Movies, Zero Tolerance & Zero Sense

Samantha Tumpach was recently arrested and jailed. She faces the possibility of three years in prison. Did she assault someone? Rob a store? No, her crime was that while she was filming a birthday event she managed to capture a few minutes of New Moon-a crime for which the movie theater folks had zero tolerance.

Being an author, I am against the theft of intellectual property. After all, as I would regard stealing my work as wrong, I must regard the stealing of others’ work as equally wrong.  Also, it is theft and hence most of the moral arguments against stealing apply to this sort of theft as well. As such, people who try to steal movies by copying them in this manner should be subject to punishment.

Being an ethical and rational person, I am against excessive punishment and believe that the purpose of law is to serve the general good. Unthinking obedience to the letter of the law and zero tolerance tends to transform the law from an instrument of the public good to a implement of harm. I am, of course, against that.

To justly punish a person for theft, the thief would seem to be an intentional thief rather than an accidental taker. In this case, Tumpach did not seem to have any intent to steal the film (if she did, then the matter changes considerably) and her “theft” seems to be purely incidental. To use an analogy, it would be like a woman setting her purse down on the counter of a pastry shop and having a pastry stick to it by accident. When she walks out, unaware of the pastry, she is “stealing” the pastry, but it would be unreasonable to call her a thief. Likewise for Tumpach. If her video simply captures the film incidentally and does not show an intent to copy the film, then she should not be considered a thief.

Just punishment also needs to be proportional. After all, punishing a person to a degree that exceeds the wrong she did (and what is needed justly for deterrence) would simply create a new wrong that would need to be rectified. What she did does not seem to have done any meaningful harm to the owners’ of the movie and hence her arrest seems to be an injustice.

Before anyone asks, no I haven’t seen New Moon. I have seen the ads, thus leading me to infer that the werewolves in that film world spend their time in the gym getting buff rather than killing people. No doubt the older werewolves are disappointed.

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