MPAA Lobbies UK To Tighten Movie Piracy Legislation

Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) president Dan Glickman is today lobbying UK film minister Margaret Hodge, advisers to prime minister Gordon Brown and the UK Film Council to make camcorder recording in cinemas a criminal offence, FT.com reports. Though cinemas are deploying ever more stringent methods (night-vision goggles, a cinema detective) to outlaw camcorders in their theatres – which are responsible for 90 percent of the pirate movies that end up on DVD and online, according to Glickman – movie distributors can still only bring civil cases against offenders, reckons the paper. (This seems a little odd since the UK has intellectual property legislation just like everyone else does.) Still, after successfully lobbying Italy, Japan and Canada to criminalise the practice, the MPAA is in town to make the case for tightening British regulation.