Fair and balanced - Camcorder pirate faces 17 years
A nineteen year old in Missouri was caught video taping "Bewitched", then uploading it to a peer-to-peer network. For this, he faces up to 17 years in prison under federal law.
This case illustrates a couple points. First, RIAA's lobbying is more effective than violent crime victims' lobbying. But RIAA has more money, so that's fair.
The second point is more important. As long as people can see or hear movies or music, they can record them.
Most recent efforts around DRM center on the idea of supporting consumers rights through degraded duplication. Record labels include low bitrate tracks on CDs they'll allow people to copy to players. HDMI interfaces between players and televisions force protected signals to drop to a lower quality when routed through a recording device. DVD players and satellite receivers aren't allowed to output through Firewire. This is a largely rational approach. If a consumer wants a "master" quality recording, buy one. Otherwise, tape it from the radio.
But this is where I get lost when figuring out how the sentence fits the crime for 19 yo Curtis Salisbury.
I don't see the huge moral leap from taping a song on the radio to taping a movie in the theater. Certainly not 17 years worth. Okay, it's the whole movie, but many radio stations play entire albums. In fact, I'd argue there is no comparison---a videotaped movie just can't compete. I'm perfectly willing to sit through a cassette someone taped off FM, but I've seen the results of a handheld videocamera in a theater and it isn't pretty. If you've seen the Seinfeld episode in which Kramer tapes art movies, you've got the right idea. I won't sit through one of those. With options like Netflix and all the movies you can eat for $14.95, who would want to? Only people that aren't part of the market for the product anyway. If the strategy really is degraded duplication, Curtis's product represents no danger to Hollywood.
Maybe Hollywood should take a closer look at themselves. Last I heard, 77% of movies on P2P networks had been leaked by insiders. The other 23% have some guy's head in the way.