rights, I ask myself: what would Singapore do? Where are my beliefs in relation to the Singaporean government? Then I shoot myself in the head because I'm a fucking idiot.
Repeal the law.
This "Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005" defines recording any movie or part of a movie as a violation. If you think it goes to far, write your senators and representative and ask them to repeal it. If everyone who read it here and was outraged did that and if 1% of the people who will read it on slashdot did that, it would be repealed. This is how you balance your collective political power with that of the movie industry which has made big donations.
"Hey Petey: Whenever I approach questions of the law vs. individual rights, I ask myself: what would Singapore do? Where are my beliefs in relation to the Singaporean government? "
You're going about it all wrong. The Singaporeans are the moderates. You want to ask yourself, what would the North Koreans do. Then you split the difference between North Korea and Singapore to arrive at a strictly happy medium.
@ Petey: How now HeiGou?
@ Petey: How now HeiGou?
I may have out-of-the-blogosphere-mainstream ideas in terms of IP, but if you ever again imply that I write as flacidly as HeiGou, I'll reach through my computer screen, across the routers, out of your computer screen, and rip out your lungs.
You may disagree with my points, but I do have an IQ above 80. Keep your bete noires separate, por favor.
No, see Petey, my point is that for the vast majority of normal people in the world, the vast majority of our actions are NOT informed by what is legal, but by what is moral. The reason I'm not out stealing cars isn't because I'm afraid of jail, but because it's wrong. I'd be hurting the person I stole from. A good deal of civilization is founded on the fact that, in general, people can trust each other not to rip each other off - it's called social capital. For example, the IRS audits only a tiny proportion of tax returns - and yet most people pay their taxes. See Francis Fukuyama's discussion of social capital in societies.
There is a minority of people who don't have moral scruples about hurting others, and we rely on our laws and law enforcers to catch them. But if the majority of the people in the world had a criminal attitude, the cost of deterrence would be huge and society would basically grind to a halt.
Shame is another societal behaviour enforcer that works pretty well. If I saw a colleague stealing candy out of the donation box, or if a friend mentioned shoplifting, I'd tell them it was wrong. The fear of other people's opinion is another pretty good enforcement mechanism.
Compared to people's inherent morality and their desire for social face, laws are a pretty damn big, heavy, ineffective, blunt club to use that has a lot of collateral damage.
From a practical perspective, I'm never going to get caught for downloading pirated material and giving copies to my friends. The internet is too big, anarchic and undistributed to ever effectively enforce. So the movie and music industries might want to brainstorm a better approach than blundering around trying to bash shadows with a club. If they tried a bit of respect and fair play, they might be surprised.
Out of the mouths of piratequeens... common fucking sense! An attribute both you and the Gou-ster lack, my dear Petomaine!
Two words:
college essay
"Sejas faces up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $2,500 when she goes to trial this month in the July 17 incident."
Well that's just stupid and I hope her surreal July 17 incident ends the same way as my surreal July 17 incident (a certain state's tax board trying to garnish my wages for a tax bill they never informed me about from a period I did not live in their state): the government backing off.
I think a zero tolerance rule for recording in theaters basically makes sense. ... without a pretty damn strict policy against recording in theaters, it's going to be impossible to provide a window for viable theatrical distribution.
Petey, the plain fact is that I and you and most commenters here already have the option of buying pirated movies. My grocery store -- my grocery store -- has a display of first-run movies on DVD, right by the checkout lines. If a consistent zero-tolerance policy is needed to preserve theatrical distribution of movies, then movie theaters are doomed.
Alternatively, it could be that a moderate amount of "piracy" delivers cultural products to people who wouldn't pay for them otherwise and allows for all sorts of totally innocuous copying and distribution as in this case, at the cost of a modest diminution of IP owners' profits. of course, if the IP owners dominate the political discourse, as currently, then we'll be told that's an unacceptable price to pay, but it doesn't make it so.
In other words, don't you agree that the optimal copyright enforcement policy for society as a whole is different from the optimal strategy for IP owners, and that cases like this suggest we're currentl closer to the latter than the former?
Maybe it's time for a boycott of the "Regal Cinemas Ballston Common 12," which, as the "victim" in this case, is choosing to prosecute.
You know what, lemuel, I don't even think the optimal strategy for IP owners and society is that far apart.
Look at the restaurant business. The way most restaurants and cafes are set up, you eat your meal and after you're done, you get the check and leave the payment on the table with a tip for the waiter. I have friends who have made livings as waiters for years - made livings on the voluntary contributions of strangers. Sure there are assholes and poor tippers out there, but on the whole you can count on an average 20% from decent people who know that you have to make a living. Nobody even counts your money before you leave the table! You could pretend to put money in there and just walk out before anybody realizes. It does happen, but pretty rarely, and restaurants stay in business, and waiters can make a living. Restaurant owners know that it's better to treat their customers with trust and hospitality, even though there are bad apples out there. And in return that trust is honored. Man, I wouldn't even dream of walking out on a bill at a restaurant - I'd feel so guilty.
But imagine dining at a restaurant, paying the bill, and starting to stand up only to have a burly security guard slam a hand on your shoulder and growl, "Hang on, we've got to count your money first." That might start to change your feeling about the restaurant. I have a feeling that the strict enforcement policy wouldn't be very effective.
The situation in the movie and music industries is even worse. The idea of bringing a harmless teenage movie fan to court simply doesn't pass the snort of ridicule test. I remember my own personal piracy "tipping point", years ago - I'd saved up to buy a $70 DVD set and was excited to watch it. Slipped it into the DVD player only to get the message that it was the wrong region code and hence unplayable. I did a bit of internet surfing to see if there was a way around the problem and noticed lots of forums with people complaining about moving countries and having their large media collections become obsolete. Then I saw a quote from a movie company executive, saying something like, "Our focus groups show this is not a big issue for consumers." Why would I ever pay $70 for something unwatchable when I can download it for free?
I now work as a freelancer and I know how important relationships with clients are. If you treat your customers right, you usually don't have much to worry about. The fact is that most people have a sense of right and wrong, and are not ravenously greedy, out for as much as they can get. Otherwise restaurant bills and tips would never be paid.
The hysterical IP enforcers are simply making their situation worse with their aggressive legal actions, pissing people off. What they really have is a social capital problem. Decent, average, otherwise law-abiding people just don't think there's anything wrong with downloading pirated material - because there's not.
Personally, I hope these RIAA and MPAA leeches get their back broken. I could care less, at this point, what the philosphical arguments are. These people are scum, and they deserve to suffer. They've taken this shit way too far, with eternal copyrights and arresting/suing children.
I personally hope piracy bankrupts the whole lot of them.
Yeah, my music downloading conscience is clear again after going to see Great Big Sea, buying one of their t-shirts direct from them and getting one of their albums for my birthday after downloading a bunch of their songs.
I think one of the big reasons that people my age (b. 1978) don't think of music downloading as a big deal is because we grew up listening to music on the radio that was being given to us free.
Comparison to HeiGou touched a nerve there, huh Petey?
But can you really claim it was unwarranted? This is an issue that some people take pretty seriously. In one case, an undeserving girl faces up to a year in jail. So if you're going to make a serious claims that the law is appropriate, and then support that claim with jokes about comparisons to disgusing alternatives, well now you're starting to generate a certain resemblance...
But if you want to engage in a serious discussion, I'll repeat my question: why wouldn't this law be improved if it took into account the presence or lack of an intent to distribute? Even if it's contigent on the suspect to show a lack of intent it would both be easy to do in this case and almost certainly improve the balance between enforement and the punishment of the undeserving. The fact that it does not is a clear indication that the law exists to the lobbying of an organization that cares not at all about the balance.
that should read "due to the lobbying"
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THE REAL TRUTH: While the police officers were arresting her for trumped-up charges, in the same local area two women were raped, five cars were stolen, and a person was held-up at gunpoint. Talk about priorities FUCK REGAL CINEMAS, FUCK THE MPAA, and FUCK THE POLICE!!! You PIGS make me want to F’N PUKE my guts out!!! What will happen to her? Since its the COMMIEWEALTH of Virginia the most ASS backwards state in the USA she will probably get royally FUCT by the DUMB ASS SHITHEADS that are the court system here. And whoever the STUPID jackass managers at the cinema who thought they were being hero’s by calling the pigs on this lady I hope you get your punk asses beat down like the fucking LOSERS you are. Im going to find out who you LOSERS are and go from there ASSCLOWN since I live in the area. I hope that $500 reward you get from the MPAA will cover your Doctor expenses after you get the hell beat out of your candy ass for being a snitch you punk ass MF’ers!!! I’ll be sure to come to the court dates just so I can find out who the snitches are and once I find that out then your snitching candy asses are going to be ASS OUT you dumb ass MF’ers!!! I hope your candy asses have insurance cause youre going to need it LOSERS!!!
Comments closed August 16, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Hm. That sounds like an overly harsh penalty, but doesn't everybody know that recording during the movie is asking for trouble?
Posted by too many steves | August 2, 2007 4:41 PM