WB Announces Attack on Canadian Pirates

As John Horn pointed out last week in his LA Times piece about Sony's success in protecting Spider-Man 3 , ever since camcording inside a movie became a US federal crime in 2005, the MPAA has said that piracy has proliferated in Canada because their laws are much weaker. Taking that thought one step further, Warner Bros.--which is about to release Ocean's Thriteen on June 7 and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in July-- is taking the unpredented step of cancelling all promotional and word-of-mouth screenings in Canada until the government makes it illegal to bring camcorders into theaters, Variety reports today. "Within the first week of a film's release, you can almost be certain that somewhere out there a Canadian copy will show up," said Darcy Antonellis, Warner Bros. senior VP of worldwide antipiracy operations. According to Warners, more than 70 percent of all pirated Warners titles released over the past 18 months originated in Canada. However, some of our brothers in the great white north disagree that that their country is a leading source of movie piracy, saying that these kind of claims are based on "unsubstantiated and inconsistent claims about camcording, exaggerations about its economic harm and misleading critiques of Canadian law," according to Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law.