Will You Be Arrested The Next Time You Bring Your Camera Phone To The Movies?
from the not-so-smart dept
Rethink Research is taking on the new California law (which Hollywood is hoping to go national) which makes it a crime to have any type of video camera in a movie theater. As they point out, this is criminalizing the potential tools for a crime (which have plenty of legitimate uses) and not the crime itself. The law will allow people to make citizen's arrests, so if you happen to pull out your camera phone to answer a call in the lobby of a movie theater, prepare to be tackled by random people around you eager to throw you in jail for "stealing from American creativity." The article also makes the very important point that none of this will do anything to stop people sharing movies online - since the vast majority of them are clearly ripped from DVDs or other sources, rather than recorded live in the theater. This is just the latest in a long line of people over reacting to new technologies.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
No Subject Given
[ link to this | view in chronology ]