Ellis Jacob Meets the Pirates!
p2pnet.net news:- “What keeps you awake at night?”
The subject is online movie “piracy” and the question reads remarkably like the intro to a PR handout hacked by Hollywood’s MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America).
However, it comes at the end of a Globe & Mail Q&A with Cineplex Entertainment’s Ellis Jacob who recently claimed camcording “pirates” view Montreal in Quebec, Canada, as an ideal centre for their depredations because of ” bilingual releases and lax copyright laws”.
Jacob is a hard-case, hard-core businessman who’s loyalties centre wholly on the interests of those who pay him him and, “Canada’s movie theatre owners sent a letter to Justice Minister Rob Nicholson seeking an amendment to the code that would make it a crime to record a movie in a theatre – the act of filming is not allowed, but it’s not currently a criminal offence,” he declared recently.
Furthermore, “We think (Nicholson) has to get up to speed on this quickly.”
Now Jacob is repeating a hoary PR thrust originally introduced in the last century by ex-Hollywood mouthpiece Jack Valenti.
Gangsters are behind it all (the theme to The Godfather is heard in the background), Jacob says earnestly and it, “endangers our young employees, because they are dealing with hardened criminals, for whom this is more lucrative then selling drugs”.
How are said young employees thus endangered?
As p2pnet says here, there’s a, “growing likelihood” that you, as a member of a cinema audience, will be “bounced by an usher with military grade night-vision goggles or a NATO bounty hunter who thought the box of candies you were holding up was a forbidden device”.
FightFilmTheft.org and the US National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO) are encouraging them to mix it down in the trenches (read cinema audience areas) to spot pirates in the act of using camcorders made by the likes of Sony’s (one of the Big Six movie studios who are doing all the whining) electronics arm.
A cinema ushers’ bounty hunter program offers hard cash to sleuths with flashlights who turn in patrons engaged in “illegal recording activity”.
“Piracy is very troubling,” says Jacob in the Globe & Mail Q&A.” The movie studios have sent out letters of concern and are thinking seriously about delaying the release of movies in Canada, which would be a travesty for the consumer.
“We need the co-operation of the industry and we need the laws changed, which we are working on with the federal government. It is of urgent concern because Canada is responsible for 20 per cent of the camcording that takes place worldwide. If you go into a store and shoplift a couple of DVDs, you can be charged and fined and all that other good stuff. If you come into our theatre and use a camcorder, there is not a lot we can do, other than basically issue you a trespass notice.”
Suggests the interviewer, “So you want laws with more teeth?”
Responds Jacob, “The delivery systems have changed and the laws haven’t changed to keep up with them. There are provisions in the copyright act, but they don’t go far enough. In the United States, they changed the laws, and the use of camcorders dropped dramatically. New York used to be one of the hotbeds. Where did it move to? Montreal.”
Stay tuned.
Also See:
Globe & Mail – He likes action, but pirates give him grief, February 12, 2007
declared recently – RCMP battles ‘camming’, January 30, 2007
down in the trenches – MPAA vs Kids with Camcorders, March 13, 2006
growing likelihood – We like p2p. And file sharing, August 1, 2006
made by – Sony camcorder crook, July 31, 2006
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