And in the most recent “americans are stupid” * news:
19 years old Jhannet Sejas was arrested today for capturing 20 seconds of the new “Transformers” movie on her digital camcorder. [The Washington Post] [Daily Press] [ABC news].
The girl of course wasn’t aware that she was doing anything wrong, but according to a new copyright law passed in 2005, recording a motion picture in a theater is a crime regardless of the reason and use for the copy. I’m not aware of the specific details of this absurd law, so it might not actually prohibit this specific behavior (capturing a very small subset of the whole work), but in any case the specific law under which Jhannet Sejas will be tried on August 21 flies in the face of common copyright practices.