I was all set to write a scathing critique of Mark Helprin’s idiotic plea for perpetual copyright in the New York Times. But I see Lawrence Lessig has set up a wiki page devoted to dismantling Helprin’s argument, so I guess I don’t have to.
Warner Brothers has announced that it’s not going to show advance screenings of its big summer movies in Canada, because 20-25% of pirated copies of movies are made by recording the movies with camcorders in Canadian theatres.
Michael Geist has been all over this story for a while now, so I won’t go into detail here — except to note my annoyance at the lobbyists’ claim that camcording a movie in a movie theatre is not against the law in Canada. That’s blatantly untrue. We don’t have legislation that specifically addresses camcording, but it definitely counts as infringement under our copyright laws.
I wish Hollywood would spend less money on lobbyists who lie to the press, and more on improving the quality of their films. Spider-Man 3 sucked.
(Incidentally, the CTV news item linked above is a remarkably shoddy piece of journalism. Halfway through the article, the author says, “Filming inside a theatre is not a criminal offence in Canada, and theatre owners are lobbying Ottawa to bring in tougher laws to combat the practice.” Yet the end of the very same article has this sentence: “The maximum fine under the federal Copyright Act is $1 million and five years in jail for camcording a movie for commercial distribution.” And large chunks of the article simply repeat stuff from this article from last January, sometimes word for word.)