Jack Valenti is the man in power of the film industry. Being the Chairman
and the managing director of the Motion Picture Association of America, he
became particularly known in the years 1983-84 when he relentlessly fought
against the new invention of the time, the home video. He brought a suit against
Sony, the overpowering due to the Betamax system company in the market at the
time, and demanded from the American courts of law that they ban these devices
on the grounds that they were the media to the “expropriation of intellectual
property”: anyone possessing such a device could copy (steal as he had
put it) a movie shown on TV without imbursing the copyright to its creators
and naturally to the companies he himself represented. The case reached the
USA Supreme Court, which ruled out his plaint taking under consideration the
fact that copying a movie shown on TV for personal use was justifiable and
furthermore, a technology was not to be banned just because it had a negative
impact on a branch of industry. Valenti was taken aback not so much by the
definitive judgment of the court as by what was to follow in the market: the
VCR became a second golden goose to the film companies which, through video
clubs sold the same product for a second time-cash flowing into their tills,
at lower prices though. As for the ones who copied films, they finally were
proved to be a minor threat to the profits of the film industry.
Years passed by, Sony, from a technology producer has become a film producer
as well, Jack Valenti remains the man in power of the industry and a new threat
has started baring its teeth against the film companies’ tills. Digital
technology allows all users to replicate exact copies of every intellectual
product and the Internet helps to their immediate exchange.
Content-selling companies indulged in ruthless judicial conflicts: the Record
Companies Association versus Napster, the Motion Picture Association versus
the users of the program that unlatches DVD discs. Apart from all these, a
huge public relations campaign was launched to persuade the public that “what
is to the Warner Brothers benefit, is America’s welfare too.”
“The copyright industry (record companies, cinema companies and publishing
houses) has opened three times as many work places as the rest of the American
economy”, claims Jack Valenti in the Newsweek desktop version, “its
exports are larger than the ones accomplished by the aviation industry, agriculture
and the automobile industry. It has achieved commercial benefit with all the
countries of the world, when the rest of the economy bleeds due to commercial
deficits amounting the unholy sum of 277 billion dollars.
What amazes mostly, is the fact that the copyright industry is universally
acceptable. America’s productions are pleasantly assimilated by every
civilization, doctrine and country on this planet. American cinema is omnipresent
throughout the world…
“Now the Internet has turned up. American film producers have welcomed
this novel miracle. For the film industry, it has a huge potential as a new
system of distribution…
