Who wants to watch a crappy camcorder copy anyway. If I want to see it I'll either pay to see it on the big screen or I pay to get it on DVD. If someone shows me a copy first, I'll still do one of those two things.

If he had made a couple of copies for friends, yes.

With over 1200 copies burned to DVD in his house, from the sounds of it, that is a professional pirating operation, a different kettle of fish.

I think the sentence is harsh but I dont have any sympathy for these idiots. He knew walking into the cinema with a camcorder that he was doing wrong. He got caught and now he gets punished. Dont want to be punished? The dont take a fecking camcorder into the bloody cinema!!

Exactly my point. Camcording is gay, but file sharing and copies for mates is a different thing. Trying to sell camcorder copies is ludicrous and the guy deserves everything he gets.

This isn't a rare thing. Trading Standards regularly conduct raids at residential addresses and recover hundreds, if not thousands of counterfeit discs.

I still don't agree with prison terms for it. Why should the full force of criminal law be used to protect faceless corporations? I don't see criminal law being used to punish said corporations when they infringe the copyright of others. Instead in that instance the civil courts must be used, so I don't see why the big film/music/game companies should be any different.

The only time I can ever envisage a prison term being appropriate is if the counterfeit put lives at risk (e.g. counterfeit electronic goods).

I dont know the law but Elspa state on their website that piracy is a criminal offence:



Also FACT say:



I found this link useful too when looking into this.

So now I dont know. Is it criminal or not?

ELSPA are a joke. They have some pretty funny interpretations of the law - I once had a guy from ELSPA try to convince me that a law could be bent to criminalise people who weren't carrying on in "the course of a business" - even though the law specifically exempted those who were not committing piracy for profit.(Specifically he was referring to home users who get their consoles chipped - S.296ZB of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988).

Yes there are criminal offences with regard to piracy - I don't necessarily agree with them. Why should the taxpayer foot the bill for protecting the trade marks of corporations?

I only agree with Trading Standard et al becoming involved if people are being mislead into buying fake goods. I want to see consumers protected, not media industry giants.

You could we're being protected from [LIFTED] camcorder copies. An important public service in my book.

If they're being genuinely mislead then that's one thing but most people know exactly what they're buying.

+1

Sorry Linux_User, but I don't buy it. If he was making a copy for himself or giving it to a friend, fine, but he is making a business out of somebody else's product. Regardless of whether you like the film industry or not, it is still wrong and he should be prosecuted for it, and given the number of copies he had, it sounds like he was running a business selling camcorder copies. He got what he deserved.