88-Year Old Man Caught Taping Avatar With A Camcorder
from the at-least-they-let-him-go dept
There's this impression out there, among some, that copyright infringement is just something that the young do. The truth is, of course, that plenty of people infringe on copyrights all the time, for perfectly natural reasons (even some of the strongest copyright supporters do it as well). And the reasons they do it is because they don't even realize they're infringing. Our natural inclination to share something we like outweighs an arcane set of laws that still haven't been shown to actually encourage greater creation of quality content. Case in point: an 88-year-old man in Australia wanted to go see the movie Avatar with his wife -- but she was unable to make it to the theater. So the guy brought along his camcorder (and his walking stick) to record the movie and share it with his wife, so they could experience it together. Now, for any compassionate human being, this is a tale of sweetness. What a thoughtful thing this guy wanted to do for his wife.But the industry doesn't see it that way. To them, it's still "piracy" and a problem. To be honest, if the movie industry stopped with its silly "windowing" concept, this wouldn't have been a problem at all. The studio easily could have released Avatar on DVD at the same time as the movie came out. Tons of people would have still gone to see it in the theater (it's the type of movie that many people very much wanted to see in the theater -- especially where there were 3D or IMAX options). Hell, if they had made it an option to buy the DVD on the way out (perhaps giving a discount if you had a ticket stub), I'm sure plenty more people would have shelled out for the DVD, as well. And, the 88-year-old man in Australia could have simply bought or rented the DVD and shared the whole experience with his wife.
Instead, the studio forbids that sort of thing, and so the thoughtful husband becomes a criminal. Thankfully, while the police were called, it appears they chose not to arrest the man. They just deleted the film from his video camera, and then let him stay for the rest of the film.
