p2pnet.net News:- Picture it:

Jimi Ex, 17, on his summer job as an usher in the local Roxy cinema, is told by his boss that if he can catch someone using the neat Sony (or whatever) camcorder they got for their Christmas/birthday/graduation (or whatever), there’ll be a fat REWARD!

He sees Mrs Why, a 33-year-old mother of two, acting suspiciously, pointing a shiny box at the screen. He rushes over and hauls her off to the manager’s office, in the process causing a disturbance, to the detriment of the people trying to watch the film.

It turns out Mrs Why was holding a silver-coloured candy box up to the light, trying to open it. She wasn’t doing anything wrong, but she was seriously embarrassed in front of her husband, children and friends sitting with her. The word spreads around town that she was arrested for ‘theft’ and you know what they say about mud.

It sticks.

Jimi caused the situation because he wanted to look good in front of his boss, or was drawn by the prospect of the reward. He acted unwisely and precipitously, but he gets off scot free. And Mrs Why has no legal redress.

OK – it’s far fetched. But yesterday the US senate passed a bill that would “carve out a larger role for law enforcers in the entertainment industry’s struggle to limit unauthorized copying of its movies and music,” as Reuters phrases it here.

The Artists’ Rights and Theft Prevention Act (S. 1932) from senators Dianne Feinstein and John Cornyn would establish new federal crimes for the unauthorized recording of movies in cinemas or other venues, and for “other acts relating to copyright infringement”.

As things exist, under some current state and local laws, cinema owners or employees who try to take the law into their own hands by in effect making a citizen’s arrest on someone they suspect is using a camcorder to copy a movie could be liable in criminal or civil actions if they’re wrong.

However, under the Feinstein / Cornyn ART Act, theater owners and employees would be legally able to ‘detain’ anyone they thought was trying to illegally record a movie with complete immunity from any civil or criminal liability that resulted from the ‘detention’.

The (ART Act) carries up to $250,000 in fines, three years in jail for first time ‘offenders,’ five years if they’re caught distributing for profit and 10 years inside for repeat offenders.

Thanks to many similar Acts of Cooperation between government offices and enforcement departments, the US segment of the international enterainment industry can now do pretty much what it wants.

Operation FastLink was a Hollywood-FBI venture in which Arizona schools were raided while agents searched for pirate contraband.

With US universities already enthusiastically helping the entertainment industry with its enforcement efforts against students, the FBI, RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), SIIA (Software and Information Industry Association), and ESA Entertainment Software Association) say they’re forming a “working partnership“.

What happened to the LAPD captain who was busted for the alleged sale of ‘pirated’ and counterfeit DVDs following a “joint undercover investigation” between the MPAA and Orange County District Attorney’s Office?

Then there’s the Berman / Smith FBI bill from – the “Piracy Deterrence and Education Act” – let through by the House Judiciary intellectual property subcommittee, chaired by senator James Sensenbrenner Jr.

Sensenbrenner, accused of abusing his power for the benefit of the recording industry, has joined two other keen entertainment industry enthusiasts, John Conyers, Jr, and Lamar S. Smith, to try to block the Digital Media Consumers’ Rights Act (DMCRA, HR 107).

The PDEA would among many other things boost the number of ‘anti-piracy’ cops on the Justice Department’s payroll, and order the US Sentencing Commission to revisit prison term guidelines to reflect ‘the loss attributable to people broadly distributing copyrighted works over the Internet without authorization’. Another part would require the FBI to “facilitate the sharing” of information among Internet providers, copyright holders and police.

FBI agents use National Security Letters (NSLs) to demand detailed information about people’s private Net communications from ISPs, web mail providers and other communications service providers. Authorized by the USA PATRIOT Act, they’re issued directly by FBI agents without court supervision and without probable cause.

Or how about senator Orrin Hatch’s Hollywood inspired Kill P2P Bill / PIRATE Act that amends federal copyright law so the US attorney general can, “commence a civil action against any person who engages in conduct constituting copyright infringement“? Or PROTECT under which the Justice Department could conceivably ask for, and get, wiretaps when it’s looking for alleged copyright violators – under prompting, of course.

Then there’s Hatch’s latest – the INDUCE Act.

And there are plenty of other Hollywood-inspired laws that have passed or are in process and which in effect, give the studios and recording industries enormous power to use US�enforcement agencies as they see fit.

… not that they’re really needed.

RIAA storm troopers
“Though no guns were brandished, the bust from a distance looked like classic LAPD, DEA or FBI work, right down to the black “raid” vests the unit members wore,” says Ben Sullivan in his LA Weekly story here. “The fact that their yellow stenciled lettering read ‘RIAA’ instead of something from an official law-enforcement agency was lost on 55-year-old parking-lot attendant Ceasar Borrayo”.

In 2003, Borrayo supplemented his buck-a-car income by selling records and videos from a makeshift stand in front of the lot, says the story, going on: “In a good week, Borrayo said, he might unload five or 10 albums and a couple DVDs at $5 apiece. Paying a distributor about half that up-front, he thought he’d lucked into a nice side business. The RIAA saw it differently. Figuring the discs were bootlegs, a four-man RIAA squad descended on his stand a few days before Christmas and persuaded the 4-foot-11 Borrayo to hand over voluntarily a total of 78 discs.

“It wasn’t a tough sell. ‘They said they were police from the recording industry or something, and next time they’d take me away in handcuffs,’ he said through an interpreter. Borrayo says he has no way of knowing if the records, with titles like Como Te Extra�o Vol. IV – Musica de los 70’s y 80’s, are illegal, but he thought better of arguing the point.”

And the RIAA acknowledges it all, says Sullivan – all except that staff members present themselves as police:�”Yes, they may all be ex-P.D. Yes, they wear cop-style clothes and carry official-looking IDs. But if they leave people like Borrayo with the impression that they’re actual law enforcement, that’s a mistake.”

Sure.

Night vision goggles
The MPAA, meanwhile, is encouraging movie theatre staff to make citizen arrests. Together with the National�Association of Theatre owners, it runs an Anti-Camcorder Employee Reward Program.

Cinema staff equipped with night vision goggles spy on audiences looking for suspicious activity – that’s to say, anyone who looks as if he or she is filming the feature with mini-cams such as those made by the likes of Sony, which owns one of the Big�Five record companies as well as a major studio.

When someone’s caught, they end up in the hands of the police.

It goes on and on and on. And now we have the Feinstein / Cornyn Artists’ Rights and Theft Prevention Act – a perfect companion piece to Hatch’s PIRATE Act.

Coincidentally, so far this year Feinstein has received entertainment industry support to the tune of $269,566.

Hollywood Rulz. Make no mistake about it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 26th, 2004 at 3:42 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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