Cell in Theater Could Lead to a Cell in Prison

Sometimes before advance screenings, security guards will confiscate camera phones for the duration of the movie in order to prevent piracy. Most people's reaction is to question the likelihood of someone actually pirating a movie they record with their phone. Aside from the fact that few people could be interested in such a bad-quality product, there don't seem to be any phones capable of recording an entire feature-length film. Well, ludicrous reasoning never stops the MPA from enforcing their anti-piracy policies, and now at least one man is facing imprisonment for recording a few minutes of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift onto his phone. Either they've got some better phones in Taiwan or the guy had a ton of memory cards -- the police only confiscated one additional card to the one inside the phone -- and planned to include a significant amount of gaps on his end product. He now faces a large fine and the possibility of becoming a different kind of pirate in jail. Another man in an unrelated incident was also recently caught recording the same movie on his cell phone but he was not charged because he was either able to erase the recording or his phone broke and lost its memory.

For some reason the MPAA considers cell phones the same as camcorders when dealing with piracy, and now they apparently have an example to further suspect moviegoers with camera phones (which is probably most moviegoers nowadays). At least one way of dealing with annoying cell phone users (talkers/texters) is now to report them to management as alleged pirates. If enough witch-hunting occurs, maybe we could get people to fear bringing their phones into theaters altogether. Plus there could be a cash reward from the MPAA, too. Then later we can get unwanted co-workers fired by starting the rumor that they're terrorists. Or commies. Or witches. Or pirates. Or pod people. I'll let you continue the list ...