States Outlaw Digital Taping in Cinemas

Found on BizReport on Saturday, 03 January 2004
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COLUMBUS, Ohio - At a recent showing of "Big Fish," several moviegoers at a local theater held up camera-equipped cell phones and took snapshots of the screen. Doing the same with a video camera will soon be a crime.

Yet the October study by AT&T Labs questioned the impact of camera-toting movie pirates. Researchers created a list of the 312 most popular movies released between January 2002 and June 2003.

Their conclusion: 77 percent of the films came from insider sources, either motion picture companies or theater employees taping from the projection booth.

Stevenson of the MPAA says the researchers used flawed data. The movie industry says its internal analysis last year found that 92 percent of recently released movies found on the Internet came from camcorders.

Of course their data is flawed. Same goes for the data used to prove that mp3's aren't killing the music industry. Good thing we have the MPAA spokesmen who happily correct these misleading assumptions to protect us from evil influences.