MPAA Proposes List of Countries to be Lobbied

Change.gov has posted a new lobbying paper by the always-on-pursuit MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) who is now appealing to the US government.

From the paper (PDF) we learn that "One of the MPAA's top priorities is attacking Internet piracy, through vigorous investigation and enforcement worldwide, as well as working with governments to ensure that their laws provide adequate remedies to stop internet piracy and are in full compliance with the WIPO Treaties."

However, lobbying the government with this may not even be the beginning of issues at stake here. Just remember the raid on The Pirate Bay two years ago – many voices were then heard saying that the US was being intrusive with respect to the internal affairs of Sweden.

An amount of bravado surfaces as the paper goes on saying: "Achieving inter-industry cooperation in the fight against online piracy, including through automated detection and removal of infringing content is imperative to curb theft of online content, and is a priority for MPAA and its member companies." It makes one wonder about the existing detection techniques and their limits.

Knowing the direction the MPAA thinking and acting has taken it’s no surprise they congratulate Britain for the recent triumph (see Wikipedia case) and claim Britain and France as worthy-of-following models.

The paper also features lists a number of countries on the MPAA’s agenda for lobbying. Among them – Canada, China, India, Russia, Mexico and Spain.

While on the Change.gov site I read an interesting comment from a reader Tom HR so I posted it here:

 Russian music-download sites pay royalties to two Russian licensing organizations, ROMS and FAIR. Those organizations have money, and it's just waiting to be paid out. But here's what the RIAA and the IFPI (international counterpart of the RIAA) don't tell you: They refuse to go to Russia and pick up the money! (Mainly because it "isn't enough" to suit the fat cats.)

Going back to the RIAA: remember that they represent the RECORD LABELS, not the performers and songwriters. So anything they write about how "Russian pirate [sic] sites hurt the musicians," don't believe it. It's like every time the Democrats want to raise the minimum wage, the Republicans trot out a boo-hoo story about "If we raise minimum wage, yada-yada, it will lead to unskilled workers being thrown out of work." Well, just as the Republicans don't give a rat's *** about minimum-wage earners, the RIAA doesn't give a fig about whether songwriters starve.

Under a 1970s law, a record label is supposed to pay 9.1 cents a song in royalty to the songwriter, and 5.6 cents a song to the performer. (Meaning that when you pay 99 cents for a song, the actual musicians are getting a maximum of 14.7 cents of that. Apple or Wal-Mart or Amazon gets another 30 cents, and the rest goes to the record label.) But many labels use all sorts of lawyer tricks in their contracts so that the songwriter and performer get paid much less than 9.1 cents and 5.6 cents. For instance, Weird Al Yankovic has lamented that he earns less per song from downloads than from CD sales, even though a music download causes less cost to his label than manufacturing a CD does.

So to answer dean's comment, the reason I don't buy music anymore from American music sites? Because my money isn't going to musicians, it's going to pay for RIAA lawyers so they can sue college kids. The musicians get screwed only slightly less if I buy from Walmart-dot-com than if I buy from MP3Sparks-dot-com.