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A suggestion by the Hollywood director Quentin Tarantino that teenagers sneak into his latest film or catch it on video was yesterday criticised as "totally inappropriate". The director of the Office of Film and Literature Classification, Des Clark, said Tarantino was encouraging young people to break the law. "He shouldn't be making comments like that because he's talking about a classification system that was designed for Australians and is highly regarded by the Australian community," he said. In Sydney for the premiere of Kill Bill: Volume One, a blood-soaked, kung-fu-filled revenge tale starring Uma Thurman, Tarantino confirmed that he made...

WASHINGTON -- As part of an uphill battle against Internet movie piracy, entertainment industry lobbyist Jack Valenti offered university students a lesson in morality Tuesday. "Too many students don't believe it's wrong to steal these movies," Valenti told students at Georgetown University Law Center. "It is fracturing the moral contract to take something that does not belong to you." The appearance was one of several that the president of the Motion Picture Association of America plans at prominent universities over the next few months. Students are among the heaviest online traffickers of illegally copied material. Since the late 1990s, a...

Arrests urged to foil Web piracy on campus By ANGEL WILSON COX NEWS SERVICE WASHINGTON -- Colleges need to monitor campus Internet activity more closely and possibly arrest students who download copyrighted material for free, members of a congressional panel said yesterday. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., said students who download music and movies from file-sharing Web sites are clearly breaking copyright laws. "It's electronic theft, plain and simple," said Wexler, a member of the House Judiciary subcommittee on courts, the Internet, and intellectual property. Lesser-known artists are being forced to find other lines of work because they are not being...

[LatelineNews: 2003-2-22] TAIPEI - Taiwan's outspoken justice minister, under pressure at home for his crackdown on CD piracy, has aimed a rare diplomatic kick at the politically isolated island's most powerful ally, the United States. Chen Ding-nan, a former shoe salesman, has accused the United States of bullying the island over its efforts to combat CD piracy, a global issue that American firms claim costs the U.S. economy around $20 billion a year. "The U.S. side knows we're working very hard. But as long as piracy exists, no matter how well we do, they always have something negative to say,"...