What the MPAA wants from Obama

Ars Technica ^ | December 10, 2008 | Nate Anderson

[CE2949BB]

3 strikes, Canada crackdown

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has supplied its political wish list to the Obama transition team, and thanks to new transition team policies, that means the MPAA has shared its agenda with everyone on the Internet. "Graduated response" rules are praised, anti-camcording rules are paramount, and Canada and Spain are two of the countries that need to be singled out for "priority trade policy attention."

The Obama transition team is publicizing its meetings with interest groups and putting any materials provided to the team up on the change.gov web site. The MPAA document is a mere one-pager that outlines the group's international agenda, but it does give us a good sense of what an MPAA-run world would look like.

The group wants the US government to continue pressuring other countries on camcording in theaters, which it calls the "major source of pirated motion pictures." Free trade agreements with countries like Korea and Malaysia have recently included such provisions, forcing the countries to alter their laws or penalties for camcording before gaining better access to the US market. The MPAA wants to see this trend continue in trade agreements (no doubt including the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement under negotiation at the moment), and the group is especially concerned about Mexico, where camcording has reached "crisis proportions."

But the truly interesting bits come further down the page. In the section on Internet piracy, the MPAA understandably claims that such piracy is a top priority, and it wants to see "inter-industry cooperation" in the matter. Fair enough, but what sort of cooperation is envisioned. "MPAA views recent efforts by the Governments of France and the United Kingdom to protect content on-line and facilitate inter-industry cooperation as useful models," says the document.

The reference is to the hugely controversial "graduated response" plans that the music industry, in particular, has pushed hard for in Europe. "Useful models" suggests that MPAA would not be averse to seeing something similar in the US, though it's difficult to imagine an Obama administration passing tough "three strikes" rules in the near future.

Blame Canada

The other controversial bit comes right at the end, when the MPAA offers up its 2009 country blacklist: Canada, China, India, Mexico, Russia, and Spain. Canada isn't normally thought of as a piracy haven, but it has been on the hit list of IP groups for some time; even video game companies have demanded that the country take action to crack down on pirates.

That irritates Canadians like Michael Geist, the law professor who helped lead the charge this year against an industry-friendly overhaul of copyright law. The MPAA document "makes it clear that the copyright lobby groups will continue to blame Canada, despite the fact that Canada is compliant with its international obligations," he writes. "Claiming that Canadian law is akin to China or Russia ought to be dismissed outright, yet the ease with which the Canadian government caved to pressure on the camcording issue has apparently emboldened the same lobby group to demand even more."

Giving hope to the MPAA may be news that Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-CA), who (literally) represents Hollywood in Congress, could be tapped as the new US Trade Representative. (USTR is also overseeing the ACTA process.)

Ed Black of the Computer & Communications Industry Association demands that whoever get the job "leave existing parochial, corporate or constituent interests behind now that his or her new constituency is the American public... Browbeating our trading partners to ratchet up IP protection or face trade sanctions has alienated our friends... While a 'what's good for Disney must be good for America' approach to IP foreign policy may once have made sense, it now impedes efforts to repair our international relationships."

Making such lobbying documents public may not produce any substantive changes in how business in Washington gets done, but it certainly generates more public scrutiny of the various interest groups that plead their cases before the President-Elect. In the case of the MPAA, some of those public reactions have been... strong.

"It's time to stop this madness, and President-elect Obama should treat these fleecers of the American consumer with the utmost contempt," says one. "Any actions as their lapdog enforcer would severely diminish my respect of his administration."

[pnh102]

Pirate left-wing content. Starve them all.

[VRWC For Truth]

Isn’t SAG going on strike soon?

[Disambiguator]

camcording in theaters

This reminds me of a certain Seinfeld episode.