brainwagon

Reuters is reporting that the Senate has just passed a bill that makes using a camcorder to record a movie a federal crime. punishable by up to three years in prison, or up to five years in prison if such recordings were made for commercial purposes.

On the one hand, I work for the movie industry. I also try to respect intellectual property laws, and think there is no legitimate excuse for video taping a movie inside a theater.

But get real! Three to five years?

The MPAA would have you believe that these bad theater recordings cost them billions in lost revenue, but such estimates are ludicrous and self serving. If they were really true, you’d be able to go back through the inflation adjusted ticket sales for the last thirty years, and note a marked decrease in the amount of money that theaters take in. It does appear that it’s possible that overall box office revenues will fall this year, but this may in fact be due to the lack of a new Lord of the Rings movie during the holiday season. (Don’t count this year out though, Shrek2, Spiderman 2, and hopefully the Incredibles will do all they can to reverse that trend).

But you could read this CNN article for some more perspective on the changing fortunes of the movie business. Quoting:

First is that much of the gain in revenue can be traced to increases in the average movie ticket prices — the 2004 average of $6.25 a ticket is up almost 25 percent from 1999 levels.

And…

The cost of making and marketing movies has continued to rise over this period. Last year saw a record 29 films cross the $100 million mark in terms of U.S. box office. But about two thirds of those films also saw their production and marketing budgets cross the $100 million mark, with two — “Matrix Reloaded” and “Terminator 3” reaching the $200 million level. It led to a total of eight films that could be described as blockbuster bombs — not equaling their cost in U.S. box office, despite hitting the nine-figure mark that used to signify a sure hit.

Lastly, the real threat to movie profits isn’t these low quality, camcorder recordings that are circulated on the internet. If someone thinks that these low quality recordings are an adequate substitute to going out and seeing the movie for themselves in a real theater or buying a real DVD, then they aren’t going to the theater in the first place. The real threat comes from theaters and studios themselves releasing high quality copies of movies to overseas marketers who then produce high quality black market copies. But this bill does nothing to address these copies. We already have tough laws (civil and criminal) to deal with this kind of industrial espionage.

The idea that you could spend more time in prison for making a bad video recording of a film than you could for getting drunk and running someone over with a car is ludicrous, and part of an escalation in criminal penalties for non-violent intellectual property crimes, many of which cannot be even shown to cause any monetary damage.

Congress should be smacked.