Things you won’t be able to do in Boston with a camera
According to The Boston Globe (link will break soon), Governor Mitt Romney is ready to sign into Massachusetts law a bill that can send you to jail for two years for secretly videotaping nude or “partially nude” people without their knowing it. (Hmm, aren’t we all partially nude most of the time?) Ok, fine, although why the article’s author calls nudie-snappers “video pirates” is beyond me.
Stores can suspend the law so that they can still videotape us in fitting rooms so long as they post a notice and avoid snickering out loud.
The article then adds, without explanation:
The ”anticamcorder” portion of the bill is designed to fight the growing global market in pirated films. The bill is the brainchild of the Motion Picture Association of America, which is pushing similar legislation state by state in the hopes of attacking the piracy problem at its roots.
I’m guessing that Massachusett’s law is modeled on the California Anti-Camcorder Bill (SB 1032) that has resulted in people who attend screenings having to go through metal detectors and be subject to surveillance via night-vision goggles. Ah, 1984!
Not to mention what’s the point of going to a screening if you can’t masturbate to it using a metal glove?
Categories: Uncategorized dw
This reminds me of that story…
And I think this is the type of law problems that are a hell of a lot worse than blockbuster movie pirating!
From what I remember of the story… An adult daughter moved back in with her parents, into her old bedroom which had been converted into her father’s computer room. Her father deliberately left his web cam on, apparently regularly, without the daughter’s consent or knowledge.
After awhile I guess, when she was using his computer, she found a bunch of video files of her undressing and naked and such.
When she tried to take legal action, she found she couldn’t, PLUS, she had to surrender back to him the videos of her naked – because by law, they were his videos, and because she was not a minor, there was nothing illegal about what he did.
I can’t find the story on-line, I’m not sure when it actually happened, or in what state. But I do know the story aired on some ABC prime time news show in the spring of 2003.
Anyway, I always assumed that the father had the video tapes of his daughter undressing, and heaven knows what else, because he was some kind of pervert. Though I guess there’s a possibility he was a “video pirate” and selling these videos… If that was the case, I guess you could use the term “video pirate”?
As for video taped movies unreleased on DVD… I had no clue that was such a big deal up until this past year when a family member was stationed in Baghdad, and a friend moved to Belgrade. In both places the streets are apparently teeming with pirated dvd movie vendors.