There is a problem in Canada - they have an unusually large community of film pirates who take camcorders into the theaters, tape the movies, and upload them to the internet. 20th Century Fox says it’s considering witholding its movies from theatres in which these illegal tapes are made:

Failing that, Fox will delay the release of its movies in Canadian cinemas to stop the theft of its product by increasingly emboldened movie pirates. “If taking cinemas out of the system doesn’t work, we’ll move Canada back a couple weeks and no longer do day-and-date releases for our movies,” he (Bruce Snyder, president of domestic distribution at Fox) added.

Probably the latter option is pure scare tactics, because even among the gentle Canadians hunger for movies would  cause an INCREASE in day and date downloading. According to Reuters, there is no Canadian law against “camcording” in theaters and presumably Fox would like to see that changed.

This first option, boycotting theaters, is much less objectionable and happens all the time for a variety of reasons, not just piracy. And the alternative isn’t so bad - theaters hire more ushers to monitor the auditoriums, looking for that little red LED trained on the screen. While he’s in there he can stop that guy from talking and that other couple from making out in the back row. Free market solution, everybody wins, though the exhibitors are taking the hit. Believe me, the exhibitors can afford it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 25th, 2007 at 1:55 am and is filed under Digital Wonderland, General, Motion Pictures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.