Your audience is not your enemy, #12,964

An Arlington movie theatre is prosecuting a 19-year-old cinema-goer (WaPo) for recording a 20-second clip of the Transformers movie to show to her 13-year-old brother.  In doing so they have significantly increased the incentives for people to pirate films in two different ways.

(1) This is apparently part of a "zero-tolerance" approach to recording movies on the part of the cinema.

Remember what happened when airport security was cranked up to accommodate the fiction that terrorists can manufacture liquid explosives in-flight? Airlines took a big hit in profits (MarketWatch). Customers dislike being treated like criminals. They dislike the inconvenience of added security checks. Some of them withdraw their custom.

Making it a little bit more unpleasant to visit cinemas is just the encouragement cinema audiences need to chuck the whole thing in and take to watching movies at home. Incentive to more piracy number one.

(2) Not only was the clip taken in this instance commercially valueless,  making it harder for people to take poor-quality copies of films using camcorders and mobile phones generally increases the incentives to consume pirate copies. See Umair on this - because one of the costs of choosing a pirate copy is the risk of getting a wobbly camcorder version of the film with tinny sound and people's heads in the way of the shot, making it harder for people to record films in cinemas actually increases the average value of all pirate copies by weeding out a lot of duds. Post a policy of zero-tolerance in cinemas, every pirate copy you download is more likely to be high quality. Incentive to more piracy number two.