Jack Valenti's Views On The Digital Age

ditogi writes "The Harvard Political Review did a quick interview with the lord of darkness himself, Jack Valenti. He gives his thoughts on government mandated copy prevention, fair use, and lobbying. In response to his famous 'VCR is [to the movie industry]...as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.' quote, he responds, 'I wasn't opposed to the VCR.' And what does he think of his current job? 'I think lobbying is really an honest profession.'" My favorite quote: "In the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless." Update: 02/05 20:05 GMT by T : Derek Slater writes "I'm the author of the Valenti article you guys linked to. I've made some brief comments about it on my site, and figured I'd send them along."

Message body

[Huogo]

Valenti's Views The MPAA president and former LBJ aide opens up on a range of topics By Derek Slater Jack Valenti has led a prolific political life. A decorated World War II pilot, Valenti served as a special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson until 1966. Since then, he has served as the President of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), turning the entertainment studio consortium into a lobbying juggernaut. Valenti helped pioneer the movie industry's voluntary rating system and has tirelessly fought government censorship. He has also headed the Motion Picture Export Association, protecting American film studios' interests in other countries. In recent years, Valenti has become an outspoken leader in the fight against piracy on the Internet. Known for his sharp rhetorical abilities, Valenti always speaks about piracy in calamitous terms, prophesizing the eventual death of the movie industry. To defend its copyrights, MPAA successfully sued publishers of a program that undermined the copy prevention technology on DVDs and is currently suing several file-sharing services. In addition, Valenti has taken his case to Congress, pushing for mandated copy prevention technologies in all digital devices that play movies, music, and other media. But many people have criticized Valenti's hard-line stance, calling it anti-technology and anti-consumer. These critics assert that Valenti's copy prevention mandates will harm innovation, forcing all technologists to ask the MPAA's permission before creating the next generation of amazing gadgets. Copyright holders have always fought new technologies, from Marconi's radio to cable television to VCRs, and in no case have their apocalyptic visions come true. Furthermore, copy prevention technologies will go beyond ending piracy by limiting how consumers can make personal use of their legally purchased movies. After delivering a speech on "Persuasion and Leadership" at Harvard's Institute of Politics, Valenti sat down with the HPR to discuss his side of the digital debate and his life in politics. HPR: You once remarked that "VCR is [to the movie industry]...as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." Even though the movie industry profits from video rentals, the MPAA still fears new technologies like digital VCRs and the Internet. What are the significant differences between the threat posed by the VCR and by today's technologies? Jack Valenti: I wasn't opposed to the VCR. The MPAA tried to establish by law that the VCR was infringing on copyright. Then we would go to the Congress and get a copyright royalty fee put on all blank videocassettes and that would go back to the creators [to compensate for videocassette piracy]. I predicted great piracy. We now lose $3.5 billion a year in videocassette analog piracy. It was a 5-4 Supreme Court decision that determined VCRs were not infringing, which I regret. As a result, we never got the copyright royalty fee, but everything I predicted came true. Now the difference between analog piracy and digital piracy is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. For example, it's very cumbersome to deal in piracy of videocassettes; it costs a lot of money. But in digital piracy, with the click of a mouse a twelve year-old can send a film hurdling around the world. The music industry now is suffering nine, ten, fifteen percent losses in revenue. When you compound that over the next three or four years, the music industry is dead. I don't see a future for it. After awhile, who's going to produce it? It now costs about $350,000 to produce a CD; it costs $80 million to make and market a movie. Big difference. The MPAA could live with the fifteen million homes that currently have broadband internet access. But when sixty million homes have broadband, plus the people on fast connections in universities, making it so easy to bring down a movie in minutes... We're breeding a new group of young students who wouldn't dream of going into a Blockbuster and putting a DVD under their coat. But they have no compunction about bringing down a movie on the Internet. That isn't wrong to them. Why? I don't know. HPR: The MPAA has backed several bills mandating copy prevention technologies. Critics have lambasted these bills for curbing consumer's "fair use" rights, including the ability to make back-up copies. How can we balance the interests of consumers and the movie industry? JV: What is fair use? Fair use is not a law. There's nothing in law. Right now, any professor can show a complete movie in his classroom without paying a dime--that's fair use. What is not fair use is making a copy of an encrypted DVD, because once you're able to break the encryption, you've undermined the encryption itself. HPR: Even if breaking the encryption is for a legitimate purpose, to make a back-up copy? JV: But you've already got a DVD. It lasts forever. It never wears out. In the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless. The minute that you allow people to break an encryption, you lose all security. If anyone can do it under the rubric of fair use, how can we protect the artists? Today, it's illegal to copy a videocassette. No one has a fair use to copy a videocassette. If you lose it, you get another one, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's what people have been doing for generations. HPR: Why do we need government mandates for copy prevention technologies? JV: You have to have copy prevention mandated by the government sooner or later because otherwise everybody's not playing by the same ground rules. For example, the standards of my cell phone have to be mandated by the FCC because everybody has to operate off the same standards. Also, all railroad tracks in this country are the same standardized width. If you don't have tightly focused, narrowly drawn mandates, either regulatory or congressional, then, if I'm a maverick computer maker in Taiwan, I can say, "Hell, I'm not going to play by the rules. I'm going to do it so everybody can copy." Then Toshiba and Sony and IBM can say, "Well if he does that, then I want to do it." We always operate on the fact that everybody needs to know that there's a 55 mph speed limit. That's called a standard. HPR: You served as special assistant to President Johnson at the formative stages of the Vietnam War. Given your experience, what do you consider most crucial to keeping the war on terrorism, in light of conflict in Iraq, from becoming a quagmire? JV: Nobody realizes that when Johnson became president on Nov. 22, 1963, we had 16,000 fighting men in Vietnam. Nobody remembers that. The problem in Vietnam was that we couldn't get these people to negotiate. Johnson always believed that there was no such thing as victory--only negotiation. He never could get the Vietcong to the negotiating table. A lot of people urged him to go all out, as Richard Nixon did later, to bomb them into the Stone Age; he refused to do that, ultimately to his detriment. I think you need to remember what de Tocqueville once wrote, that "The people grow tired of a confusion whose end is not in sight." If you're going to go to war, you must have the people with you. If you lose the confidence of the American people, you face a terrifying problem. So long as George Bush has the majority of the American people on his side in the war on terrorism and the war against Iraq, he'll be just fine. But if he ever begins to lose that support, he will not do fine. That's what you learn from Johnson. HPR: In an interview with CNN.com, you discussed how costly the lack of censorship was to President Johnson during the Vietnam War. Having fought against the government's attempts to censor the movie industry, how do you think the government should approach censorship during wartime? JV: At all costs, the government should stay out of censorship, except in war. When soldiers lives may be at stake, I think you can. Vietnam is the only war we've ever fought in the history of our country, without censorship. But in any other arena, I'm totally opposed to censorship in any form. I'm a great believer and defender of the First Amendment. HPR: How do you view the influence of lobbyists in government and campaign finance reform? Do organizations like the MPAA have an undue influence because they have money? JV: I think lobbying is really an honest profession. Lobbying means trying to persuade Congress to accept your point of view. Sometimes you can give them a lot of facts they didn't have before. Money, however, is negative--it's corrupting the body politic. Even though money might be the most self-conflicting force in politics today, there are too many loopholes in this McCain-Feingold bill. All these lobbyists in town who are callous to what the bill stands for are going to exploit it. They'll turn to state parties and special interest groups and the money will keep pouring in. It's a tragedy.

Re:no backups !!!

[ecchi_0]

What about "DVD-rot [hardocp.com]"?

"Fair use is not a law"

[TheFrood]

From the interview:

HPR: The MPAA has backed several bills mandating copy prevention technologies. Critics have lambasted these bills for curbing consumer's "fair use" rights, including the ability to make back-up copies. How can we balance the interests of consumers and the movie industry?

JV: What is fair use? Fair use is not a law. There's nothing in law.

Bullshit, Jack. It's right here: US Code: Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107 [cornell.edu].

TheFrood

Valenti is unaware of copyright statutes

[yerricde]

Jack Valenti said:

What is fair use? Fair use is not a law. There's nothing in law.

He obviously has not read Title 17, United States Code, the statutes that specify copyright law in the United States. If he had, he would have seen section 107 [cornell.edu], which tells the judge what four factors to look at.

And one of the four factors is commercial exploitation. Nothing from nothing leaves nothing. If a work is out of print or otherwise not being exploited, then it'd probably be possible for a defendant's counsel to argue that by taking the work out of print, the copyright owner has admitted that the work has negligible market value, that unauthorized copying could not possibly diminish the market value, and that the use of such material is more likely to be fair.

Re:Costs of Production

[John_Sauter]

Depending on how you go about it, a CD can be produced for very little. If I were to record a chorus I would bring my Roland VS-1680 and microphones to their rehearsal hall. I would set up six microphones a few feet in front of the singers and have them go through their selected songs while I recorded everything. I would then, back in my home studio, extract the best performance of each song and mix it down to stereo. I can make small quantities of CDs directly on the VS-1680. When they approve the master I send it to a duplicating house who will make a few hundred for about $1 apiece, including jewel cases and simple jacket art. Total cost is about $2 per CD, less if they want thousands.
John Sauter ([e-mail])

Definition of public performance

[yerricde]

I guess he could get the legal eagles to define 'audience' as one or more people or pets.

United States copyright law, 17 USC 101 [cornell.edu] defines an audience as "a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances".

My favorite line:

[illuminatedwax]

This is great: "The MPAA tried to establish by law that the VCR was infringing on copyright. Then we would go to the Congress and get a copyright royalty fee put on all blank videocassettes and that would go back to the creators [to compensate for videocassette piracy]."

And of course, the MPAA are the "creators," because who else would ever make a movie? And he's also saying this implies that the MPAA own the right to copy movies period?!

This line, too:

"What is fair use? Fair use is not a law. There's nothing in law."

May I point Mr. Valenti to the US Code Sec. 107. - Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use.
"Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright."
And he thinks no one should be allowed to copy anything, ever.

I don't see how anyone can take this guy seriously.

Railroad was designed by a horse's ass

[yerricde]

The width of a railroad track goes back to the width of horse-drawn vehicles that ran on standardized rutted roads, which in turn was based on slightly more than twice the width of a horse's rear end. Let Cecil Adams explain the rest [straightdope.com].

Unfair comparison

[aborchers]

I would recommend you do some research on the music production process as a whole, and not base your assumptions of it on a single, very limited case. Your example leaves out a few hundred factors that can affect the cost of production. Many, if not all of these, were discussed at length [slashdot.org] a few weeks ago on this very board.

Re:no backups !!!

[suman28]

DVD rotting has been stated here [slashdot.org] in a previous story

Re:Thoughts on Movie Pirating

[TheShadow]

The reason you have to sit through commericials is because the film distributors (i.e. Warner Bros, DreamWorks, Sony/TriStar/Columbia Pictures) take about 70% of that $9.00 ticket for the first few weeks the movie is released (which is generally when most of the money is made).

Because of this, you pay high prices for popcorn, soda, candy, etc... and sit through commercials.

All so that the movie industry can continue to pay Nicolas Cage $20mil to star in a shitty movie that barely sqeaked out $40mil (Windtalkers).

Who is Valenti

[fishbowl]

A lot of people don't seem to realize who Jack Valenti is, or the power he had even before his position with the MPAA.

Valenti was in the motorcade when Kennedy was assassinated -- and was the first person to be given a new job under Johnson (before AF1 even left Dallas!) He had a part in writing most of Johnson's speeches, and was stronly in favor of the war in Vietnam.

The man is over 80 years old.

One thing I definitely have observed is that people over 80 make short-term decisions. (Little old ladies selling farms to be paved over, old politicians milking the last bit of pork from the barrel).

I thought our society was supposed to strongly encourage retirement at age 65? For Valenti, that would have been during the Reagan administration.

Re:"Fair use is not a law" [ot]

[philkerr]

[Thanks Markus]

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet,
8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.

Why was that gauge used?

Because that's the way they built them in England, and English
expatriates built the US Railroads.

Why did the English build them like that?

Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built
the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

Why did "they" use that gauge then?

Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools
that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?

Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would
break on some of the old, long distance roads in England, because
that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads?

Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and
England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads?

Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to
match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots
were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of
wheel spacing.

The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is
derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war
chariot. And bureaucracies live forever.

So the next time you are handed a spec and told we have always done it
that way and wonder what horse's ass came up with that, you may be
exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just
wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses.

Summary

[mkro]

Jack Valenti is a war hero, is known as smart guy, and has been fighting for the good of the world ever since he joined the MPAA.

HPR: Wanna put an end to the embarrasing 'Boston strangler' anecdote everyone keep bringing up?

JV: Sure. I didn't say that, or it came out wrong, and I were right anyway. And digital is to analog as canned pickles is to a carton of milk or something. Left in the sun.
Anyway.. Here's a five-minute monologue of why piracy will lead to the End of Civilization As We Know It.

HPR: Great. Now, tell us why "fair use" is just whining.

JV: My pleasure. DVDs last forever, and some professor in a school can PLAY the DVD in front of the students, right? For now. That's fair, right?

HPR: Well, that should make things clear, and I can't think of a single question that would make this an interview. Wanna add anything about the war since we still have time left?

JV: Yeah, Vietnam is the only war we lost, because there were no censorship then. Lack of censorship led to lack of support from the American people, and that's why I think censorship in wartime is just neat!

Fair Use HAH

[pyite]

"JV: What is fair use? Fair use is not a law. There's nothing in law."

This is really laughable, and an idiot like this should not even be ALLOWED to lobby. Sorry Jack, but you don't know Jack. Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107 of the United States Code provides a four value metric [cornell.edu] for determining whether or not something falls under the fair use doctrine. A very good fair use explanation can be found here [eff.org].

obligatory (stupid) content related quote...

[rmassa]

There is almost no legal, high quality content available on the internet. -Sen. Ernest Hollings D-S.C.

Re:Standards evolve

[fishbowl]

For an interesting counterpoint to this, have a look at:

this [google.com]

and:

this [google.com]

FALSE!

[Riskable]

Have a look here...

http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.htm