[News]
Valenti: broadcast protection a major part of SSSCA war aims

John Borland of CNET has published an interesting interview with Jack Valenti of the MPAA (who said -- before Congress in 1982 -- that "the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone"). Here Valenti, asked about his goals with respect to the Hollings bill (formerly SSSCA, now called CBDPTA), replied

But we want to narrow the focus of the bill as the legislative process moves forward. What needs to happen is we all sit down together in good-faith negotiations and come to some conclusions on how we can construct a broadcast flag (for keeping digital TV content off the Internet), on how we plug the analog hole (allowing people to record digital content off older televisions and other devices), and how we deal with the persistent and devilish problem of peer-to-peer.

(Emphasis added.)

So Valenti doesn't expect to have the Hollings mandate legislation passed as it stands; instead, he expects it to be narrowed to include the BPDG mandate and a few other issues. The connection between the BPDG and the SSSCA is clearer and clearer all the time; Valenti doesn't expect a broad mandate but does want a series of narrow mandates.

We've called those "mini-SSSCAs", and we can look forward to a series of technology-specific mandates if the BPDG approach proves successful.

To put all this another way, the BPDG bill is "compromise legislation" between the SSSCA apocalypse of "mandates on every digital device" and the innovation-friendly "no mandates" outcome. It's the "mandates on some devices, and not others" middle way. But that path runs firmly through Mr. Valenti's territory -- an affirmation of the idea that Hollywood gets to give new technologies a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

Before that Judiciary Committee hearing in 1982, Valenti said

There is going to be a VCR avalanche. Exports of VCR's from Japan totaled 2.57 million units in 1981. No. 2, the United States is the biggest market. No. 3, February 1982, which is the latest data, shows the imports to the United States are up 57 percent over 1981. Ths is more than a tidal wave. It is more than an avalanche. It is here.

Now, that is where the problem is. You take the high risk, which means we must go by the aftermarkets to recoup our investments. If those aftermarkets are decimated, shrunken, collapsed because of what I am going to be explaining to you in a minute, because of the fact that the VCR is stripping those things clean, those markets clean of our profit potential, you are going to have devastation in this marketplace.

[...]

We are going to bleed and bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects one industry that is able to retrieve a surplus balance of trade and whose total future depends on its protection from the savagery and the ravages of this machine.

Now, the question comes, well, all right, what is wrong with the VCR. One of the Japanese lobbyists, Mr. Ferris, has said that the VCR -- well, if I am saying something wrong, forgive me. I don't know. He certainly is not MGM's lobbyist. That is for sure. He has said that the VCR is the greatest friend that the American film producer ever had.

Next comes the "Boston Strangler" line:

I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Bostron strangler is to the woman home alone.

It's twenty years later, and Mr. Valenti's latest Strangler is the computer. In the CNET interview, he cites computers and the net as a source of "terror" for his industry -- again on the verge of closing up shop:

There are more than nine and a half million broadband subscribers now. Once those large pipes and high-speed access subscribers begin to increase, we can be terrorized by what's going on.

In a digital world, who on earth is going to invest large sums of venture capital in a movie if they believe it is going to be ambushed early? The value of that movie is going to be diminished. You don't have to be a Nobel Prize winner to figure that out.