on a recent returning trip, my luggage was searched... they found nothing(no excessive booze or smokes, or food/plants.... which I never bring... obviously)
However, the officer asked if he could "take a look at my laptop" and I said fine. Well.. what else can I say?
I don't use my laptop for work, so it contains no business information or the blueprint to my plan to colonize Mars.
He and another officer powered it up and looked around. He told me he saw several movies on my hard drive and wanted to know if they were enough to keep me entertained on the long flight. (they were still in a very polite/friendly mood) I said I didn't get to watch any of them on this trip because I fell asleep, but maybe on the connecting flight home I'll finish up the move. The 2nd officer even said "that movie was funny.... I saw it twice...." blah blah blah....
However, two seconds after that, he asked me how I got the movies on the hard drive. Without thinking, I replied that I bought the DVDs(and the Blu-rays) and ripped them on to my hard drive. He said "Ms.____, are you aware that it's against federal law to do that?" I had no idea what to say... so I kind of said "oh... ummm....." He told me to remove those movies as soon as possible. The 2nd officer joined in and said that they have some sort of new directive to crack down on the practice.(even if you have the original DVD next to the laptop, it's still a violation of copyright laws or something like that)
It still hasn't registered in my mind that they were being serious... until I noticed them taking my passport and writing something on their notepad. He said "consider this a friendly warning... because the next time this happens, we'll know...... if you want to keep legal movies on your laptop, buy it from iTunes or something...."
WAIT... IS THE CBP NOW WORKING FOR STEVE JOBS OF APPLE??????
Is this something new? I googled this issue and didn't find anything... nothing on this website as well.... My laptop only has a 64GB SSD and most of that is occupied by Windows 7 and other programs... so there's barely 10GB of space left... just about enough for 10 movies)
Has anyone else encountered this lately? I can't be the only one who has ripped her own DVDs in order to watch them on laptops, right?