Another reason why “media piracy” should be legalized

It’s so that ridiculous crap like this would cease to happen. A 22-year-old woman in Chicago was celebrating her 29-year-old sister’s birthday at her surprise party at a theater where Twilight: New Moon was playing, and as she was taking pictures and short videoclips, she happened to catch “no more than four minutes” of the film as it played on the screen. Yet, for overzealous theater managers and cops, this is ample evidence enough to demonstrate how she’s a film bootlegger and now, she is under arrest and faces a sentence of up to three years in prison. The sordid affair, below:

Managers saw the woman taping and called the police, who examined the camera (a digital still camera that also takes short video segments) and say they found “two very short segments” that totaled no more than 4 minutes.

From the Sun-Times:

“We sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to her in the theater,” [Samantha] 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.

As ads and previews ran on the big screen, she fiddled with the camera — which she got in July and is still learning how to work — and was surprised to see it took clear videos of the screen.

The footage she shot also includes the pre-film commercials, as well as her talking about the camera and the movie.

“You can hear me talking the whole time,” Tumpach said.

She plans to fight in court the felony filed against her because she said she did nothing wrong — and certainly didn’t try to secretly tape the movie.

This is so blatantly stupid and unfair. Who in their right mind could actually think this woman was trying to get create a tape the film? It’s just a birthday party, for crying out loud. I doubt a few moments of crappy video-camera footage shot by an amateur, with cheering and singing and talking in the background, constitutes any reasonable evidence of film piracy. But then, it is increasingly clear as time goes on that anti-piracy measures and their enforcers have completely lost any shred of common sense, instead operating under a bullshit “zero-policy”, “guilty until proven innocent” mindset. It’s pathetic.

Just another reason why I prefer to download films directly rather than humor these jackasses and view movies in the theater. The less money these scoundrels receive, the lighter my conscience is.

(via The Agitator)