Hollywood's antipiracy charm offensive has FCC in crosshairs

Hollywood's new campaign for government permission to police the Internet for copyright theft began this month with a segment on, of all places, CBS's Sixty Minutes. Viewers expecting another of the shows' self-described "hard-hitting investigative reports" watched a feature called The Movie Pirates, in which a shocked Leslie Stahl disclosed what was apparently a revelation to her—that people go into multiplexes with camcorders, record the movie, then package and sell it on the street. "Mobsters have moved into the piracy business, and it's bleeding Hollywood to the tune of billions of dollars a year," Stahl warned her viewers. What Sixty Minutes only hinted at during the show was the extent to which the trade association that doubtless cheered this segment—the Motion Picture Association of America—is also pressing for the deployment of a wide variety of techniques to put "speed bumps" on the 'Net, as one of the program's interviewees called them. The piece came in the wake of a reshuffling of MPAA staff, reportedly in response to studio complaints that the group's anti-piracy efforts have not been effective so far. Even the group's boss Dan Glickman is stepping down.

The Friday before that program, MPAA sent the Federal Communications Commission a 32-page filing submitted as part of the FCC's National Broadband Plan, which the agency must submit to Congress by mid-February. The statement called for the Internet to be "governed by laws, standards and rules, just like the real streets and communities inhabited all across America." The FCC and Congress "cannot let the anonymity of the Internet become a cloak behind which people think that unlawful conduct can continue unabated," MPAA warned.