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At Least Jack Valenti was Consistent in Being Wrong

Aug 02, 2004 9:43 PM
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Tim Wu, at Lawrence Lessig's blog, has a nice recap of the recently-retired MPAA head's laughable rants against each new supposedly-apocalyptic threat to his lobby.

On the nascent cable industry, in 1974
"[Cable will become] a huge parasite in the marketplace, feeding and fattening itself off of local television stations and copyright owners of copyrighted material. We do not like it because we think it wrong and unfair."

On the dangers on media concentration, 1984 Op-Ed
"There are now only three national networks ... there will never be more than three national networks."

On the VCR, 1983
"[Some say] that the VCR is the greatest friend that the American film producer ever had. I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."

And, no, he was not some fringe Luddite; this was the man the film industry chose to represent them for decades. And he's had a stifling influence on new opportunities such as peer-to-peer technologies (e.g. Kazaa, BitTorrent) and that God-awful DVD encoding scheme.


Comments: At Least Jack Valenti was Consistent in Being Wrong

Well, perhaps if Kazaa and Bittorent were actually used for legal purposes, he wouldn't have any problems with them.

And don't try to say "Oh, plenty of people use them for legal purposes", because you know as well as I that the VAST majority of data transferred via peer-to-peer/bittorrent are copyrighted material.

Posted by: Steve Meister on August 3, 2004 6:02 PM | permalink

Yes, and VCRs and audio cassettes could also be used for illegal copyright violation. And I'm sure that that was a major component of their initial use. But should they have been demonized or even banned on that basis?

Posted by: Joe Grossberg on August 3, 2004 6:12 PM | permalink

Bittorrent is starting to get some legit use, particularly from game developers looking to distribute game demos or videos without having use their own bandwidth.

No comment on Kazaa... Cold day in hell when that one is legit.

Posted by: O'dell on August 7, 2004 1:00 AM | permalink

No more comments! Either someone has violated Godwin's Law, I'm tired of the discussion or, most likely, the ten-week window has closed. You can, however, contact me through email.