Last month, the film adaptation of the popular Broadway musical, “ Wicked ,” released in theaters, breaking box office records. A viral post online prompts people to share photos they took while watching the movie. “Show ur ‘wicked part 1’ photos,” the post says. Although many people are aware that video recording inside the theater is illegal, others replied to the post with photos they took in their local movie theater, sparking a discussion online about whether it’s legal to take those pictures. Movie theater chain Alamo Drafthouse responded to the post calling for photos, writing “Or, don't do that.” Is it illegal to take pictures of movies at the theaters? Yes, it is illegal to take pictures of movies at the theaters. Taking photos of a movie in theaters is illegal under federal copyright laws. Movie theaters also ban the practice. United States Code 2319B states that “any person who, without the authorization of the copyright owner, knowingly uses or attempts to use an audiovisual recording device to transmit or make a copy of a motion picture or other audiovisual work protected under title 17, or any part thereof, from a performance of such work in a motion picture exhibition facility” could face up to three years in prison, fines, or both. If it's a subsequent offense, prison time can increase to up to six years. Audiovisual recording devices are defined under the law to be “a digital or analog photographic or video camera, or any other technology or device capable of enabling the recording or transmission of a copyrighted motion picture or other audiovisual work.” By that definition, cell phones or any still image camera would be included. In addition, the crime is not limited to distributing or sharing illegal work. The very act of taking the picture is in itself illegal. While the law “emerged in response to the growing threat of piracy in the digital age,” Eisner Gorin LLP says it “targets the act of recording itself, regardless of whether the recorded content is distributed or used for personal gain.” Federal law gives theater employees the authority to detain anyone suspected of violating the law. Many movie theaters have outlined in their rules that filming or taking photos during a movie is strictly prohibited. For example, Regal’s admittance policy says , “No recording devices (cameras, video recorders, sound recorders, etc.) are permitted to be used within any Regal Entertainment Group facility.” AMC Theaters has a similar policy, with its code of conduct stating , “In support of federal law, camera use is not permitted in our auditoriums”SocialTensor Launches NicheTensor API: Monetizing Decentralized AI on Bittensor
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Infrastructure projects in Tibet have often drawn controversy for failing to balance development, human rights, and environmental protection. As CDT has covered this year, state-sponsored hydropower projects have forcibly displaced local communities and led to violent reprisals against protesters. A series of recent reports expand on this topic to highlight the social and environmental perils of these projects. Last week, the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) published a report titled, “ Chinese Hydropower: Damning Tibet’s Culture, Community, and Environment .” The report includes an interactive map showing the location of 193 hydropower dams constructed or proposed in Tibet since 2000, along with their areas of impact and proximity to locations of cultural importance, protected areas, and land cover. The report reveals that these dam projects are causing “irreparable damage” to Tibetan communities, downstream countries, and the environment : If completed, 1.2 million residents living nearby dam projects could be dislocated from their homes, communities, and livelihoods. Religious and sacred sites serving communities will also be destroyed. Almost 80 per cent of dams studied are large or mega dams (\>100MW), which carry the most significant risk to the Tibetan civilization, environmental sustainability, and the climate. However, over half the dams (60%) are either in proposal or preparation stage, presenting opportunities to change course. A truly sustainable pathway for the energy plan must account for the climate, social, environment, and geopolitical costs of hydropower and change course. No plan is sustainable without the consent, participation and co-management of local communities. Tibetans, who remain among the most politically marginalized in China, should not bear the highest cost to power China’s industrial centers. Any long-term solution must involve a political solution where Tibetan people enjoy the right to freely decide how their natural resources are used. This begins with the PRC entering into a meaningful dialogue with representatives of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. [ Source ] Speaking to French newspaper Libération about the report, ICT researcher and advocacy officer Tenzin Palmo stated, “We wanted to show what was happening in this inaccessible border area in the west of the country, but also to reveal the projects of the Chinese authorities who are trying by all means to hide information, to harass civil society, all while engaging in a greenwashing operation around these dams .” Other groups have provided related evidence. Last month, Turquoise Roof and Tibet Watch published a report titled, “ The risks of China’s dangerous dam-building in Tibet: the impacts of China’s move upstream on the Machu/Yellow River ,” which highlighted the threat of geological disasters and environmental problems: For the first time, China’s construction of hydropower dams is reaching upstream to the sources of Asia’s great wild rivers in Tibet, with at least three major new dams on the upper Machu (Chinese: Huang He) river. Chinese scientists have warned of the risks of heavy infrastructure construction in a seismically unstable region where river systems are increasingly unpredictable due to climate change. [...] While China can point to its solar and hydro projects in Tibet to signal a green transition, the smart grid is currently orientated to fossil fuels, which may reveal a slower, less substantial shift than these projects imply. Although hydroelectric power is technically renewable, the large-scale hydropower projects underway in Tibet have complex environmental and social impacts, including ecosystem disruption and displacement of communities. The first major dam to be built upriver on the Machu, the Yangkhil (Yangqu) hydropower station, has devastated an entire community. Accounts and images from eyewitnesses in this report documents how Tibetans have been compelled to dismantle their own homes and an important monastery has been emptied and destroyed. China removed the monastery from a protected heritage list before beginning demolition to make way for a dam that Chinese engineers boast is constructed by AI-driven robots. [ Source ] In the Made in China Journal last month, James Leibold wrote about the Tibet-Aid Project, which he describes as a CCP initiative that pairs Tibet’s administrative units with inland government actors in order to extend Beijing’s settler-colonial enterprise and fortify Han dominance in the region. Among the Tibet-Aid cadres championed in CCP propaganda are Han engineers committed to transforming Tibet’s physical landscape through “civilizing” infrastructure projects. Leibold argued, “By unleashing a new legion of Han officials and settlers on to the Tibetan Plateau, Xi seeks to complete the discursive, demographic, and cultural integration of Tibet into a new Han empire.” In this excerpt, he describes how Han migration and infrastructure-building erode local Tibetan sovereignty : Most of the Han people living and working in Tibet today are descendants of former Tibet-Aid cadres. In a recent survey of 300-plus Han retirees who had worked in Tibet, 49 per cent had a parent who had previously worked in Tibet, with one-quarter of those born in Tibet (Zhou and Du 2023: 83). They are called ‘second’ or ‘third-generation Tibetans’ (藏二代 or 藏三代) in Chinese and now make up the backbone of the party-state’s governing and economic apparatuses in the region. According to officials, they are the ‘strongest source of strength’ for forging what Xi Jinping has called the ‘collective consciousness’ (共同体意识) of the Han-centric nation/race (Thondup and Tsring 2023). By claiming Tibetan identity, albeit an altered one, Han migrants are engaging in a common settler-colonial strategy—what Lorenzo Veracini (2010: 46) calls the discursive erasure of ‘indigenous specific alterity’. Han colonists live a highly fluid existence in the TAR and their roots are impermanent. Due to health concerns, they split their time between apartments in lower-elevation cities, chiefly in Sichuan, and their posts on the plateau. China’s mega-infrastructure building in the TAR—roads, airports, railways, power and telecommunication lines, etcetera—serves as conduits for Han mobility, allowing colonial subjects to move more comfortably and smoothly through ‘harsh’ Tibetan spaces while imprinting the landscape with Han norms that ultimately efface Tibetan sovereignty. The 1,629-kilometre Chengdu-to-Lhasa high-speed railway is of ‘immense strategic value’, a 2018 blog post asserts, as it will not only facilitate military logistics, but also allow the vibrant economy and Han-dominated population of the Sichuan Basin to ‘more easily spread and radiate into the Tibet region’ when it is completed in 2030 (Sohu 2018). [ Source ] Similar dynamics are playing out in other borderland regions, such as Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. In an article for Atmos, Nithin Coca and Patrick Wack described how state-affiliated energy companies have built massive solar plants in Xinjiang that greenwash rights abuses against local Uyghur communities . Uyghur activists argue that these projects are part of longstanding efforts to Sinicize the region and exploit its resources while further colonizing their homeland through Han migration. This also plays out in the realm of Tibetan language politics, as the Chinese government has imposed Sinicization policies to force Tibetans to use Mandarin instead of their local languages. For more on this topic, see CDT’s recent interview with Gerald Roche about the erasure of Tibet’s minority languages, which face unique challenges in the face of both Mandarin and Standard Tibetan. Other interviews can be found in CDT’s series on Tibet . Categories : Environment , Human Rights , Level 2 Article , Society Tags : colonialism , dam , dams , dams resettlement , environmental degradation , environmental destruction , human rights violations in Tibet , migration , Tibet , Tibet culture , Tibet development , Tibet environment , Tibet plateau , tibet policy , Tibet protests , Tibet railroad , Tibetan culture , Tibetan language , Tibetan plateau , tibetan politics , Tibetan protests Related Posts Interview: Gerald Roche on the Erasure of Tibet’s Minority Languages Jimmy Lai Did Not Ask the U.S. to Nuke China China’s Global Fishing Fleet Intrudes on Distant Waters French Museums Waver Between “Tibet” and “Xizang” Amid Uproar Over Chinese Influence Essays on Colonialism and Indigeneity in and Beyond the P.R.C. Deadliest Attack in Years Sabotages Pakistan’s Security Promises to China Scams, Weapons, and Resource Extraction Entangle Chinese Actors in Myanmar Civil War After Kim-Putin Summit in Pyongyang, Censors Erase Chinese Public’s Unease Censors Take Down Discussion of Last Mongolian-language College Entrance Exams Reports Detail Forced Displacement and Violent Reprisals Against Protest in Tibet Censors Delete Tale of Police Overreach in Anti-Fraud Case Macron’s Charm Offensive Comes Up Short During Xi’s Visit to France Diverse Sinophone Groups Voice Support for GazaArouca will be looking to surge from the bottom of the Portuguese Primeira Liga standings when they play host to Santa Clara at the Estadio Municipal de Arouca on Sunday. Having lost the last three meetings between the two teams, Os Acoreanos will head into the weekend looking to get one over the home side and strengthen their position in the upper echelons of the table. © Imago Arouca continue to struggle for results at the wrong end of the Primeira Liga standings as they suffered a 2-1 defeat against Estrela Amadora at the Estadio Jose Gomes last Monday. Jason struck after just four minutes to hand the visitors a dream start to the game but Tiago Esgaio netted a 58th-minute own goal to gift Estrela an equaliser before Rodrigo Pinho turned the game on its head with a 68th-minute effort. Arouca have now failed to win their last six matches across all competitions, picking up one draw and losing five, including a 2-1 defeat at the hands of Farense in the Taca de Portugal fourth round on November 23. Vasco Seabra 's men have now lost eight of their 13 Primeira Liga matches so far while claiming two wins and two draws to collect eight points and sit rock-bottom in the standings, but could move level with 14th-placed Boavista with a win this weekend. Having finished seventh in the standings last term, Arouca's poor campaign has been owing to their struggles in attack as they have netted the fewest number of goals so far (7) while allowing 24 at the opposite end of the pitch. © Imago Arouca, on the other hand, turned in another dominant home display last Friday as they picked up a 1-0 victory over Rio Ave when the two teams squared off at the Estadio de Sao Miguel. Brazilian forward Vinicius Lopes continued his fine form in front of goal as he netted the only goal of the game in the 36th minute to hand Santa Clara a sixth straight home victory. With that result, Vasco Matos 's men have now won four back-to-back matches across all competitions, including a 1-0 victory over Famalicao at the Estadio Municipal de Famalicao in the fourth round of the Taca de Portugal. Os Acoreanos have won nine of their 13 Primeira Liga games so far while losing four to collect 27 points and sit fourth in the league standings, six points adrift of first-placed Sporting Lisbon. While Santa Clara will be looking to continue from where they left off against Rio Ave and make it five victories on the trot, next up is the challenge of an opposing side whom they have failed to get the better of in their last four encounters, including three defeats in each of their most recent three encounters. © Imago Arouca will take to the pitch without the services of Kouassi Eboue and Croatian defender Nino Galovic, who have been sidelined through muscle and knee injuries respectively. Oriol Busquets has been out of action since coming off injured against Vitoria de Guimaraes on May 18 and the Spanish midfielder will play no part in this weekend's matchup. Veteran midfielder David Simao was forced injured right on the stroke of half time against Estrela last time out and the 34-year-old is a major doubt for the home side. As for Santa Clara, Matos will be unable to call upon the services of Portuguese defender Pedro Pacheco , who has been sidelined since sustaining a severe knee injury back in May. Lopes has been a standout performer for Os Acoreanos this season and the 25-year-old forward, who boasts seven goal involvements this season, will be one to keep an eye on. Arouca possible starting lineup: Mantl; Esgaio, Lamba, Fontan, Dante; Loum, Santos; Jason, Sylla, Trezza; Araujo Santa Clara possible starting lineup: Batista; Lima, Rocha, Pereira; Calila, Lobo, Firmino, Nunes; Lopes, Silva, Klismahn Santa Clara have returned to the top flight with fire in their bellies and find themselves strongly competing in the upper echelons of the standings. Matos's men take on a floundering Arouca side who have won just two of their 13 matches so far and we predict they will come away with all three points at the Estadio Municipal de Arouca. For data analysis of the most likely results, scorelines and more for this match please click here .None
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