Dan Glickman's Bad First Impression

Say That Again

from the new-boss,-same-as-the-old-boss dept

Well, you can be sure of one thing: there’s still going to be plenty to talk about concerning how the MPAA continues to shoot itself in the foot now that it’s under new management. Just days after everyone went around trashing Jack Valenti for his clueless statements about technology, we now have Dan Glickman, talking about how Valenti gave the MPAA “enormous credibility” in a new interview that should give you a sense of just how bad things are likely to get. He talks excitedly about his experience in international trade issues in saying he wants to “further market-opening free-trade discussions,” by which he apparently means “market shrinking, innovation killing discussions,” as he praises the recent export of the DMCA to Australia as somehow being a good thing. One good thing, is that while Jack Valenti denies fair use exists, Glickman at least seems to realize it’s there — though, only in the sense that he hopes to kill it off. When asked about Boucher’s DMCRA bill that will help clarify fair use to make sure it’s not taken away by the DMCA, he says: “it goes way beyond what we think is necessary to protect fair use.” That’s because the MPAA doesn’t want to protect fair use at all, so any protection is too much. He also goes down the ever popular trail of saying that “piracy” is the biggest threat to the industry, and pulls out the “it’s pure, downright theft” quote while also calling it a “plague.” Of course, the Supreme Court has already made it clear that copyright infringement is not theft, and as many times as the entertainment industry declares it so, it does not get any closer to being theft. As for moving the industry forward in face of these things, he says they have a “multifaceted strategy,” which includes: “aggressive law enforcement by state and federal authorities, use of litigation, civil litigation (and) education.” Obviously embracing new technologies, innovating, and keeping up with the times have no place. The only bone he tosses to the tech industry is telling them that he wants to make sure he gets to approve advances first, by saying he wants to explore with technologies how to “permit” new technologies to “flow and develop.” There we go with the permission to innovate again. At what point did the technology industry become some flunky to the entertainment industry where they need to ask for permission before creating the next great technology? And, for good measure, he makes sure we realize how important all this is by letting us all know that “nothing creative will be produced — in the intellectual sense, the creative sense and in the hard-goods sense,” if our intellectual property laws change towards being more open. Ah yes, because all those examples of innovation and economies thriving in the absence of strong intellectual property laws and reports showing how overly broad intellectual property laws are slowing down innovation and development are simply figments of our imagination. Welcome, Dan Glickman, and good luck holding back the tide. It would be nice if you learned to surf, instead, but you have a long legacy of clueless, ineffective tide stopping to continue.