Hollywood’s content rights back on DC stage

Hollywood galloped into Washington before this weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner with its usual message: protecting content.

Popular film producer Harvey Weinstein reintroduced the message April 26, lunging at companies that push open access and spinning a relatively lighthearted event into a political one. “You can start by paying the artists, paying the newspapers, paying the magazines,” Weinstein said to heavy applause at the first Creativity Conference, sponsored partly by the Motion Picture Association of America and held at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. “When you are starving, you are starving. It’s hard to be creative in that situation. Let’s even up the score.” The conference, which spanned more than four hours, encompassed several panels and delved into a wide swath of issues related to technology and innovation. But the content controversy — who owns what in a fast-moving digital age — remains one of the most unresolved.