Cinema swoop puts dent in pirated movies

UNNATI GANDHI
Globe and Mail

It all went down like a scene in an action film.

Shortly after midnight on a recent Friday night, a man nestled comfortably into his aisle seat beside his girlfriend at the back of a Montreal theatre, his digital camcorder atop a tripod recording the Steve Carell comedy Dan in Real Life. Meanwhile, just outside, cinema owner Vincenzo Guzzo and a team of private security guards prepared to move in.

“We walked in like a SWAT team. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Two guys went up one way, two guys went the other way, I went straight up the middle,” Mr. Guzzo, executive vice-president of the independent Guzzo cinema chain, said Tuesday.

“He had nowhere to go unless he jumped over me. And I'm 245 pounds of robust Italian hot blood.”

Police were called and a 23-year-old man became the first Canadian to be arrested and charged for illegally recording in a cinema since new legislation came into effect in June.

The arrest, which was the culmination of weeks of private investigation, has already put a huge dent in the city's normally bustling piracy industry, Mr. Guzzo said: Not a single illegally recorded movie sourced from Montreal has surfaced on the Internet since.

Montreal police spokesman Constable Raphael Bergeron said he too can't recall any illegal recording incidents from the last few weeks – significant because Montreal was recently identified as the No. 1 city in the world for surreptitious recording in theatres, topping pirating capitals in such countries as China, Lebanon and the Philippines.

It was a May visit from California Governor and onetime Terminator Arnold Schwarzenegger that prompted Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the federal government to get going on film-piracy legislation. An amendment to the Criminal Code was announced less than a month later.

Under the previous law, the federal Copyright Act, recording a movie was only a crime if it could be proved that it was for commercial distribution. The movie industry complained that the law was too difficult to enforce.

With the new legislation, filming a movie with a camcorder in theatres now carries a maximum penalty of two years imprisonment, while recording for the purpose of commercial distribution is punishable by up to five years.

Douglas Frith, president of the Canadian Motion Pictures Distributors Association, said the fact that charges have been laid in this case shows that the legislation is working.

“It could be a breakthrough case. That theatre had been targeted fairly often, more than we would have liked, so this is very significant.”

The association also credits the industry's investment in a series of technological systems.

One such system, at a cost of nearly $5,000 to the studio, was a night-vision detector set up to scan the auditorium for digital camera lenses. It was installed in the Guzzo Lacordaire cinema in question, said Gary Osmond, director of investigations for the CMPDA in Montreal.

“This was the first time we used the technology and we caught someone, so it was obviously worth the money and the research and development.”

The association is considering installing the technology in other problem theatres in Montreal and Calgary.

On top of that, studios can determine at which theatre a film was recorded because each individual reel sent out has a set of watermarks printed onto different frames, generating a unique code for every theatre.

Louis-René Haché, of Montreal, has been charged with one count of recording in a movie theatre and one count of recording in a movie theatre for commercial distribution. A reporter's attempts to contact him went unanswered.

He pleaded not guilty to both charges this month and was released on a promise to appear with the condition that he not go to any Guzzo cinemas. He is scheduled to next appear in a Montreal courtroom Jan. 21.

With a report from Tu Thanh Ha