Montreal Theatres Catch Movie Pirates With Night-Vision Goggles

It seems that Pirates of The Caribbean haven’t been the only naughty pirates this summer. They’re also not the only thieves appearing in Vince Guzzo’s movie Theatres. There have been so many cinema-goers who have smuggled video recorders into Guzzo’s 12 Montreal cinemas to pirate films, he’s resorted to using night-vision goggles to catch them in the dark.

Guzzo, 38 has said, “I caught four people trying to camcord `Pirates of the Caribbean. There are two types of people doing this: One type does it for kicks, then you have the professional criminal.”

This latest story goes to show what effect on Hollywood Studio movie pirates have. Guzzo has claimed to have caught at least a dozen, including a very sneakey patron trying to film the movie with a camera hidden inside his motorcycle helmet!

An astonishing one in six movie copies made illegally by recording from the screen comes from Montreal, so say the Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association whose members include Time Warner Inc.’s Warner Bros. Entertainment and News Corp.’s Twentieth Century Fox.

Barry Newstead, a Toronto-based vice president and general manager at Twentieth Century Fox has said, “If it gets recorded on Friday, it hits the street on Saturday. It has a huge impact.”

The MPAA has estimated that film piracy cost producers, distributors, theatres, video shops and pay-per-view television operators $18.2 billion in lost revenue in 2005.

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