Jacqui Cheng - Oct 29, 2008 5:17 pm UTC
A man caught recording movies in a theater with a camcorder has been sentenced to almost two years in prison following his guilty plea earlier this year. Michael Dwayne Logan had filmed two movies—28 Weeks Later and Enchanted—on their day of release with a high-definition JVC Everio Model GZHD7U camcorder, apparently with the intent of selling the copies on DVD, and police believe they have linked him to another 100 unauthorized movie copies in circulation.
Logan was originally caught filming in a movie theater in late 2007, when the theater's surveillance system observed him setting up a camera to record Enchanted. Law enforcement was dispatched and Logan was arrested on the spot. Upon examining the hard drive of Logan's camcorder, police found roughly 50 minutes of Enchanted.
Police were then able to analyze certain patterns in his recording—Logan's voice, the image of Logan using a cell phone while recording the movie, the use of a baseball cap to hide the camera—to link Logan to an illegal copy of 28 Weeks Later that they had obtained in May. Eventually, Logan pleaded guilty to two felony counts for recording both films.
In fact, investigators claim that similar patterns were found in more than 100 other pirated films originating in the Baltimore and Washington, D.C. area, and they believe that Logan is the origin of many camcorder-recorded films on the DVD black market. According to court documents for Logan's sentencing, the MPAA stated that it believes Logan is responsible for eight percent of all pirated versions of those particular films online, and seven percent of pirated DVDs around the globe.
For the purposes of this case, though, investigators kept things limited to films that exhibited three or more of Logan's characteristics. Logan apparently admitted to his probation officer that he made a living by selling illegal copies of movies, and that he had earned a "decent" amount of money so far. "Had Defendant Logan not been caught, copies of his recording of Enchanted undoubtedly would have made their way to street vendors and Internet sites that facilitate the piracy of motion pictures," reads his sentencing document.
In the end, Logan was sentenced to 21 months in prison (a sentence that was reduced dramatically by his plea agreement) under the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005, Article 18. Additionally, all of his unauthorized audio-visual "works" will be confiscated and destroyed. Of course, as pointed out by TechDirt, this makes us curious as to why the MPAA has been pushing for new and harsher camcording laws if current law is already putting camcorder pirates in jail. It doesn't sound as if Logan's offerings were of the highest quality either, if agents were able to identify things like his voice and his use of a cell phone in practically all of his movies. When there are a plethora of prerelease DVD rips available online before most movies even hit the silver screen, lobbying for tougher camcording laws really seems to be an exercise in pointlessness.
