Cinema Guzzo Faces $10K Damage Award for Invasive Search

June 1, 2009

Cinema Guzzo, a Montreal-based theatre chain, has been ordered to pay $10,000 in damages arising from the search of a patron's bag that violated their privacy rights. The lawsuit over the "abusive search" was first filed in July 2007. While this case has nothing to do with copyright, how long will it be before the case is cited by U.S. copyright lobby groups as further evidence that Canada is hostile to their interests.

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2 Comments

Tant pis says:
June 1, 2009 at 12:46 pm

Too bad it wasn’t $100,000.

Too bad is was in Quebec and therefore won’t likely to be a precedent in the ROC.

Too bad that people are dumb enough to subject themselves to such degrading searches – after all, this is not international airline travel. Nobody is forced to attend first run Hollywood movies.

Too bad that the Competition Bureau is DOA.

Too bad that there is not a boycott of cinemas such as this one.
Norman Farrell says:
June 1, 2009 at 2:07 pm

Be fair. That patron might have been smuggling a bag of candy that someone gifted or some less concerned vendor provided at a fraction of Cinema Guzzo’s price. If you complain about that, next you will complain that Microsoft or some other company cannot search my computer and change setting like my browser’s homepage or file associations. How can Adobe cope if people keep removing Acrobat’s file rights and changing to the tiny perfect pdf reader from Foxit.

http://northerninsights.blogspot.com/