A teenage girl in Ohio preparing for a Halloween party nearly suffers from sheer embarrassment. Hillary, a 16 year old high school student, organized a nice little Halloween sleepover with her friends. To truly get into the spirit of things, she goes online and attempts to download a bunch of classic 80s and 90s slasher movies. On her queue were titles like “I Know What You Did Last Summer”, “Scream”, both the original and remake versions of “Prom Night” and the overlooked classic “Valentine”.
As she’s checking the quality of her movies, with her mother, one turned out to be an unintentional porn download. When she checked her queue once more, she had apparently downloaded “I Know WHO You Did Last Summer”. The mother was so incensed that Hillary was grounded, thereby all hopes of throwing a Halloween eve slumber party were crushed. Her Internet privileges were revoked as well. Because of this tragedy, Hillary is now out looking for justice.
“I wasn’t my fault. How could I have known?” asked a seemingly inconsolable Hillary. The teen girl has now filed an official complaint against porn spoofs being too similar to the movies they parody. Hillary discovered that she was not a lone victim of this shocking dilemma.
Mary Watson, a mother from Wisconsin has filed the same complaint against certain porn companies. “I am not against pornography. Some people are into that, I respect that. I myself have indulged in a skin flick or two in my day, especially when my husband and I are preparing for love making. But when I saw from my kid’s laptop that he was down loading a movie titled In Diana Jones, I knew that sort of thing just had to stop. My little girl is not old enough to see that kind of thing.”
Similar complaints rage from all parts of the nation. Who is to blame in this cinematic crisis? Is it the producers of such movies for not exerting more effort into protecting the young from their adult content? Is it the parents for not supervising their children? Is it the Internet itself, with its endless access of unfiltered information? Maybe it is society, who tolerate the profane disgracing of cinematic masterpieces?
Maybe the blame lies in people like Hillary and Mary, who fail to realize that downloading movies is considered illegal and a slap in the face of intellectual rights.
