Please, Sir, May I Have Another?
Posted by MoreCoffeePlease on 29 Aug 2007 at 04:40 pm | Tagged as: Business
Two years for taping a bit of a movie for your own personal use? WTFF? Could the government bend over any farther to the industry lobbyists?
Posted by MoreCoffeePlease on 29 Aug 2007 at 04:40 pm | Tagged as: Business
Two years for taping a bit of a movie for your own personal use? WTFF? Could the government bend over any farther to the industry lobbyists?
They are also training dogs to sniff out DVDs so they can stop DVDs from being imported. Who knew DVDs had a certain smell?
http://tinyurl.com/3bwsem
I suppose everything has a smell of some sort.
I suspect the personal use clause is to avoid having to prove beyond reasonable doubt that it was for resale–a burden of proof issue rather than an issue of substantive law. (How many people actually pay $13 to go into a theatre and tape a movie just for personal use?)
Actually, now that I’ve read the backgrounder properly, that seems to be the issue they’re trying to address.
It does create a possible ignorance of law issue, since I suspect it probably wouldn’t occur to the kind of person who really *would* go into a movie theatre to tape a movie for genuine personal use that this might result in criminal liability.
I was thinking of that kid in the States that recently got busted for using her cameraphone to tape 20 seconds of some movie for her brother, who couldn’t be there. Yeah. Because 20 seconds of cameraphone-quality film is a threat to democracy and life as we know it…
The phrase “prosecutorial discretion” comes to mind. Especially since it would be in the youth system anyway. Bizarre though.