Copyright Outrage: Woman Arrested for Taking Birthday Pictures at a Twilight Movie Party

This is the opening of “Five Reforms for Copyright,” by law professor Tom Bell (one of the handful of IP attorneys to publicly oppose IP),¹ his chapter in the recent book Copyright Unbalanced: From Incentive to Excess:

ON NOVEMBER 28, 2009, police arrested a 22-year-old Chicago woman named Samantha Tumpach, jailed her for two nights, and charged her with “criminal use of a motion picture exhibition”—a felony offense punishable with up to three years in prison. Her crime? She had captured two brief clips of The Twilight Saga: New Moon while recording her family’s surprise birthday celebration for her sister, who had come to the theater to watch the film.² Tumpach copied under four minutes of the movie in total and obviously had no intention of making a bootleg for resale. “You can hear me talking the whole time,” she explained.³ Officials eventually dropped the charges, but the damage had been done. Tumpach brought suit for malicious prosecution, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligence, and defamation.⁴ Her complaint did not, however, name the ultimate cause of her distress: a copyright regime that has grown too big and too powerful.

1. See Patent Lawyers Who Oppose Patent Law; also Reason.TV: Too Much Copyright; Bell’s draft book, Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good; The Great Debate on Intellectual Property, in Cato Policy Report (January/February 2002); Tom Bell: Copyright Erodes Property?; Tom W. Bell on Intellectual Property; other copyright writing by Bell. [↩]
2. Dan Rozek, “Woman Arrested for Trying to Record ‘Twilight’ on Digital Camera,” Chicago Sun-Times, December 2, 2009. [↩]
3. Ibid. [↩]
4. Aliyah Shahid, “Twilight Taper, Samantha Tumpach, Sues Illinois Theater after Taping Twilight Saga: New Moon,” New York Daily News, June 29, 2010. [↩]