Hollywood threatens Canada
p2pnet.net News:- Using Rupert Murdoch’s Twentieth Century Fox as the front, Hollywood is threatening Canada over the alleged bootlegging of movies in Canadian cinemas.
Canadians “pirate” as many as 50% of movies which show up online, “prompting the film industry to threaten to delay the release of new titles,” says the studio which, according to the CanWest News Service, claims most of the camcording goes on in Montreal cinemas, encouraged by, ” bilingual releases and lax copyright laws”.
“They are using Canada because they can have the movie out on the street in the Philippines and China before it even releases there,” the story has the Cineplex Entertainment theatre chain’s Ellis Jacob saying.
Bruce Snyder, president of Fox’s domestic distribution, told Jacob about the alleged activities and said if Canada doesn’t do something to curb its growing piracy problem, “Hollywood will”.
The entertainment cartels have been lobbying frantically trying to get Canaidan copyright laws changed so they can go after Canadians in the same way they do Americans and people on other parts of the world.
Hollywood’s MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) routinely uses national police forces to go after, on its behalf, anyone it believes is a “pirate”.
It, and its brother music organization the RIAA, aka the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association of America), want to be able to do the same in Canada and Voil�! – “The movie industry has complained that the Canadian Copyright Act, as well as the internal policies of police forces including the RCMP, make it extremely difficult for them to crack down on movie piracy,” says CanWest, going on:
“Under the act, anyone caught copying a movie without the studio’s consent can face criminal charges and jailed or fined up to $25,000. Copyright holders can also take civil action against someone who has infringed on their property. owever, Jacob said convicting someone is difficult.”
Canadian exhibitors, “are caught in a bind because Canadian laws do not allow for the arrest or prosecution of moviegoers with camcorders,” says Reuters.
“You have to prove that the person was camcording and using it to generate revenue. It is virtually impossible to do that,” he said.” Unless you can assign blame to the person recording in your theatre, your law doesn’t have any teeth.”
The Canadian Motion Pictures Distributors Association acts for Hollywood in Canada and, “We’re working in a legislative and enforcement vacuum, and certainly a prosecution vacuum at every level in this country,” says its boss, boss Douglas Frith, according to the story, which goes on:
“In addition to working for stronger laws, the CMPDA has trained cinema employees to spot illegal camcorders,” but, “local police are not responding to calls from cinema operators when pirate camera operators are spotted and detained.”
Reuters also quotes Frith as declaring, “We’re doing the surveillance. We have them (camcorder operators) in our crosshairs. But we require a police force to enforce the law, which is why we are pressing so hard to get camcording made a criminal offense.”
The entertainment cartels have used their massive spin machines to elevate copyright infringement, a commercial matter, to the level of major crime in the US, and they’re desperately striving to achieve the same thing in Canada.
In the US in late 2005, 19-year-old Curtis Salisbury was looking at up to 17 years in jail and a possible $250,000 fine for allegedly camcording a movie.
Stay tuned.
Also See:
CanWest News Service – Studio threatens to delay films in Canada, January 24, 2007
Reuters – Hollywood studio vexed by Canadian bootleggers, January 24, 2007
17 years in jail – Star Wars ‘Sith’ p2p uploader, January 26, 2006
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January 26th, 2007 at 2:35 pm
People want to buy your product NOW but you refuse to sell it, so everyone gets it elsewhere because you’re clinging to an obsolete business model. If any other business did that they’d be out of business, and good ridence to them. It’s like walking into a grocery store that refuses to sell you food.
“prompting the film industry to threaten to delay the release of new titles,”
Yeah, that’ll teach those pirates, it worked so well in the past. /SARCASM
January 26th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
The movie industry has complained that the Canadian Copyright Act, as well as the internal policies of police forces including the RCMP, make it extremely difficult for them to crack down on movie piracy,”
apparrantly the RCMP are too busy with real crimes to be the dancing monkeys for the entertainment industry.
January 26th, 2007 at 5:20 pm
Actually, a lot of media, software, and hardware companies do this. It is supposed to be so that, if a product fails in one market, the makers can save money by not having tried the other markets, essentially assuming that the product could fail in these markets as well. Distribution costs money, and no one wants to make a bad investment. Releasing a flop in one country is less damaging than releasing it worldwide.
That isn’t saying that I agree with that idea. The very least these companies could do is turn a blind eye to piracy of a product that isn’t even legally available in a market, either yet or ever. Besides, the P2Pers are basically taking the distribution costs upon themselves and ultimately testing all of the other markets in an uncontrolled setting. However, unless BigChampagne monitors the top 10 movies as well and can measure based on locality, the studios usually have no idea how popular their stuff is.
January 26th, 2007 at 8:31 pm
Sure they are. Ask Maher Arar.
January 26th, 2007 at 10:51 pm
This is another FUD to bully Canada into passing laws to protect the cartels turf. No more no less.
By far the biggest piracy occurs in Asia. Canada doesn’t have much connection with Asia. Of course to hear it from the cartels, the internet is responsible. These media cartels need to go the way of the whale oil lamp makers.
Next year or the years that follow, it will be somewhere else that is the piracy center of the world. That is provided they can bully Canada into complying.
Funny, they were all so happy to get the windfall off blank recording media. At the time they sort of looked at it like it was a freebee. They were being paid on the basis of blanks that may or may not be used to copy their products. You use a blank for computer data, you still pay the fee. Same thing here in the states.
Funny thing about that money here in the states. It was given with the understanding that those funds would go to the artists. It’s been collected since the days of the cassette. Not one penny has been paid to any artist though.
We in the states have also paid the fee to copy. However unlike Canada, it seems our lawmakers are more subject to unofficial bribes. I guess the jury is still out on that one as there seems to be quite a bit of discovery going on with Minister Oda.
This is just another red herring attempting to scare Canada into line. I am sure it is quite timely for some “event”.
*5th attempt at validation
January 27th, 2007 at 6:17 pm
from the article:
“In addition to working for stronger laws, the CMPDA has trained cinema employees to spot illegal camcorders,” but, “local police are not responding to calls from cinema operators when pirate camera operators are spotted and detained.”
First of all, any movie theatre that ‘detains’ ANYONE is opening themselves up for some serious litigation, both CRIMINAL and CIVIL. The laws regarding citizen arrest are very strict, and the consequences for making a false arrest are quite severe. If there are no CRIMINAL laws that you have eye-witnessed being broken (and simply holding up a camcorder is not a crime), and you arrest/detain someone, you’ve got quite a problem if it turns out you were wrong. The least of which, is that it IS LAWFUL for someone to use force to defend themselves OR OTHERS from an unlawful arrest. So if some punk teenager theatre employee thinks he’s going to “detain” someone, and gets his face smashed in for it, it’s too damn bad for him. Or if the person being ‘detained’ has friends nearby and those people end up putting Mr Theatre Employee in the hospital, too damn bad.
If you work in a theatre, don’t risk your own neck on your employers behalf. If you mess with the wrong type of customer, no matter who is right or wrong, you’ll get your teeth knocked down your goddamn throat, or maybe sued. I know if I was watching a flick and saw anyone messing with one of my friends I would use the excuse to mess up someone’s face (and I DO carry weapons in public for just such occasions, because I’m an angry, violent person.)
The same thing applies to those door-alarms in department stores that have 1000s of false-alarms daily. I just keep walking. The alarm, because it is so unreliable, does not give anyone the right to stop me (and the few times it has happened at Walmart, nobody has said anything and I keep walking.) But if someone does try anything physical like an unlawful arrest based on a store alarm, I (and many other angry people walking around this city) would take the opportunity to crack their skull wide open.
When people that are not police officers get involved in ‘fighting crime’ and ‘making arrests’ and ‘detaining perps’ they better be damn careful. That $8/hr job is not worth a $3000 dental bill, a broken jaw, or maybe your life.
January 27th, 2007 at 6:38 pm
Do studios really lose that much money to cam recordings? I mean, have you ever seen an example of one? Generally, they really suck. I can’t imagine anyone really getting much enjoyment out of seeing a dark, incomplete, and blurry movie with bad sound. I was really amused to see NBC news holding up a fake copy of “Sith” that they purchased off the street before its release and describing it as a “flawless” copy, while showing footage that looked simply awful.
January 27th, 2007 at 8:49 pm
It’s true, they should never have given the information. However, at least they were doing police work, and not acting as the cartel’s private police force.
January 28th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
And as a matter of educational interest, on the truly awful (IMHO) Star Wars flic “The illegal distribution of ‘Sith’ started during the week before its May 19 release, when Albert Valente, 28, of Lakewood took a DVD copy of the film from a post-production facility where he worked,” said the Los Angeles Daily News.
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/7741
Cheers!