The Twilight Saga: Eclipse The Movie

A Chicagoland woman did two nights time for videotaping several minutes of New Moon. Worth it?! Prolly not. But read the details of the shakedown. Clearly The Twilight folks don’t be liking Pirates!

The incident happened on Saturday afternoon, Nov. 28 when 22-year-old Samantha Tumpach, of the 3800 block of Odell Ave., Chicago, was allegedly caught videotaping the movie by theater staff. She was charged and faces up to three years in prison if convicted. The camera had four minutes of video from the movie recorded from the screen. Reports say Tumpach was with friends at the end of a birthday celebration and video taped four minutes to commemorate the celebration. Tumpach spent Saturday night, Sunday and Monday morning in a Rosemont jail cell before appearing before a judge in the Rolling Meadows courthouse where she was released on a $10,000 I Bond (no cash), said Rosemont Police Sgt. Keith Kania.

The Director of Twilight: New Moon, Chris Weitz is speaking out on behalf of the defendant. Weitz says that authorities are unfairly making an example out of Samantha Tumpach. “Needless to say, the case seems to me terribly unfair and I would like to do what I can to address this,” Weitz wrote in an e-mail to the Sun-Times.Tumpach contends that she wasn’t taping the movie, per se, but was instead making a video of her sister’s surprise birthday party.

“It was never my intention to record the movie,” Tumpach said. “You can hear me talking the whole time.”

Weitz said he will contact the film studio on her behalf. “I am not sure what effect I would have on the case. The film is, after all, not my property,” Weitz wrote to the Sun-Times. “There is, needless to say, a difference between trying to protect the copyright of a film and making an unfair example of someone who clearly seems not to have any intentions towards video piracy,” Weitz wrote. Tumpach is due in court on felony charges Dec. 17

“Theater managers are instructed to alert law enforcement authorities whenever they suspect illegal activity. Theater managers have neither the expertise nor the authority to decide whether a crime has been committed. Law enforcement professionals determine what laws may have been broken and what enforcement action should be taken,” read a portion of the statement. “It is then up to prosecutorial discretion to determine the seriousness of any charges that might be leveled. In our continuing effort to educate our guests about the illegality of film piracy, Muvico prominently places a number of posters and signs within its theaters alerting moviegoers of its “zero-tolerance” policy with respect to the camcording of films in its auditoriums.”

A spokeswoman from the Motion Picture Association of America said the cost of video piracy to the motion picture industry is estimated at $18 billion worldwide according to the most recently available statistics from 2005.

She said 90% of pirated titles in current theatrical release were made using cameras in theaters.

(Source:  NBC and JournalOnline)