Warner Bros sues Polish theater group

The Shining

Ad Spectators is most well known for performing plays. However, since September of last year it has been organizing weekly film screenings in its theater. The group focused on showing thoughtful movies, mostly by Hitchcock and Giuseppe. Recently, they were to show Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. However, the police were called in to put an end to the event, and the theater's director was arrested. "The man had organized an illegal public showing of unlicensed movies," said Krzysztof Zaporowski from the Wrocław police.

Masztalski contends that he had a contract signed with Polish publishing agency ZAIKS granting permission to show the films in public. He also notes that his audience consisted of only five people, and that tickets cost zł.5.

"Even if the showing was in some basement in the middle of nowhere in Poland we'd find out anyway and we'd prosecute," says Tomasz Sianowski, a lawyer for Warner Bros Poland, the company which filed the suit against Masztalski. "The film can be publicly shown only upon purchase of the license to the film," he added.

Warner claims that paying ZAIKS is not enough, since the publisher merely has rights to the translation, but not to the film itself. Masztalski says that his intention was merely to heighten awareness of thoughtful movies and that he will no longer take such spirited public initiatives if they are to cost him so much trouble.