The hardest of the hard men in any penitentiary are granted a certain amount of respect. The amount of personal space, favors and outright juice these guys have is directly linked to the types of crimes that put them where they are.
Which makes you wonder what the other cellmates will make of prisoners brought in for selling bootleg DVD movies.
The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, which was passed by the Senate Tuesday, would provide three years in prison for anyone caught with camcorders recording movies in theaters. Second-time offenders would face as long as six years behind bars.
It's hard to imagine a group of convicts sitting around a prison exercise yard, eyeballing a new man and advising each other: "Don't mess with him, man. That dude's doing a nickel for downloading 'Shrek 3' and dealing 200 copies of 'Miss Congeniality.'"
Visit any of the city's street corners where vendors sell bootlegged music discs and pirated DVD films. You'll see men and women doing a job that's about as criminal as your Aunt Bessie activating the record button on her VCR, or the guy at the next cubicle offering to burn you a copy of the new Black Eyed Peas CD.
Talk with any of the city's pirate film vendors. They'll tell you the reason you don't see tables filled with pirated copies of films out in the suburbs is because few inner-city neighborhoods have movie houses.
One vendor I interviewed a few months back along Sixth Street, Downtown, put it this way: "When Pittsburghers can take their families to see a movie Downtown, people won't buy from me anymore. I'm just providing a service."
Movie industry bigwigs claim that service costs them $3.5 billion a year. With blockbuster films such as Disney's "Finding Nemo" raking in $339 million at the box office and 25 million copies sold on DVD and video at $20 a pop, it's hard to imagine what Hollywood is worried about.
My guess is it could have something to do with greed.
Making pirated movies a federal crime is obviously the result of some pretty urgent -- and cash-heavy --- lobbying from the Motion Picture Association of America, a group usually at odds with the government over the adult content of its films.
As a result of this odd marriage of Hollywood money and influence, and politicians eager to appear tough on crime, vendors could receive as much prison time for selling a copy of "Barbershop II" as a criminal shooting someone with a gun during a robbery.
If there's any solace to be found in this madness, it's that filmmakers have the same chance of controlling underground distribution of their product as recording studios do of curtailing the downloading of music on the Internet.
Maybe Hollywood will realize this before the feds start making convicts out of street vendors.
