Chris Dodd Warns Of Hollywood Backlash Against Obama Over Anti-piracy Bill

In an interview with Fox News, the head of the MPAA had a “warning” for the President and members of Congress up for reelection in 2012. “Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake.” Of course, the head of the MPAA is Chris Dodd, who was a U.S. Senator last year and is therefore forbidden from lobbying Congress or the White House for a few more years. Nevertheless, this “warning” sounds like crude blackmail, a blustering threat from a mob boss whose time is passing.

I imagine any more honesty might have resulted in this: “You were supposed to stay bought! We paid good money and you didn’t do what we demanded! That’s not how blackmail is supposed to go! When I was a Senator, politicians knew how to stay bought!”

Dodd went on to say that Avatar was “stolen by online pirates” 21 million times, a specious claim on many level.

• “Stolen” is the wrong word. To steal something form you is to deprive you of that thing. Put simply, if you have two DVDs, and I steal one, you now have only one. Whatever it is that people do online, it is not “stealing.” This may seem like splitting hairs, but the analogy between stealing and whatever-this-is is imperfect, and the use of the word “stealing” to describe it hides those differences, to ill end.
• “Pirates” is the wrong word. There are real pirates in the world today, and they kill people. This word may have been chosen by the “pirates” themselves, in an effort to romanticize their exploits, but again, it’s the wrong word.
•  21 million times? Avatar grossed $2,782,275,172 in theaters alone. That’s $2.8 Billion. It’s the highest-grossing movie ever, beating #2 Titanic by nearly a billion dollars. This is Dodd’s example of acts which threaten to decimate his industry?

I don’t “pirate” movies, not ever. I am, however, more and more open to the research demonstrating that illegal downloading may actually help sales rather than hurting them.

I note that claims like “21 million downloads” miss quite a few interesting details.

How many of those originated in the U.S.? SOPA/PIPA were designed to stop people within the U.S. from being able to find sources of illegal downloads on overseas sites, which apparently is less than 7.5% of total movie downloading.

How many of those people who illegally downloaded the film also saw it in theaters? How many also bought it on DVD? The assumptions seem to be that those who download only download, but I can see people downloading and still making the trek to the local cinema, or downloading to watch at home before the film is available on DVD or Blu-ray, but then snapping it up once it is available for sale.

It would be nice to know what’s going on inside the brain of someone who uses the most successful movie in history to demonstrate that the industry is being destroyed by illegal downloads.

It would be nicer if Senator Dodd were in prison for his clumsy attempts to circumvent the law and threaten our representatives in Washington, D.C.

(ht: BoingBoing)