Word: mpaa
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Jack Valenti, the firebrand longtime head of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), was never one to mince words. As the movie industry's chief lobbyist, he knew how to portray his business's challenges in dramatic terms. Back in the 1980s, faced with new technology that supposedly threatened the studios' bottom line, Valenti once famously compared the VCR to the Boston Strangler...
...praise from consumers and a route to profits for the labels. The film industry, however, is still in the trenches, trying to stall what it sees as an onslaught of movie theft. Already as many as half a million movies are swapped online every day, according to the MPAA. But a diverse chorus of critics says that Hollywood is on the wrong track and that file sharing may well hold as much potential profit...
...outweigh illegitimate ones. The movie industry is furious. "These are folks who hide behind a curtain of plausible deniability, like they don't know what's being traded on their networks," says Dan Glickman, a Clinton Cabinet member and former Democratic Congressman who took over the helm of the MPAA after Valenti retired...
...Hollywood is pinning its hopes on a new tactic: federal legislation that would essentially target file-sharing technology. If passed, the so-called Induce Act, backed by such powerful legislators as Senate majority leader Bill Frist and Senator Hillary Clinton, would close the legitimate-copying loophole and empower the MPAA to sue peer-to-peer file-sharing services like Grokster after all. Opponents of the bill include usual suspects like the Electronic Freedom Foundation--the A.C.L.U. of the digital world--but also a surprising number of big businesses...
...spooked Hollywood. Recently Ramsay, who has been struggling to expand the TiVo business, won FCC approval for TiVoToGo, a service that would allow people to share TV shows, movies and other TiVo recordings with as many as nine other TiVo boxes and computers via the Internet. (Not surprisingly, the MPAA bitterly opposed TiVoToGo.) "Downloading any movie ever made--that's possible on a TiVo box today," says Ramsay. "The problem is in the copyright management, not the technology." Hastings, meanwhile, takes pains to stress that any future downloading business would work out a profit-sharing framework with movie studios...