The Washington Post features a story on a 19th year old who filmed a 20 second clip of Transformers in a theatre to show her brother. She now faces up to a year in jail and a $2,500 fine.
What the Spring Legislation Might Mean, Part Two
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What of Context?
Quoth Kendrick Macdowell, general counsel for the Washington-based National Association of Theatre Owners per the article: “We cannot educate theater managers to be judges and juries in what is acceptable…Theater managers cannot distinguish between good and bad stealing.”
Appalling. Common sense and contextual understanding is ruled out as a matter of policy for theatre managers, then?
Stealing and Sharing
Good and bad stealing?
Copyright steals the public’s liberty and grants it to the cinematographer.
The cultural exchange of discussing, sharing, and building upon artistic works is a human right that has been suspended as a commercially valuable reward to the publisher.
It’s time the publisher learnt to survive on money alone as compensation, rather than scream blue murder when the public unwittingly forget their liberty to share is supposed to be suspended as additional compensation.
I’ll tell you what ‘good stealing’ is, it’s when the public takes back the liberty that has been stolen from it.
If you remember, copyright was only supposed to suspend the liberty of a few PRINTING PRESS owners, not the liberty of the entire populace.
What we really need is some constitution challenge along the lines of “ordinary Canadians aren’t bound by laws that are too complicated for them to figure out without hiring a lawyer”.
People generally don’t check through the statute books before they do something – they rely on the fact that the law generally institutionalises reasonable behaviour and they don’t do things that are unreasonable.
Copyright law (especially in the US) is more-and-more outlawing reasonable behaviour by ordinary citizens. I shouldn’t need to hire a lawyer to figure out whether backing up something I’ve bought, making a mix-tape, or modifying my PS3 to run Linux are legal.
(Note that under my rules if you’re making, or trying to make, a profit, you can and should hire a lawyer to figure out whether your business model is legal).