The Washington Post reports that the House of Representatives has adopted legislation that makes it illegal to record a movie in the theater and then circulate it outside, particularly on the Internet.

The bill is dubbed the Piracy Deterrence and Education Act of 2004.

As an interesting side note:

But when it came time to vote, lawmakers did a little editing of their own and added language to the measure that would give federal protection to a special type of DVD player that can play cleaned-up, family-friendly versions of popular Hollywood movies.

The DVD player comes from a small Utah-based company called ClearPlay. Using the $70 player, it's possible to rent or buy a DVD such as "Cold Mountain" and watch it with the kids, without having to squirm through the scenes with sex or violence in them. ClearPlay's software filters contain a list of such scenes in certain movies and command the player to simply skip over them. At its Web site, ClearPlay lists hundreds of movies that the company has filtered in this way.