The Internet hasn’t been good for the movie or music industry, at least in terms of providing a new way for the distribution of content which takes away the need for traditional companies.
But does that excuse the movie industry starting to spy on what we do with our Internet connections, and share with others across our network?
Here, Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge looks at the issues surrounding a speech given by Dan Glickman, the chairman of the MPAA:
Glickman’s Spying Is No Game
Hollywood for years has had a fascination
with spies. Some are action spies, like the various incarnations of
Bond, James Bond, or cerebral spies like Alec Guinness’
masterfully
subtle George Smiley.
All sorts of people have played TV spies, from
Robert Culp and Bill Cosby to Patrick McGoohan, Robert Goulet and the
fabulous Lady Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee.
There have been spies who watch and listen to us without our
knowledge. Gene Hackman had a creepy turn as the telephone eavesdropper
(technically not a spy, although he spied) in “The
Conversation” in
1974.
Ten years ago Will Smith’s “Enemy of the
State” played off of the
then-paranoid “fantasy”, now a reality, of the
all-hearing National
Security Agency (NSA). The current crop of Bourne films shows a Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) with the technical capability to listen and
see anything and anyone at any time.
It wouldn’t be an issue if Hollywood’s
fascination with monitoring
our words and images was confined to fiction. But over the past couple
of months, the fourth wall has been broken and Hollywood is now setting
itself up to play a new spy game for real.
Using ISPs as Spies
In this new game, the public
departs from its traditional role as movie fan, and would now be movie
victim. And instead of using the resources of a super-secret government
agency to do its spying, the movie industry would use the resources of
the companies who do the bidding of the super-secret government
agencies – your once-friendly local telephone companies.
The movie industry wouldn’t call what they want to
do “spying,” of
course. They have more polite, more indirect ways of couching their
goals. Exhibit A in that regard is a speech
by Dan Glickman, the chairman of the Motion Picture Association of
America (MPAA) given March 11 at an industry event in Las Vegas.
The speech was breathtaking not only for its internal
inconsistencies but also for its obvious obfuscations, particularly
concerning Net Neutrality.
The Movie Industry Doing Well
He started off with a positively giddy report on how well the
movie
biz is doing as the industry “could hardly be better at the
box
office.”
Some of the data points included 17 movies earning
$100
million, up 50 percent from 2006; seven movies making $200 million;
four movies making $300 million; 1.4 billion tickets sold in the U.S.
last year; 600 films produced, up from 450 in 2006. As Glickman said,
“film is alive, well and growing as an American art-form and
consumer
experience.”
But despite all of this good, even great news,
there’s still the
threat to the industry of “what happens when one illegal copy
[of a
movie] makes its way to the Internet – God forbid on opening
weekend –
and is instantly available to the world.” What happens? There
would
have been 18 $100 million movies?
The technology hasn’t
changed all
that much in the past couple of years. Chances are some movies escaped
onto the Net before or at release. And yet, things still look pretty
good, according to Glickman.
New Tools To Stop Piracy
To stop that one copy from being spread to the world, Glickman
said,
“new tools are emerging that allow us to work with Internet
Service
Providers to prevent this illegal activity. And, new efforts are
emerging in Washington to stop this essential program.”
Glickman said: “This effort is being called by its
proponents ‘net
neutrality.’ It’s a clever name. But at the end of
the day, there’s
nothing neutral about this for our customers or for our ability to make
great movies—blockbuster first-run films—in the
future.
If Washington
had truth in labeling, we’d call this proposal by another
name:
Government regulation of the Internet. Government regulation of the
Internet would impede our ability to respond to consumers in innovative
ways, and it would impair the ability of broadband providers to address
the serious and rampant piracy problems occurring over their networks
today.”
The challenge Glickman put forth: “Do we take a
stand for
intellectual property rights or cast them aside in the digital
environment? Are we permitted to respond to consumers, innovate on
their behalf and compete with the world or are we told by our
government to stand down?
Today MPAA and all of our studios are
standing up in opposition to broad-based government regulation of the
Internet. We are opposing so-called ‘net
neutrality’ government action.
And, in the process, we are standing up for our customers, for our
economy and for the ability of content producers to continue to create
great movies for the future.”
A Call To Arms or Nonsense?
That was certainly a stirring address, a clarion call to arms
against an evil menace to society. And in the spirit of the truth in
labeling meme, here the label or two for this speech: Hogwash.
Nonsense. A twisting of the truth and a subjugation of reality on more
levels than we could count.
It is truly ironic that the movie industry, of all industries,
rails
against “government regulation.” This is the
industry that persuaded
Congress that copyright should last almost forever.
This is the
industry that wanted the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to
impose a “broadcast flag”, also known as copyright
controls, on digital
television. Viacom in 2002 threatened to withhold high-definition
content from CBS unless that flag was in place.
This is the industry comes crying to Congress every year for
new,
even more Draconian penalties and crimes because their members
aren’t
making as much money as they think it should. Their newest
“Pro-IP”
bill just passed
a House subcommittee on March 6.
This is the industry, or at least part of it, that pays lip
service
to, but doesn’t really care about, the exceptions to the
copyright law
for “fair use” of materials, that would have
consumers pay each time
they buy a DVD or CD and make a copy to another device the consumer
owns.
This is the industry that seemingly wants an Intellectual
Property czar in each cabinet-level agency. Let’s not talk
about some
vapid anti-regulation philosophy here. Hollywood’s paths to
the Hill to
the White House and to the FCC are well-worn.
A Free Internet
Let’s talk about their concept of a free and
non-discriminatory
Internet as a barrier to innovation. There’s no barrier to
innovation
now. Look at the adoption by NBC and others of Hulu, a new distribution
mechanism for movies and TV shows using their version of the
peer-to-peer (p2p) protocol that the movie industry blames for all the
theft. (Ars Technica has a nice interview
with schizoid NBC on this very topic.)
Net Neutrality has nothing to do with prohibiting innovation
or for
making movies available in the future. If anything, a free and open
Internet would put all movie makers on an equal footing and not subject
to the whims of what one telephone or cable company might do with one
movie company at the expense of another. If anything, Glickman and his
crowd should endorse Net Neutrality out of self-preservation.
What Glickman is proposing under the guise of working with
ISPs to
prevent illegal activity also has nothing to do with a
non-discriminatory Internet. It has to do with invasion of privacy and
presumptions of guilt and spying on American citizens who have done
nothing wrong.
There already is a mechanism for dealing with copyright
infringement. It’s one that the content community went to
great lengths
to pass. The industry persuaded Congress to pass the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998 as a means of protecting online
content.
So far, it seems to be working without the need for spying. As
the
Content Alliance, the umbrella group, put it in a March 3 letter to
Congress: “The DMCA, in its 10 years, has failed to produce
the
hypothetical harms posited by its detractors; to the contrary, it has
enabled an explosion in the amount and kinds of new legal offerings of
creative works available to consumers.”
A Step Too Far
What the movie industry wants is the ability to look at each
packet
every person sends across the Internet and try to discern whether that
little bit of information carries material the movie industry thinks
shouldn’t be carried.
In the name of trying to
“prevent this illegal
activity” the movie industry and its willing partner
AT&T will
employ technology, deep-packet inspection or other, to see what every
Internet user is doing.
Set aside the fact for now that not all unauthorized uses of
copyrighted material are illegal. That means that even if AT&T
flags something, or blocks it, a person’s legitimate right to
use
information or material could be compromised.
What right do they have to do that? Who gave the movie
industry or
AT&T (Verizon is yet holding out, to its credit) the authority
to
assume that illegal activity is taking place, and thus search for
it?
Or, which is worse, there might be no assumption of illegal
activity,
but they are searching through packets anyway, just to discern their
nature in order to determine whether there should be suspicious
transmissions present.
It would be like police officers breaking into homes just to
see if
there are any stolen goods lying around. Or it would be like telephone
companies spying on Americans on the off-chance someone is talking to
someone who might know a terrorist.
Conclusions
The telephone companies are already using up their political
credits
in a big way to get the White House to defend their surveillance under
the guise of national security. What’s going to happen when
AT&T
gets sued for invasion of privacy for snooping someone’s
legitimate
Internet transmission?
Will they run back to Congress asking for
retroactive immunity as means of protecting a valuable American
industry? Or will they ask for proactive immunity to do it ahead of
time? Or is that simply more “government regulation of the
Internet”?
Spying and hypocrisy are a deadly combination. They might make
good
movies. They make terrible policy, and it’s about time the
movie people
and their friends realized it.
Art Brodsky is an author at Public Knowledge discussing public rights in the emerging digital culture. Post has Some Rights Reserved.
