New Law Bans Film Piracy

Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney signed new legislation this month that makes it a felony to bring a camcorder into a movie theater and tape the show.

The new law, which passed on Nov. 17, eliminates an ambiguity in previous statutes that allowed “theft of copyrighted material on a grand scale,” Romney said in a press release.

The Bay State is now the toughest in the country on film piracy, with penalties of up to two years in prison and up to $100,000 in fines, the press release said.

This move follows the recent decision by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to start suing users of pirated online movies as the music industry has already done. But this new law focuses on the source of the counterfeit movie rather than the end user.

“We were actually very happy that Romney signed this bill,” Dan Glickman, president and CEO of the MPAA, wrote in an e-mail. “In some cases, the quality of DVDs from camcorders is virtually indistinguishable from the real thing...This bill will certainly be of help to the industry.”

However, some were dubious about the true extent of bootlegging in Massachusetts theaters and whether this law would be effective.

“In Costa Rica it is a huge business with a lot of sourcing from states like Texas, Florida and California because they have more links to third-world countries,” said Gerardo Con Diaz ’08, who bought pirated movies in his native Costa Rica, “but I actually think there’s almost no problem with bootlegging here in Massachusetts.”

Yves H. Etheart, one of the house managers at the Brattle Theatre, said that he did not know of any incidents of in-movie piracy.

Kevin S. Davis ’98, coordinator of residential computing at Harvard, agreed, casting doubt on whether the capacity for movie downloading by students would be at all affected. “I guess the question you’d have to ask,” he said, “is how much of this trading in movies comes from local locations?”

Romney spokesman Felix Browne wrote in the press release that although film piracy is not a large problem in the state, the legislation is necessary to prevent the “increasing problems” from it, which the MPAA estimates cost the entertainment industry $3.5 billion a year.

Eike Exner ’08, who frequently downloads pirated movies and music, was cynical about the effectiveness of the new law. “It won’t affect student life at all. Most pirated films are pre-show DVD rips, supplied by people in the film industry, anyway,” he said. “I think we don’t need any more copyright laws as long as the film industry is making billions of dollars.”