Beware, all ye Twihards thinking of snatching a piece o' Taylor Lautner's treasure trail with yar smartphones: Thar be dire consquences te yer piratey actions. Samantha "Team Me" Tumpach, 22, of Rosemont, IL. was thrown in jail for two nights when an usher discovered her shooting video of New Moon with a digital camera. Tumpach is now facing three years in prison, reports the Chicago Sun-Times.
Here's how it went down:
The usher spotted Tumpach shooting the video. He told the theater manager, who called police, who examined the device. They found two sequences on the camera, adding up to no more than four minutes in length. That was enough to get her arrested. She was booked on a rarely enforced anti-piracy felony, resulting in her sitting in jail for over 48 hours, until she was brought to bond court on Monday morning.
The culprit said the cops were mostly sympathetic to her throughout the ordeal, and insists the entire incident is much ado about nothing: She had never intended to intentionally record or sell the movie, and had merely been shooting footage from her sister's 29th birthday party. (Yes, we've double checked, and the first digit is not a typo.) Her proof? She was talking throughout the taped footage in question.
Oh, is that all? Just yapping away in a dark theater while waving around your LCD screen and taping four minutes of New Moon footage? How sympathetic! Seriously though -- the girl's been in jail for two days. Enough already. It's not like she's some kind of Malaysian child-prostitution/DVD bootlegging kingpin who keeps a dozen naked teenagers around the house in case she gets a hankering for a line of blow off a hooker's ass. Clearly Tumpach is being made an example of. At this point, she should just pray the MPAA doesn't get involved. The smell of pirate blood turns Dan Glickman into a rough justice banshee; she'd have been better off hiking in Iran.
ยท Woman arrested for trying to record 'Twilight' on digital camera [Sun Times via PopWatch]