I tend to stay out of the debate about copyright and online piracy. For the major studios in Hollywood, led by the MPAA, piracy is the monolithic issue, especially because of pending legislation in DC that has pitted Hollywood and Silicon Valley against each other. Even if the pending legislation is as bad as the tech companies (Google, facebook etc.) say it is, I think we can all agree that content theft is a problem that will always need to be addressed.
The claims about how much the American economy is affected by piracy seem very inflated to me, but they could be accurate….I just don’t know. What I do know, however, is that the lobbying effort undertaken by Hollywood has been pissing me off for sometime. The following video is a perfect example:
Let me say that I actually like this video and found it very entertaining. That said, the biggest threat the poor woman’s job is NOT content theft…..it’s runaway production. Since this film worker appears to live in New York, she is probably having to turn down offers because New York’s lavish film incentive has kept production booming. However, before New York took action with a protective film incentive, the woman’s job would still have existed….but filled by someone else in another state or nation offering film incentives designed to cause runaway production. If New York ended its incentive, incentive-fueled runaway production would be the direct threat to her employment, not content theft.
I would like to make my own version of this PSA that would accuratley represent the true threat to this film worker’s job…
Rather than offering free movies to people, the man would be offering free money to producers in the form of film tax credits available someplace outside New York, say Louisiana for this example. What’s the catch if the producers accept the millions of dollars Louisiana is willing to throw at them?? The poor woman holding the boom in New York will lose her job and it will go to someone in Louisiana. In this alternate version, we already know the outcome. The producers and the studios don’t hesitate to take the free money and don’t bat an eye at replacing a job held by someone in California or New York with someone in another state or nation.
The video bothers me because the studios are trying to make it look like they care about protecting jobs, when we all know they are really only interested in protecting their own profit. And protecting profit is fine for them to do, just be honest about motive and come clean. The studios should only need to tell the truth about being robbed and not resort to a disingenuous claim that content theft is really about jobs.
