Biden to MPAA: you'll like Obama's pick for copyright czar - Ars Technica

Biden to MPAA: you'll like Obama's pick for copyright czar - Ars Technica

"I had hoped that having a Dem in office would delay or roll back this stuff I guess $$$ counts more than the public good no mater what party you're from -- HSM"

Biden to MPAA: you'll like Obama's pick for copyright czar

The MPAA hosted its latest DC lobbying event, featuring a dinner at which Vice President Biden promised the group that it will like the person Obama will eventually pick for the administration's chief copyright policy position.

The Obama administration's stance on copyright enforcement has already attracted an open letter in which a variety of public advocacy groups voiced concerns that there seemed to be a bias towards content owners in the initial round of appointments. Those worries are unlikely to go away any time soon, if this week's events are any indication. The Motion Picture Association of America came to town, armed with lobbyists and figures that suggest it functions as a one-industry, nationwide job stimulus, and it heard exactly what it was looking for from Vice President Biden.

The MPAA hosted a series of events in Washington on Tuesday, during which it pressed both Congress and the administration for action on piracy. Its justification: a new report which presents the entertainment industry as one of the US' big success stories in recent years, one that's creating jobs nationwide. The report focuses on how the industry is one of the few portions of the economy that is running a trade surplus, and that it's able to create jobs in nearly every state.

Some of the self-promotion is undoubtedly true. A single film shoot can spread the wealth to a wide variety of peripheral jobs, from caterers to security to the carpenters and technicians that build sets and provide lighting. Nevertheless, many of these jobs are transient, at least outside of states like New York and California where filming and production runs year-round. It's not clear, for example, how much South Dakota's state economy benefited from the fact that the "Dinosaur Dig" TV show was filmed there, as highlighted by the MPAA report.

The report also relies on some statistics that probably aren't very informative. For example, it brags that "the average salary of those employed in the core production-related industry was just under $75,000 in 2007." Given the oversized salaries of leading actors, that's probably a bit like highlighting the average salary of jobs hosted at Yankee Stadium.

This sort of stretching also occurs in the section of the report entitled "Investing in infrastructure and community development." The language seems chosen to parallel that of a lot of the stimulus spending, which is supposed to help improve the national infrastructure. A careful look at the projects listed by the MPAA, however, suggests that the group considers studios, sound stages, and office buildings "infrastructure."

The industry (as its report notes) does well in selling overseas, and probably would do even better without piracy and counterfeiting. The report is simply meant to give legislators leverage when they agitate for changes in copyright enforcement through either national laws or international treaties; as we've seen in the past, said legislators don't really seem to care how precise these sorts of figures are.

In any case, the day's events wrapped up with a dinner that featured Vice President Joe Biden as a speaker. According to reports of his speech, Biden blasted piracy as "pure theft" and singled out China for failure to enforce intellectual property laws. He also promised that the administration would "find the right person for intellectual property czar." It was left unsaid whether that was "right" in the sense of "best person for the job", or "right" in the sense of "someone the audience would be happy with."

 

Biden to MPAA: you'll like Obama's pick for copyright czar - Ars Technica