MPAA rep on the hot seat at this years SXSW Fest in Austin

March 18, 2006

RTV71 used our news submit to tell us about a woman from the MPAA that took a trip into the lions den- she decided to speak to the audience at SXSW Interactive! This is a festival of sorts that: "offers five days of panels, keynote discussions, trade show and exhibition, and exciting evening events. Attendees benefit from hands-on, how-to training as well as long-term, big-picture analysis in an atmosphere that charges creativity and out-of-the-box thinking." It's going on right now in Austin, Texas.

The woman was a panelist there to discuss the future of Darknets, (communities using private subnetworks to communicate and collaborate out of view of the larger Internet) but the moment she introduced herself: "Hello, my name is Kori Bernards, and I"m from the Motion Picture Association of America." the audience then became an angry firing squad, hijacking the subject and changing it to vent pent up disgust of draconian measures placed upon the public by the MPAA! The author of this article said the anger was palpable and he began to even feel sorry for the woman, for a while anyway.

The audience was filled with other examples of an industry gone crazy. One guy moved to the UK and all his DVDs stopped working because they were region-encoded (as most are). Her answer? That was in the contract you agreed to when you bought the DVD. Another guy asked why he can't just download the Sopranos. After all, he's a HBO subscriber, so he paid for it, he just happened to miss the last episode. Her answer, again, was that the time is part of the contract. My answer: Give it a couple years and HBO will be doing this, or they'll be out of business.

Another audience member said she worked at a small film studio, doing clearances for copyrighted works to appear in movies (simply having a movie on in the background of another movie requires a release, at least according to the MPAA) and most of the time the artists involved all said it was fine - it was the studio lawyers who stood in the way.

And that's really the problem, isn't it? There are these industries of middlemen - RIAA, MPAA - that claim to "protect artists" but what they're really protecting is themselves. Artists (and I include myself in that word) need to rise up and tell these people to go get stuffed. We can decide when a mashup is perfectly fine with us. We can decide to embrace file traders to build awareness of our work. We don't need you anymore. You're just holding us back.

Anyway the "discussion" went on for about an hour and we have to admire the lady for being able to take the heat, what a nightmare for her. Still, a fascinating article and you can check it out here. Not only
that, you can also find a link at the bottom of the page to listen to the whole panel, thanks to a link to SXSW's MP3 Podcast.

Source: Just a Thought