16 December 2009

Hypocrisy, Thy Name is MPAA

I do love it when copyright maximalist organisations like the MPAA put out statements, because they invariably put their foot in it too. This "Testimony of Dan Glickman Chairman and CEO Motion Picture Association of America" is no exception. Here's a plum [.pdf]:

While not a Free Trade Agreement, the US motion picture industry – producers, studios and guilds -- has a keen interest in the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), in particular the provisions to address Internet piracy. We firmly believe that for the ACTA to address the enforcement challenges our industry confronts today, it MUST include robust protections for intellectual property online. Practical secondary liability regimes for online infringement are essential to motivate stakeholders to cooperate in implementing the reasonable practices that promote legitimate consumer options and make the online marketplace less hospitable for infringers. ACTA parties should refine their secondary liability regimes to reflect current realities and adopt modern, flexible systems where they do not exist.

What the MPAA wants is for ISPs, for example, to change their businesses "to reflect current realities and adopt modern, flexible systems where they do not exist": how strange, then, that the MPAA is not prepared to do the same by working according to the new digital rules instead of clinging to the old analogue ones...

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2 comments:

zotz said...

Perhaps all ISPs could refuse to carry MPAA traffic?

Or perhaps we need a law that says that if a leak comes from an MPAA IP address that the work passes into a copyleft status with the copyright going to a non-profit set up to promote Free Music, Art, and Software.

I mean if it is not too much trouble for them to ask the ISPs to watch everything to and from everyone, it *cannot* be too much trouble for them to be responsible for what goes out of their little part of the online world.

This can be applied to other groups with similar attitudes.

Glyn Moody said...

@zotz: sounds reasonable to me...