Tipped off by the MPAA, the police went after brothers Paul and Timothy Epifan who they suspected of recording first-run movies and selling the copies on the Internet.

As the brothers left the cinema, police officers stopped them to announce that they were under arrest. Paul Epifan complied without a struggle, but according to the official report his brother Timothy fled and was pursued by police.

After a short chase of 20 seconds, during which Timothy Epifan lost his flip-flops and was running barefoot, the suspect stopped at the sight of two marked police cars. But while he was standing still, a third and unmarked police car ran into him and broke his leg in multiple places.

For this arrest with deadly force, Timothy Epifan took both the police and the MPAA to court earlier this year. He is seeking thousands of dollars in damages for the emotional, physical and economic damages he suffered as a result of the violent arrest.

The case has been dragging on for a few months with both sides making their arguments, but last week the MPAA was dropped from the lawsuit. The attorneys of both parties agreed to dismiss all claims without costs of disbursements.

The case against Somerset County police, who are accused of using deadly force to apprehend a suspect for a non-violent crime, continues. According to the original complaint, Epifan’s attorney writes that his client still can’t walk without help.

The collision with the car “left a 10-foot trail of skid marks, bone, blood and skin,” and as a result “Epifan sustained severe leg fractures, has undergone multiple surgeries, incurred hundreds of thousands in medical bills and now walks with a cane.”

Epifan himself plead guilty to the camming charges and was released from his one year prison sentence earlier this year.

Source: Injured Movie Pirate Drops Lawsuit Against MPAA

They arrested a then 31 year-old man, known online as SilentNinja, and seized all his computers, mobile phones, cameras, memory cards and hundreds of DVD backups. The raid was the result of an investigation carried out in the months before.

The investigators found several of SilentNinja’s releases on The Pirate Bay, but it was CCTV footage of the local movie theater that eventually led to the arrest. Aside from improving releases from other groups, SilentNinja also camcorded several movies on his own, and copies of those eventually ended up online.

After his arrest SilentNinja was taken to a police station where he was interviewed and released some 12 hours later. In the months that followed the police searched the seized equipment for further evidence and the Salisbury man was eventually charged with several copyright-related offenses.

Last Friday, during a hearing at the Salisbury court, SilentNinja plead guilty to distributing and selling several copyrighted movies.

For three movies – Repo Man, I Love You Phillip Morris and Ninja Assassin – he made adjustments to existing pirated movies which were then uploaded to The Pirate Bay by others. Four other movies – Resident Evil 3D, Devil, Going The Distance and Piranha 3D – he cammed himself at a local cinema and sold the copies to interested parties. These cams didn’t appear online, as far as the defense was aware.

Talking to TorrentFreak, SilentNinja said that financial and mental health issues drove him to sell pirated movies for profit.

“I only did the camming myself for financial gain, due to personal circumstances at the time. If the situation wasn’t as bad as it was, I would have never sold content as we are here to share and not profit. This is the main regret of the whole thing because of my mental state, I went against what it’s all about and that’s what pisses me off,” he says.

The arrest and the investigation that followed led to some dark months for SilentNinja, full of mixed feelings. During talks with TorrentFreak it became apparent that he still feels a strong connection to his old habit, and we were told that he plans to release some guides on how people can put the video editing skills he learned to use for legal purposes.

In the coming weeks SilentNinja will meet with the probation service to discuss his personal health issues, and they will send a letter of notification to the courts along with sentencing proposals. SilentNinja is then expected to receive his sentencing in four weeks.

Although rare, this is not the first time that someone from the UK will be sentenced for camcording and subsequently distributing movies.

Earlier this year 25-year-old Christopher Clarke from Scotland was sentenced to 160 hours of community service for camming and uploading several movies. And September 2010, then 22-year-old Englishman Emmanuel Nimley was sentenced to 6 months in jail for a similar offense.

Source: UK Movie Cammer ‘SilentNinja’ Pleads Guilty

In May we reported that Anne Muir, a 58-year-old woman from Ayr, had pleaded guilty to criminal file-sharing offences. She received three years probation.

While Muir’s case was brought following investigations by the BPI and IFPI, this latest case is the work of FACT, the Hollywood-backed Federation Against Copyright Theft.

From their monitoring of the Internet, FACT were able to trace ‘cam’ copies of movies including Big Bang, Four Lions, Iron Man 2, Kick Ass and Nanny McPhee back to Scotland. Hidden watermarks in the recordings led them directly to the Cineworld cinema in Renfrew Street, Glasgow.

In order to build their case, FACT were given access to a database of Cineworld customers who pay a set fee to watch unlimited movies each month. They found that now 25-year-old Christopher Clarke from Glasgow had watched them all.

In May last year a pre-Cannes Film Festival screening of Robin Hood was arranged for Cineworld, a golden opportunity for someone looking to get an early copy of the movie. Clarke took the bait and FACT were waiting for him.

Alerted by FACT, the police stopped Clarke as he left the cinema. They found a mobile phone hidden in a cloth enclosure, fashioned to hide the device and keep it still during recording. It contained a copy of Robin Hood. A subsequent search of Clarke’s flat revealed recordings of other films on his computer.

As we’ve learned from other cases in Britain, making a recording of a movie in a cinema isn’t necessarily illegal. However, Clarke admitted to using his girlfriend’s Internet connection to upload the movies to an unnamed “pay website”, an action which rendered his camming a criminal act.

Clarke pleaded guilty to a charge under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and was sentenced at Glasgow Sheriff Court to 160 hours of community service.

“Following the intelligence development by FACT, there was excellent co-operation from Cineworld, Strathclyde Police and the procurator fiscal to ensure that Christopher Clarke was brought to justice,” said FACT Director General Kieron Sharp.

“This individual was responsible for the recording of five films and their subsequent uploading to the internet for downloading or streaming by millions of people worldwide.”

This first-of-its-kind conviction in Scotland follows a similar English case last year. In September 2010, then 22-year-old Emmanuel Nimley was sentenced to 6 months in jail for recording movies including Alice in Wonderland and Green Zone and subsequently uploading them to the Internet.

Source: First Ever Scottish ‘Anti-Camcorder’ Piracy Conviction

Over the past decade an awful lot of money has been spent trying to mitigate the problem. Intense lobbying in the United States has transformed camming into a serious felony and pressure on other countries, Canada in particular, has significantly reduced the number of copies from these traditional sources.

But of course, there are always others ready to take up the slack and it appears that in recent times that role has been filled by Hungarian pirates. This year, probably using secret watermarks, the major studios including Sony Pictures, 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. have been tracing copies of first-run movies back to local cinemas.

While the problem has existed for some time, a source familiar with the situation believes it came to a head recently when Hangover Part II turned up online just after its premiere. Videoed in a Hungarian cinema, this copy initially had fairly limited appeal due to its dubbed local language audio. But as usual, pirates have innovative tricks up their collective sleeves.

Due to tough legislation (not to mention tools such as night-vision goggles) camming usually proves very difficult, say, in the United States. However, recording just the sound from a movie onto a small portable device is not. So, armed with the video to Hangover Part II obtained by a Hungarian release group and a soundtrack easily culled from an English-language region, pirates connected to the P2P release group ‘EP1C’ spliced the pair together producing an end product with massive appeal.

This illicit release, added to the many others coming out of Hungary this year, appears to have caused Warner Bros to run out of patience. The studio has now announced that in order to stop piracy, for the foreseeable future their movies will not be released locally, on or even close to US release dates. In addition, Warner are said to have banned midnight screenings in Hungary altogether, presumably since these quieter times are more popular with cammers.

In recent months many of the key illicit copies, including Hangover Part II, have been made available by a Hungarian release group known as CiNEDUB. Keep an eye on this group for the rest of the year for an indication of whether or not Warner’s strategy is working.

Source: Camcorder Piracy Epidemic Forces Studios To Delay Screenings

The efforts are paying off nicely though. The night vision goggles helped to spot Batman and Bond pirates and a Virgina teenager was busted a while back for recording a few seconds of the movie Transformers on her cell-phone. The only thing she wanted to do was show it to her 13 year old brother, however, the alert theater staff called in the police and the girl was arrested.

With one of the latest inventions by Prof. Babaguchi and colleagues, catching cammers might become even easier. While video-based watermarks are already used in theaters in order to determine which screen the movie was recorded from, new technology makes it possible to watermark the audio of films too.

The audio watermarks go much further though, as they can pinpoint almost the exact location that the pirate was in when he recorded the movie. This so called spread-spectrum audio watermarking does not spoil the subjective acoustic quality and is fairly accurate in estimating where the offender was seated.

With a mean estimation error of only 44 centimeters, it might be a seat off every now and then, but those are worries for later. To use the technology successfully, however, the theater has to keep a database with info on the identity and seating position of each member of the public so the offenders can be handed over to the police afterwards.

These administrative tasks can of course take place while waiting in line for the metal-detector, and might even come in handy to contact someone who forgot to pick up his phone after the movie ended. The movie-goers can still enjoy a great night out if they pass all the nice security checks and they wont be bothered by any buzzing camcorders anymore.

Everyone wins really.

Source: Audio Watermarks Locate Camcording Pirates

This week MPAA chairman Dan Glickman is visiting the UK to talk to UK film minister Margaret Hodge, advisors to the UK prime minister Gordon Brown, and representatives from the UK Film Council. Glickman will probably sum up the familiar made-up statistics we read in every MPAA press release to convince the lawmakers that pirates are in fact terrorists.

Crazy or not, unfortunately it seems like their approach is working. Theater owners slowly start to alienate their customers and go as fas as using metal detectors and night-vision goggles to track down movie cammers. Everyone could be a pirate these days and theater employees are trained and rewarded up to $500 for catching pirates.

As a result, a Virgina teenager was busted for recording a few seconds of the movie “Transformers” on her cell-phone. The only thing she wanted to do was show it to her 13 year old brother, however, under a new Zero-Tolerance Policy, police responded to the call from Regal Cinemas who promptly arrested Sejas.

On a sidenote, Hollywood just had its best summer ever. In a response to this great news MPAA chairman Dan Glickman said “As Shakespeare said, ‘The play is the thing.’ As long as we offer good quality stories that people like and a comfortable place to see them, people will go to the movies.” A comfortable place? Right.

Source: MPAA Pushes Lawmakers to Criminalize Movie Camming

The recording didn’t cause any losses to Regal Cinemas nor the producers of Transformers, but still Regal Cinemas decided to prosecute to make an example of her..

The Arlington County prosecutor, Richard Trodden, told a Wired blogger that Regal Cinema continued to press the case. “They were saying, ‘Could you get her to admit that it wasn’t right.’ They wanted to make sure the message gets out.”

Indeed, Sejas did later state, “I totally forgot that I was not allowed to do that. I did it without thinking clearly.

In a plea agreement, Sejas pleaded guilty and paid a $71 fine for making an Unlawful Audiovisual Recording of a Motion Picture, a misdemeanor that could have resulted in a fine of up to $2500 and a year in jail. The law was placed on the books in Virgina and 37 other states under pressure by the Motion Picture industry.

Neither Regal Cinemas nor the producers of Transformers stood to take a loss from Sejas’ sharing of a 20-second cell-phone quality clip. The reason it did not occur to Sejas that she was doing something wrong is because she had no criminal intent! Note that Sejas was not charged with any copyright violation, as showing her brother a 20-second low-quality clip certainly would have fallen under Fair Use.

The MPAA decided years ago that copyright laws were not enough in their favor. Instead, the industry had to create new laws that avoided copyright altogether, wait for innocent victims like Sejas to stumble into them, and then make an example of them.

Source: Regal Cinemas Make Example out of Teen for 20 Second Transformers Recording

Sejas and her boyfriend were promptly escorted out of the movie theater, still confused about what just happened. “I was crying, I’ve never been in trouble before.”, she later said in a response to the trip to the police station.

Of course Sejas had no intention to sell the 600 millisecond clip, she wasn’t even planning to put it on YouTube. The only thing she wanted to do was show it to her 13 year old brother, who was dying to see the movie himself. Unluckily theater owners just introduced their new zero-tolerance policy since everyone can be a pirate.

Kendrick Macdowell, a representative National Association of Theater Owners said in a response: “We cannot educate theater managers to be judges and juries in what is acceptable. Theater managers cannot distinguish between good and bad stealing.”

Good and bad stealing? Nuts!, the guy obviously has no clue what he’s talking about. If all theater owners treat their customers like this they will start to lose even more money than they already do now. And guess who they will be blaming? Right, Pirates.

Sejas will go to trial later this month for recording a motion picture without permission, and is facing up to a year in jail and a $2,500 fine. Seriously unbelievable.

Source: Teen Arrested for Recording 20 Second Movie Clip

The MPAA claims that New York is a pirate movie haven and with a claimed 43% of all camcorded movies originating from the city, it was just a question of time before Major Bloomberg’s and the MPAA’s anti-piracy campaign – coupled with new legislation – claimed its first scalp.

According to reports, police descended on the American Theater on East Avenue in Parkchester, after warning theater workers in advance that they were about to conduct a sting to arrest a known movie ‘cammer‘ at a sneak preview of the new movie ‘Transformers’.

After waiting until the end of the screening on Monday night, Kalidou Diallo, 48, was surrounded by seven plain clothes officers, arrested and subsequently charged with the new anti-piracy misdemeanor. He had been allegedly filming or ‘camming’ the movie, utilizing a hidden camera and digital recorder.

The manager of the American Theater, Justin Hill, said that the authorities knew that his theater was the source of the ‘cams’. “The movie companies … knew it was coming from our theater,” he said. “We were taking heat for it because we weren’t catching anyone.”

Under the previous law, getting caught meant up to 15 days in jail and $250 fine. The new measures signed in May 1, makes ‘camming’ a misdemeanor offense, which means that Diallo is facing a possible 6 months in jail, accompanied by a $5,000 fine.

Source: ‘Transformers’ Movie-Cammer Facing Prison