MUVICO IS THE NEW EAST INDIA TRADING COMPANY

[defrog]

ITEM [via BoingBoing]: A 22-year-old Chicago woman is arrested and charged with a felony after taping four minutes of New Moon during her sister's surprise 29th birthday party at the Muvico 18 Rosemont.

The woman – who was using a digital still camera with a video function that can only take short clips, not a full-on camcorder – spent two nights in jail and faces up to three years in prison.

Muvico says it’s just obeying the law and doing its job:

In order to combat the increasing theft of copyrighted films, the motion picture industry has encouraged theater owners to adopt a "zero-tolerance" policy prohibiting the video or audio recording of any portion of a movie. Specifically, theater managers are instructed to alert law enforcement authorities whenever they suspect illegal activity. Theater managers have neither the expertise nor the authority to decide whether a crime has been committed.

Because OBVIOUSLY there is no difference between taping an entire film and selling it or uploading it on the web, and taping a few crappy clips during a birthday party in a movie theatre, and even if there is, you can’t expect a theatre manager to tell the difference. He’s NOT QUALIFIED. The movie industry loses billions of dollars that way, and then it goes out of business and no more sparkly vampire movies for YOU, Little Miss Fuck Copyright I Wanna Steal Movies On My Camera Cos I’m Selfish And Have No Respect For Authority.

And the MPAA wonders where people get the idea that they’re humorless greedy killjoys.

Who’s the pirate here,

This is dF

Comments

[thelastaerie.livejournal.com]

Poor woman, she probably got caught because it's easier to catch her than doing actual investigative work which requires both money and intelligence.

[garbagecanmusic.livejournal.com]

I was going to start going to this movie theater (because it looks like something of an experience to go there, you can see it from the freeway, big sparkling lights, etc. etc. etc.), but when I read about this, these people aren't going to get one f-ing dime from me for their popcorn....

And it's stories like this that make people want to "steal" movies...

[def-fr0g-42.livejournal.com]

You do wonder what's eventually going to hurt the movie business more in terms of financial loss – actual piracy or moviegoers fed up with being treated like this and just waiting for it to be available on HBO or Netflix (or yes, file-sharing sites).