MPAA's Chris Dodd Calls SOPA Defeat a 'Watershed Event'

MPAA's Chris Dodd Calls SOPA Defeat a 'Watershed Event'(hollywoodreporter.com)

62 points by danberger 14 years ago | 47 comments

hxa7241 14 years ago |

Their interest is not 'having a conversation'. They have degenerated into monopolists. Let us clarify the game they play:

One year they lobby government to strengthen enforcement. They say: piracy means they are not getting what the law says is their due. (it sounds almost reasonable!)

The next year they lobby government to expand copyright. That is: they are deciding for themselves what is their due.

Far from the general public interest, and, indeed, plainly very far from the free market.

jrockway 14 years ago |

I like how he thinks that Netflix and Redbox are also ripping him off. It's like he expects each person who sees the movie to pay for the entire production. Anything less is ruining the industry.

I disagree with this, though. I think it should be legally required for everyone to pay for the movie, regardless of whether or not they see it. That way, nobody can steal his hard work!!

orcadk 14 years ago | |

Don't even joke about that.

In Denmark we pay "license" to the state, to keep the public television and radio channels going. Mind you, this isn't part of the tax and it's completely optional whether you want to pay it or not.

Except, if you have a television, an internet connection, a cellphone, a radio or any device capable of receiving a television signal via an antenna or internet connection - you have to pay. After all, you have the ability to watch/hear the content. Whether you do or not, that doesn't matter. If we paid this through our taxes, it wouldn't be an issue (compared to what else we pay for). This being a pseudo-tax masked as an optional thing, that's ridicilous though.

Oh and on top of that we pay an extra tax (which goes to the artists) on casette tapes, CD-R's, DVD-R's, VHS tapes, etc. After all, we might record songs & movies on those mediums. And before you ask, no, despite us paying that tax, it's still not legal for us to do so.

davej 14 years ago | | |

By the way, almost every country in europe has a TV licence. It definitely can be a good thing, most brits would accept that the TV licence is a good price for the BBC. They provide quality television/radio for minority groups and tend to invest heavily in industries like documentary film-making which might otherwise be ignored in a purely capitalist TV industry.

tjoff 14 years ago | | |

Isn't that to compensate artists for the right to copy something for private use. At least that's how I believe it works in Sweden. Unfortunately we also have laws that forbids us to circumvent any form of DRM or copy protection and since nothing is sold without DRM today we are paying for something we can't legally do. And this is something that even extends to external harddrives, MP3-players and I believe smartphones as well (not sure on that though).

nollidge 14 years ago | | |

In the U.S. we have the Corporation for Public Broadcasting created by an act of Congress. Funds are entirely tax-based and not optional (not even in theory). Americans largely don't have a problem with this due to the high quality of the programming, although there's an outcry of protest every so often.

roc 14 years ago | |

> "I like how he thinks that Netflix and Redbox are also ripping him off. "

They don't, actually. They just know that if they play the victim, they can shift the eventual compromise further in their favor than if they took a rational position.

Suppose a given policy discussion is a numeric 1-10 scale, and you and I are at 4 and 7 respectively, compromise (as it is seen by voters who expect compromise to be a mid-way point) is 5 or 6. But if I pretend to stake my position as a 10, compromise is suddenly a 7 -- exactly what I wanted in the first place. So long as no-one (e.g. the press) is calling me out for staking out an absurd position, there's no reason not to run this tactic.

Newgy 14 years ago |

Classic Chris Dodd. Obvious outcomes -- like the 2008 financial crisis, which occurred on his watch as Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee-- are "watershed" and heretofore "never seen before." This way, he can escape responsibility for the role his own actions played in creating the mess.

rhizome 14 years ago | |

In fact, the public rejection (if final) of SOPA/PIPA are not watershed events, but evidence of Dodd's absolute failure to execute the job he was hired for.

emehrkay 14 years ago |

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Dodd

In office for 36 years, the first thing he does when he goes private is to lobby for a law nobody wants on behalf of his new employer. What happened to Obama's promise to stop this?

yahelc 14 years ago | |

Ironically, one of Dodd's final acts in Congress (opposing filibuster reform) basically made any kind of substantial lobbying reform impossible.

rayiner 14 years ago | |

Obama's promise was to limit lobbyist movement in the other direction (industry -> government). Not that he's done a great job of that, but let's paint his promises in an accurate light.

emehrkay 14 years ago | | |

He did mention the other way as well. I'm not sure if he was only talking about limiting the extent to people in his administration of the whole gov.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/pr...

lonnyk 14 years ago | |

President Obama cannot stop people from talking to members of Congress.

esmevane 14 years ago |

I want to share my results of a tertiary topic on this thread: Adam Lipsius claiming that hundreds of thousands of pirated copies of "16-LOVE" had destroyed his chances of profiting from the film.

A Google of Adam Lipsius returned his IMDB page, his Facebook page, a few videos about 16-LOVE, and no Wikipedia article. I followed his IMDB page and discovered he has participated on the producer + director level of several films. He is said to be 'known for' The People vs. Larry Flynt and Men in Black, but was involved only in the sound of those films.

16-LOVE produces similar results: virtually nothing on Wikipedia or IMDB. Its IMDB article says it is similar to films such as "Zookeeper", and is rated at around 5 stars. Completely distinct from the IMDB results, RT claims it is 100% fresh with 39 reviews. It was directed by and produced by Mr. Lipsius.

Conspicuously absent in my searches were any torrent offerings.

---

Here's what I think:

I think 16-LOVE was not a popular film, and just plain didn't do well. I don't think piracy had anything to do with it.

My opinion is that generally you will find the noisiest, most entitled, belligerent users amongst the ranks of the free. They didn't pay for it, and so there is literally no skin in the game to persuade them to like it.

I contend that if, indeed, hundreds of thousands of people had illegally downloaded this film, there would be much, much more evidence of its existence available through Google - the same exact route I would have found torrents, by the way.

I think it was just an unknown film, with no publicity, and maybe - hell, probably - it would have done far better if it had been offered through a more direct, easily-accessible avenue.

duskwuff 14 years ago | |

Perhaps he found one of those ridiculous fake torrent sites that claims to have thousands of downloads for anything you pass it in a query string? He definitely wouldn't be the first.

example: http://usenetdownloads.net/usenet.nl/v4/files.php?q=SGFja2Vy...

spodek 14 years ago |

The MPAA knows watershed events, alright.

I'm still waiting for the VCR to destroy movies, as his predecessor, Jack Valenti, predicted: "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."

fennecfoxen 14 years ago | |

Let's talk about the Boston strangler.

How many women did the Boston strangler actually get? (I'll save you a trip to Wikipedia: 13, over 3 years.) What percentage of "women home alone" is that - even women home alone in the Boston area? Now compare the level of raw paranoia that the strangler generated - surely, paranoia well in excess of any real risk. Perhaps this is a more apt analogy than Valenti realized.

And no one ever seriously promoted a massive reorganization of society, establishment of a surveillance state, or revocation of basic liberties in communication over the matter of the Boston strangler.

RyanMcGreal 14 years ago |

Another 'watershed moment' in American politics is Dodd's shameless and unapologetic shakedown of the US Congress for not staying bought.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/01/19/exclusive-hollywo...

nextparadigms 14 years ago | |

Speaking of which, the petition has been completed, so let's see what the Obama administration does about it now:

https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/!/petition/investigate...

jinushaun 14 years ago |

"There was some back and forth about how best to combat piracy, with some in the audience advocating a strategy that supplies more content in new, affordable avenues to undercut the temptation to steal, and Fithian arguing that cheap-prices-up-front approaches such as Netflix streaming and $1 Redbox kiosks are "bad business models.""

Clueless

numeromancer 14 years ago | |

...Fithian arguing that cheap-prices-up-front approaches such as Netflix streaming and $1 Redbox kiosks are "bad business models.""

I read this as "if we sell movies this way I'll have to work for a living."

waterlesscloud 14 years ago | |

Fithian represents NATO, the theater owner trade association.

He has zero interest in promoting anything other than theatrical distribution.

haakon 14 years ago | | |

Oh. I was wondering why there was such a heavy military presence on the panel.

MrScruff 14 years ago | |

Care to elaborate?

gregd 14 years ago | | |

I think what's he's saying is that it's a bad business model for Hollywood, but it's exactly the kind of business model people are willing to pay for.

waterlesscloud 14 years ago |

There's a business opportunity in this article.

At the end they talk about digital-to-the-theater distribution and indie filmmakers hooking up with indie theaters.

A marketplace portal that facilitated that connection on a global basis could do well for itself.

A lot of schlepping, but a very viable market.

djb_hackernews 14 years ago | |

Yea, I never understood why that isn't the case today. I mean, they ship the film to the theaters still.

Theaters should be turnkey. Find the space, set up the Movie Market Place (MMP) hardware, make an account on MMP.com, license movies from the MMP.

Should be no different from app markets.

waterlesscloud 14 years ago |

I very, very seriously doubt the film 16-Love was robbed of "hundreds of thousands" of viewers through piracy.

You can't complain about misinformation on the other side and then trot out something like that.

gregd 14 years ago |

I love how Dodd seems to extricate himself from his own statements, "the white noise has made it impossible to have a conversation about this," he said. "We've gotta find a better way to have that conversation than we have in the last two weeks."

It's as if his head isn't attached to his mouth, which I think goes for a lot of current politicians. Bringing them all down a staff of notches is entirely in order, lest they forget they represent the "people".

math_is_life 14 years ago |

I hate when they just pull these numbers out of their ass. I can agree that they lose money (even though I feel it is necessary to force them to innovate), but they are just creating random figures of things that would have never happened. It would be like Michael Bay coming out claiming Transformers lost 250 million dollars because of piracy.

djhworld 14 years ago |

Has it actually been defeated though? I'm not that well versed in what's been going on, but the last time I read about it they just said the bill had been shelved after public outcry

Shelved surely means they'll pick it up later and push it through discreetly?

technoslut 14 years ago | |

When something gets shelved it pretty much means it's dead. The president even said he was against it and we are in an election year.

Chances are greater that they would hide this in another significant bill so it can get passed.

warfangle 14 years ago | | |

Or it will become moot when ACTA is ratified.

ChristianMarks 14 years ago |

It's more like a river basin event. My fervent hope is that Dodd draws upon his years of experience weakening the economy to weaken Hollywood to the point of collapse. Hollywood should figure out how to protect its products if this is important to them, instead of demanding that Internet service providers figure it out for them and pay for the privilege.

squarecat 14 years ago |

MY EYES! Thank you, Clearly... http://www.evernote.com/clearly/

orenmazor 14 years ago |

why does he make "…communicate and organize directly with the public…" sound like such a bad thing?

funkah 14 years ago |

There is no conversation to be had. They're just gonna keep pulling this shit until they pass what they want to pass.