Gire on movie piracy: It's costing all of us
The first question I would ask video piracy suspect Gerardo Arellano would be this: "Hannah Montana: The Movie"? Are you kidding me?
That's the motion picture you're accused of illegally videotaping?
Arellano could have been charged with stealing an Oscar-nominated drama, or a critically lauded comedy.
But nooooooooooo.
The cops Friday arrested the 32-year-old Hoffman Estates resident at AMC South Barrington Theatre after someone reported seeing a man with a handicam recording "Hannah Montana," a movie that apparently felt it necessary to identify itself as a movie, so as not to be confused with an opera or a live concert.
Police charged Arellano with computer fraud, criminal use of a motion picture facility, online sale of stolen property and unlawful use of a sound recording device after searching his home and finding 44,000 DVDs and CDs, duplicating equipment and labeling equipment. Police also arrested Arellano's wife, 32-year-old Maribell Fernandez, who admitted she brought the camera to the theater and gave it to her husband, police said.
She was released on her own recognizance. A Cook County judge set Arellano's bond at $20,000 Monday.
Meanwhile, AMC officials aren't saying who fingered the piracy suspect or how he was spotted, citing security measures they understandably don't want to make public.
Arellano's arrest comes in the wake of another, bigger looting of box office booty by online pirates.
Last week, an estimated 1 million people illegally downloaded a stolen, unfinished version of 20th Century Fox's upcoming movie "X-Men Origins: Wolverine." Among them was Fox News 411 columnist Roger Friedman, who actually posted a review of the unfinished print after revealing where he got it. He's been fired.
Good.
All media people - especially film critics and columnists - have an obligation to stand up against piracy, even if the movie being pirated isn't worth stealing.
Film critics are often subjected to metal-detector wands before entering a press screening. Sometimes they must check their cell phones at the door, too.
At the height of Hollywood's anti-pirating mania, security guards even frisked Roger Ebert, apparently thinking he was packing heat in the form of video cameras and recording devices.
Look, I don't want to go all philosophical here, but stealing movies is like stealing works of art. No, it is stealing works of art.
Even if some movies aren't quite art, stealing is still stealing, and there's something about that in the Ten Commandments, I think.
In these hard economic times, we need to remember that the movies continue to give us the best bang for our entertainment bucks.
Ultimately, movie theft will drive the admission prices up for the rest of us, so we, on a bare-bones consumer level, owe it to ourselves to stop pirates.
Even those accused of videotaping "Hannah Montana."
Uh, "The Movie."