Thursday, August 02, 2007

Is 20 Seconds Fair Use?

The Washington Post has proof that copyright concerns have gone too far. Out of the Theater, Into the Courtroom describes how 19 year-old Jhannet Sejas was in a theater watching Transformers and wanted to record a 20 second clip on her camera to show her 13 year-old brother to convince him to see it. But no, 2 cops showed up, removed her and her boyfriend, and confiscated the camera. The theater for some reason has decided to prosecute her for "illegally recording a motion picture". Yep that 20 second clip could have been used for piracy!

Then again, it could have been used to convince someone else to pay to see the movie in the theater. It would never occur to me to record a clip of a movie to do this, but I'm not 19 and I didn't grow up always having a camera that didn't need expensive film and able to take video.

"Kendrick Macdowell, general counsel for the Washington-based National Association of Theatre Owners, said that illegal pirating of films costs the industry billions of dollars and that the industry was stepping up efforts to stamp it out. Because of that, he said, there has to be a "zero-tolerance policy at the theater level." "We cannot educate theater managers to be judges and juries in what is acceptable," he said. "Theater managers cannot distinguish between good and bad stealing."

Um, yeeaaahhh. There's just absolutely no way a manager could figure out if this is right or wrong. Yup zero-tolerance is what's needed.

"The movie industry needs to recognize that their audience isn't the enemy," said Cindy Cohn, general counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit group that specializes in digital rights issues. "They need to stop treating their fans like criminals. . . . What they're doing is extremely unreasonable, coming down on this poor girl who was actually trying to promote their movie."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

hmmm, shouldnt justice be blind? It seems unfair to punish a 19 year old who was just taping 20 secs to convice her brother. But then again that is her story. What if I wanted to tape the whole movie to convice my wife that it was a good movie to take the kids to?

Howard said...

well yeah, it's blind, it shouldn't be different for one person vs another. But it's a little more than her story, the was only 20 sec's on the camera.

If you want to work on other cliches, shouldn't the punishment fit the crime? The crime is piracy, I doubt there's a market for 20 sec clips.

The problem here is the theater manager over reacting. Sure it's his right to prosecute, but I think it's back firing in this case. First he lost her as a regular customer, he lost the brother as a potential one, and I'll guess he'll lose others for bad publicity.

But you're right, he deserves his day in court as does she. But common sense applies too and it seems to be missing here.