[News]
Valenti redoubles rhetoric

Jack Valenti of the MPAA has delivered some very impressive testimony with a tremendous amount of Valenti's trademark (or should we say copyright?) rhetoric: "thieves", "pirates", "pilfering", etc.

We'll soon post Valenti's 1982 testimony on the VCR menace -- nowhere available on-line, it uses astonishingly similar tactics and arguments! There, as here, Valenti paints the copyright industries as having a paramount importance to the American economy; there, as now, he claims they're besieged by technically-savvy criminals, against whose threat a Congress which failed to act promptly would be not only economically foolish but also morally weak. There, as now, he holds new technology itself responsible for infringement; there, as now, he makes apocalyptic forecasts about what unregulated innovation might do to his industry.

One of Mr. Valenti's considerable talents is making assertions and assumptions the refutation of which would exceed his audiences' attention spans. His recent testimony expertly deploys this approach: Valenti appears as the straightforward, direct, plain-speaking industry leader. Someone who took the time to analyze Valenti's claims in depth, however, would appear tedious, dull, and lawerly.

For instance, if the testimony should contain an inaccurate characterization of how copyright law works, it would nonetheless be a plausible-sounding mischaracterization. The would-be Valenti critic would then begin to explain carefully how Valenti had gotten the law wrong -- and would seem pedantic and tiresome by contrast.

What's the relevance of this testimony to BPDG? Only that Valenti again mentions the "broadcast flag" as a major long-term legislative goal:

In testimony before the Judiciary and Commerce Committees I have outlined a number of specific goals relative to the development and adoption of technology standards by the Information Technology (IT), consumer electronics (CE) and copyright communities. These include the adoption of a "broadcast flag" to prevent unencrypted over-the-air digital television broadcasts from being redistributed on the Internet; adoption and implementation of technology to plug the "analog hole" whereby protected content is stripped of its protection through the digital to analog, or analog to digital, conversion process, and the adoption and implementation of technology to limit the rising tide of unauthorized peer-to-peer file distribution of copyrighted works, of which I have spoken. The attainment of these goals is key to the viability of a legitimate marketplace for the online digital distribution of motion pictures, and we look forward to continuing to work with the IT and CE industries, as well as your colleagues on the Judiciary and Commerce Committees, to achieve a successful outcome on this front.

What does the broadcast flag have to do with "the viability of a legitimate marketplace for the online digital distribution of [Hollywood] motion pictures"? Is there a suggestion that legal sales aren't "viable" when they have to compete with some illegal distribution?

Look closely at this suggestion: Valenti doesn't say that we have to enforce copyright law in order to make legitimate sales viable. He says that, in order to make Hollywood feel comfortable with the Internet, we have to have not one, not two, but three government mandates on major categories of technology (digital TV receivers, video digitizers, and Internet software).