So much for "fair use" eh?
World's biggest theater chain pressured prosecutor to charge teen...:
Xeni Jardin:
... for capturing 20 seconds of "Transformers" on her Canon Powershot, so she could share a video snippet with her kid brother. David Kravetz at Wired News blogs:
Arlington County's top prosecutor, Richard E. Trodden, tells THREAT LEVEL he was pressured by Regal Entertainment Group, the world's largest movie exhibitor, to prosecute a 19-year-old Virginia woman for filming 20 seconds of Transformers.
"What they were saying, 'Could you get her to admit that it wasn't right.' They wanted to make sure the message gets out," Trodden said in a telephone interview Wednesday. "This was kind of trying to address the concerns of the theater people, and the fact that it was not an outrageous crime."
Trodden, pictured [here], said he spoke with Randy Smith, Regal's general counsel. Messages left for Smith at the company's Knoxville, Tennessee headquarters were not immediately returned.
Jhannet Sejas, 19, pleaded guilty last week in Arlington County General District Court to one misdemeanor count of filming a motion picture in a movie house owned by Regal Cinemas. The statute, like the 37 others nationwide sponsored by the motion picture industry, deems filmgoers guilty for filming a "portion" or a "portion thereof" of a movie.
Link.