Tells Congress that “protecting intellectual property…results in consumers having more choices in how they view entertainment,” and that the govt should use foreign policy to “motivate” counties to “take meaningful steps to improve IPR (intellectual property rights) protection.”
MPAA Chairman and CEO Dan Glickman recently testified before the Government Management, Organization and Procurement Subcommittee as a part of hearing titled: “Protecting Intellectual Property Rights in a Global Economy: Current Trends and Future Challenges.”
The hearing focused on the Federal Government’s roles and responsibilities in the global protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR).
Glickman made sure to emphasize the importance of protecting jobs in the creative community, especially during the current economic downturn, but oddly argued that a crackdown on piracy will also lead to more entertainment choices for consumers.
“Protecting intellectual property preserves these jobs, creates new production-related employment opportunities, and results in consumers having more choices in how they view entertainment,” he said.
That’s certainly not true and we have the music industry to show as an example why. First it didn’t want to offer digital music until Napster and the ensuing appetite for digital music by file-sharing music fans forced its hand. It even held firm onto DRM-protection requirements until again, illegal file-sharing forced its hand. Even today it consistently fails to provide music fans what they want.
Why?
“What the music industry never encouraged or even allowed was building an ecosystem around its product,” said David Pakman, a music industry veteran and now venture capitalist at Venrock Associates, back in July while discussing how record industry protectionism is killing digital music innovation.
So to hear Glickman insist that a crackdown on piracy (i.e. illegal file-sharing) will benefit consumers by creating more entertainment choices is preposterous. It will do no such thing.
All piracy does is fill gaps in the marketplace that copyright holders refuse to fill.
Take for example, TV shows. There was the infamous “Battlestar Galactica” debacle from 2004 when the series was aired only in the UK and Ireland in October 2004. Fans in North America, anxious to see the show and unable to wait until the following year for it to air there, decided to take matters into their hands and illegally download copies ahead of time.
This happens again and again with TV shows. Australians in many cases have to wait upwards of a year to see shows after they’re broadcast in the US. The same is true of British programming in the US.
Consumers want to watch content at a time and place of their own choosing and the marketplace just doesn’t offer that option as of yet. Preventing people from being able to do so doesn’t guarantee the gap in the marketplace will be filled, it only guarantees profits and establishes a natural inclination to maintain the status quo.
Glickman also thinks that foreign policy should be used more “cohesively” to fight piracy, using our trade preference programs as “leverage to seek and secure
improvements in IPR legislation and enforcement in beneficiary countries.”
Never mind that some countries like Pakistan have expressed their skepticism of the statistics groups like the MPAA tout as reason to aggressively fight piracy, observing that they are “generally with little transparency regarding the raw data and the methodology used to derive those figures.”
The numbers are viewed as self-serving components of aggressive economic interests, and that without credible and impartial figures there is no way countries can even begin to build a higher standard of enforcement.
Pakistan made the important point that what’s really to blame is copyright holder business models in developing countries such as its, that “unreasonably higher costs along with barriers to access do provide some justification to the consumers to use counterfeit and pirated goods.”
Holding trade benefits hostage because businesses don’t want lower their prices isn’t the way to go.
Too bad that once again consumers were conspicuously absent from the conversation.
Stay tuned.
um yeah the http://www.mafiaa.org speaks all lies and if fighting piracy increases choices so much, where is that supermininova that has all those torrent files like mininova did? oh yeah you have to use other sites. What about those file sharing apps? If fighting piracy = choices, why can’t i see 12 nillion plus on many networks and it not take me a while to get some stuff, not that it matters too much b/c i leave my pc on 24/7 serving files and downloading. I’m helping fill the gaps where the mafiaa decides not to fill and only sue their customers. Thanks mafiaa for costing me $ either way. (sarcasm at end)
The only thing to gain is an increase to a monopoly of power which is gradually slipping through their fingers. The MPAA could choose to find ways of working with a changed market, but they are stubbornly refusing to and, instead, trying to put the toothepaste back in the tube and trying to revert everyone back to a 90s distribution model during a time when that’s unfeasable.