"When the elder Glickman called his son to tell him of the find, the response was immediate. "He said, 'What are you going to do about it, Dad?' " Dan Glickman recalls.

Glickman, the new head of the Motion Picture Association of America, heard the question often last week at the ShoWest convention of theater owners.

The MPAA estimates that piracy costs Hollywood $3.5 billion a year in lost ticket sales and home video rentals. Glickman has spent much of his first year on the job lobbying lawmakers to make videotaping in a theater a federal crime. Currently, 20 states have laws against the practice, a felony in most states.

Glickman, a former congressman who took the job after Jack Valenti retired last year, calls piracy "a potential dagger poised at the heart of the motion picture industry."

Theater owners are feeling the threat as well.

"You'll show your movie on opening weekend, and you'll see it out on DVD the next week," says Robert Beall, owner of Weatherford Cinema 10, a multiplex in Weatherford, Texas. "You can have your projectionists looking for people with cameras. But what are we going to do? Send everybody through metal detectors?"

Though some piracy occurs in the labs and production houses, most pirated films, Glickman says, are "from people sitting in the back of the theater with camcorders."

Glickman says the best tool may simply be informing the thieves it's not a victimless crime.

"OK, an A-list actor isn't going to be hurt by it. This industry employs 750,000 people, most of whom don't make a ton of money. They're hurting everyday folks just trying to make a living."

From http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2005-03-20-pirated-dvds_x.htm
==========SNIP==============
'What are you going to do about it, Dad?' ----Geez Louise...want some cheese with that whine? What a lamer!

Where's old "Manny the Stunt Man"....????

The quality of video that comes out on the net from these theater recordings will not effect sales.

If anything, when the movie is good enough people will want to go out and see it on the big screen.

The MPAA, like the RIAA. Stuck in a monolithic business model that is almost as old as the dinosaur. They need to get with the program or suffer the consequences.

'What are you going to do about it, Dad?'

Notice there is no answer to this question.

MrDude...i agree..i have d/led alot of movies. but the good ones...i see in the theater. cant do w/o that big screen.

I did see one camcorder movie once on VCR. Could not count the times someone stood up and walked across. You had this black ghost in the middle.
'What are you going to do about it, Dad?'
Well son, them pirates out there are just so mean. They fly the Jolly Rodger and with the black beer and eye patch,and the camcorders that they have. Some of the projectionist will get hurt or maybe even god forbid even die. We need to have the police in every theater. By god Congress should make it a felony to even own a camcorder. Well son we'll tell congress we lost 3.5 billion and they will do it for us. They will never know how much we really lost. If we lost anything.Who cares we pay them to do what we want.

They don't have to wait as far as I go, they are already suffering the consequences of practicing financial terrorism. I won't spend my money on products whose companies have business practices I strongly disagree with. They won't have to wait for some week in April, nor for some short term time that I will continue to do this. As long as they continue to do such actions I will continue to boycott them. Over the space of a year that should be a tidy sum from me alone. Merry Christmas ahead of time, MPAA and RIAA.

a potential dagger poised at the heart of the motion picture industry."

Sounds like a Valenti quote about the Boston Strangler.

Ask Dan If he wants wahburgers with his french cries.

I have to ask.. do they have estimates on what manipulating and locking down TV standards, sueing random people, and baselessly ravaging random weblogs and fansites loses them in revenues due to angry consumers?

I'm just interested in weather theyve done a study.

they dont have to study when they can make stuff up

Why should anyone care if you take a camcorder into a movie house? Geez.

I agree that you should arrest/sue bootleggers who hawk illegal copies on the streetcorner, but even that does't hurt ticket sales all that much, and the industry knows it.

What the RIAA/MPAA are REALLY trying to do with all their whining about so called "piracy" is to destroy the Internet as we know it. They want to turn it into nothing more than a glorified TV with a "top-down" paradigm with the RIAA/MPAA controling all the available content.

Two things that have done more damage to the movie sales then file sharing would have to be 1) Lousy formulaic script writing. Example my girlfriend talked me in to going to see Constantine about a month back. The plot was so formulaic that within the first third of the movie I had predicted the ending. The saving grace was we went to see it at a Cinerama Theater where the massive screen and sound system made the visual effects worth the matinee price. This brings me to factor 2) Multiplex theaters, does it really suprise anyone that you have a harder time convincing people to spend $10 a ticket to watch a movie on a screen much smaller than a Cinerama screen in a seat not much bigger than an airline seat in an undersized screening room with inadequate air conditioning?

my dad sends me bootleg DVD's from Afghanistan because i'm a huge anime fan. any of these animes that are good ones, i go out and buy better copies (i own the entire Hayao Miyazake collection due to this, including a couple i'd never heard of previously).
i rarely see movies in the theaters anymore, mostly due to them being total crap. the only non-anime movie released in the last year i wanted to see in theaters was Shaun of the Dead, but it didn't come out here. oh well, i got it on netflix. but with my limited budget, do you really think i'm going to shell out ten bucks to watch some generic action/horror/romance/sci-fi movie that isn't worth the rental price? while being forced into those godawful seats with nauseating odors all around form half-cleaned spills?
i'm only 18 years old. i still have a good 50 or 60 years of movie viewing before i die. if the industry continues as it has been the past few years, i'll go to the theater maybe 4 times more before i die. how much revenue is that?

bet they blame it on me downloading movies too

What's really hurting ticket sales is the fact that they keep cranking out craptastic movies like Taxi, or anything starring Ben Afleck. If they'd like to win back theatre-goers, they should stop letting everyone with a lame assed idea and Rob Schneider on speed dial waste money and film.

Oh, also, I'd go see more films if there wasn't an hour wait filled with commercials from the showtime to the films end.

But hey, on the bright side, there's a second run movie house in town that will feed you and show you a movie for less than the cost of a ticket to the first run house. Just perfect for my strange fixation on thoroughly stupid action movies.