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Jack Valenti's Views On The Digital Age
ditogi writes "The Harvard Political Review did a quick interview with the lord of darkness himself, Jack Valenti. He gives his thoughts on government mandated copy prevention, fair use, and lobbying. In response to his famous 'VCR is [to the movie industry]...as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.' quote, he responds, 'I wasn't opposed to the VCR.' And what does he think of his current job? 'I think lobbying is really an honest profession.'" My favorite quote: "In the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless." Update: 02/05 20:05 GMT by T : Derek Slater writes "I'm the author of the Valenti article you guys linked to. I've made some brief comments about it on my site, and figured I'd send them along."
Or the DVD rots away.
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
If Jack Valenti had his way back in 1982 (he almost did as the Sony BetaMax case went all the way to the Supreme Court) we wouldn't have VCRs today, Blockbuster wouldn't exist and 50% of Hollywoods income wouldn't exist.
The guy is a knob.
Hi:
I would like to respond to the article's citation
to the costs of producing a CD and a movie.
I believe it cited 250,000 dollars for a CD and
20 million for a movie.
I talked about this with a friend who is doing
a CD for a chorus. He said that the studio
rental and editing costs were about $20,000
to $30,000.
We did not get a chance to talk about the
manufacturing and distro costs, but I strongly
think that the total costs can be done at much
less than the number cited in the article.
Mark
Cleara
'VCR is [to the movie industry]...as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.' quote, he responds, 'I wasn't opposed to the VCR.'
From that quote then we can also infer he wasn't opposed to the Boston Strangler. Maybe he is the "Prince of Darkness".
[from the interview:]
Valenti: But in digital piracy, with the click of a mouse a twelve year-old can send a film hurdling around the world.
Hey Valenti, what sites have you been visiting lately? Pete Townshend wants to know...
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
We're breeding a new group of young students who wouldn't dream of going into a Blockbuster and putting a DVD under their coat. But they have no compunction about bringing down a movie on the Internet. That isn't wrong to them. Why? I don't know.
Nowhere in this article did I find any mention of turning "Bringing down a movie on the Internet" into a viable business model.
People download movies becasue it is easy, convenient, and fast.
Attach a cost.
Keep it easy.
Keep it convenient
Make it fast.
and it could become a viable business model for the future...
The music industry still hasn't gotten the clue, maybe the movie industry still has a chance before it eaten alive by Kazaa, IRC(for the moment), and other file sharing applications.
"In the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless."
Or what about when media changes? Can I simply transfer digital content from one media to another when I have paid for the right to listen to it? For instance, I purchased and repurchased a significant bit of music first on vinyl and then on CD with many of the albums being duplicates. In fact, some of them were purchased as vinyl LP's, cassettes, and then CD's of the same album. Now they are digital and hosted on my dedicated G4 media server, I don't want to have to purchase them again.
Also, what about all of that vinyl I have that is out of print? Old punk and bluegrass vinyl that I want to rip into iTunes as well. Since I have already purchased this stuff, I should be able to digitize it without having to pay any more royalties.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
He doesn't have CD eating children running around his house like I do.
Dear Jack,
I work at the bank where your financial information is stored. We were considering backing up your jillions of dollars but decided after hearing your comments that the information is secure because it is digital.
Have a nice day,
A fan
the lord of darkness himself, Jack Valenti.
I was going to make a comment about slashdot, and professionalism, and editorial responsibility to present unbiased viewpoints..
but..
..fuck it. This guy is Satan on Earth, and I hope he goes the fuck out of business.
Bullshit, Jack. It's right here: US Code: Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107.
TheFrood
If you say "I'll probably get modded down for this..." then I will mod you down.
My god the VHS tape is barely over 20 years old, but you'd think the way he talks people have been breaking VHS tapes and buying replacements for over 100 years.
Also I never knew it was illegal to copy VHS tapes that you already owned. All the FBI blurb at the begining of almost every U.S.-made movie says is that it is illegal to copy for distribution or showing in front of an audience. I guess he could get the legal eagles to define 'audience' as one or more people or pets.
"The RIAA, where an ignorant consumer[*] is our best customer!"
[*]sheep, that is
"All I am saying," he said, "is that there is currently no oversight over the information that is getting duplicated. In other words, for all we know these people could be backing up my clients' protected material. My clients are simply requesting a reasonable amount of access to this data to verify that it doesn't contain any of our intillectual property."
Mr. Valenti then asked the SysAdmin industry can justify spending so much money on "backing up" untold Terrabytes of content even though the data is in digital, format which does not degrade.
"I'm not accusing them of anything, but I think they are stealing content," he concluded.
Ñ'
He obviously has not read Title 17, United States Code, the statutes that specify copyright law in the United States. If he had, he would have seen section 107, which tells the judge what four factors to look at.
And one of the four factors is commercial exploitation. Nothing from nothing leaves nothing. If a work is out of print or otherwise not being exploited, then it'd probably be possible for a defendant's counsel to argue that by taking the work out of print, the copyright owner has admitted that the work has negligible market value, that unauthorized copying could not possibly diminish the market value, and that the use of such material is more likely to be fair.
Will I retire or break 10K?
"we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out."
Damn, I wish he banked with my company... I'd make sure we didn't make any backups of his bank account - since they're not needed and all that.
And then I'd schedule a disaster-recovery test involving fire, flooding, and lots of sledgehammer blows to the DASD where his data was stored.
"So on one hand, honey is an amazingly sophisticated and efficient food source. On the other hand it's bee backwash."
What's his point here?
"What is not fair use is making a copy of an encrypted DVD, because once you're able to break the encryption, you've undermined the encryption itself."
So what if I've 'undermined the encryption'?
I do know what the DMCA says about it. But it's absurd and wrong that they can wrap a patent around something that copyright law won't let them accomplish.
Through their own legal battles against used sales and mom & pop rental places, they've made the point that I'm purchasing a liscense to the content. Where is the liscense (if there is a standard one)? Is there a term anywhere that says the liscense is tied to the medium and the encryption somehow?
Also I take issue to this quote:
"We're breeding a new group of young students who wouldn't dream of going into a Blockbuster and putting a DVD under their coat. But they have no compunction about bringing down a movie on the Internet. That isn't wrong to them. Why? I don't know."
This is bullshit. 'Young students' surely do know right from wrong. They know getting a movie (or video game or album) they haven't paid for is wrong. They also know it isn't theft, but a copyright infringement. I just hate his insinuation that we're not only criminals, but stupid.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I guess he could get the legal eagles to define 'audience' as one or more people or pets.
United States copyright law, 17 USC 101 defines an audience as "a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances".
Will I retire or break 10K?
You buy it again! I mean, duh.
Why would anyone want backups of stuff they paid for when they could simply pay for the same content all over again!
Look, let me put it in terms even a Slashdotter can understand. If people could have backups, how would Jack make more money? Next thing you know, people will start thinking movies are about "watching photons bounced off or emitted from a screen and being entertained". Sure, there's that "acting" and "direction" and "plot" and "special effects", but, please, people, don't lose sight of the important part, namely the part about Jack making money.
Local Man Arrested For Violence At Bank
Police Tuesday arrested a local man at a Bank of America branch. Jack Valenti, 46, was charged with assault and attempted robbery for beating the bank president with a spindle of blank CDRs and attempting to take cash from the teller's drawer. According to the teller, Mr. Valenti became upset when he was informed that, due to a computer error, his account had been closed. Due to recent changes in the bank's policies, the IT staff ceased making backups of the bank's data. When asked about the policy change, the IT manager, who appeared to be choking back laughter, said, "We recently changed our backup policies in light of statements made by Mr. Valenti himself that digital information was timeless and, therefore, did not need backed up. The bank president read that interview and told us he could no longer justify the cost of daily tape backups."
Mr. Valenti is being held on $50,000 bond. His lawyer declined our request for an interview. In similar news, the RIAA has filed suit agains Bank of America for copyright violations. When asked what evidence prompted the suit, a spokesdemon replied, "They had CDRs, didn't they? What more evidence do you need?"
Public use of any portable music system is a virtually guaranteed indicator of sociopathic tendencies. -- Zoso
We've long suspected as much, but now we know for sure. Is there anything in that article that he says that isn't an out-and-out lie? He was never against VCRs? That's doubtless why he claimed that VCRs would destroy the movie industry. Statistics I hear suggest that movie tickets are now selling better than they have at any time since Jack Valenti was still getting into movies at the "child" price.
Backups aren't necessary? I wonder if, when he was a kid, he ever dropped a record on his bedroom floor and watched it shatter into a million pieces. He obviously really believes that if he scratches a CD, trips and falls and smashes a CD in half, has his cassette player or his VCR eat a tape, or anything like that, he (and we) should all just rush out to buy a new one. No way!
Where does his figure "$3.5 billion a year in videocassette analog piracy" come from? How does he "measure" this loss, being as it's really difficult to measure negative quantities. Is he counting the total street value of large-scale bootleg videotapes, or some sort of hypothetical "if Joe Average hadn't taped Star Trek off the tv, he would have bought the box set" figure?
"What is fair use? Fair use is not a law. There's nothing in law. " Well, IANAL, but I quote
107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.
That looks like there's something in law, all right. In Canada, the similar reservation is called "fair dealing," in case you're looking for it.
Oh, how he do go on. He claims to have been in Vietnam. Was he exposed to Agent Orange? That's the only other explanation I can think of...
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Studio costs are just one part of production for a typical album. They also usually include a producer to guide the project (assuming you want to be a commercial success) and paying the band an amount to live off of during the process.
Choruses also usually spend less time in the studio than the typical band. The chorus is working from a precomposed score and can sing their parts right the first time. Overdubbing, multiple takes, mistakes, and experimentation all take time.
Manufacturing/distro is in the $2/cd neighborhood. Marketing can be huge.
DVD rotting has been stated here in a previous story
That means that he's claiming about $20 worth of losses for EACH blank videotape.
So I guess they're assuming that every single blank videotape sold is used to pirate movies. Nice.
Wait, just kidding. I just totally made up those numbers. Shit, I should be a lobbyist and live with honor.
According to this ass, the film industry, which is rolling in more money because the VCR exists than they would without it, is still grousing because the SCOTUS decided to allow me to videotape my niece's birthday party without forking money over to his fat-cat cartel.
Free Mac Mini. Yes, I'm
This is really laughable, and an idiot like this should not even be ALLOWED to lobby. Sorry Jack, but you don't know Jack. Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107 of the United States Code provides a four value metric for determining whether or not something falls under the fair use doctrine. A very good fair use explanation can be found here.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
The "railroad standard" evolved without a gov't mandate (unless of course were talking about Rome)...search google for "space shuttle chariot railroad". Any number of links to the following text:
I was surprised to discover that Valenti is also concerned about the music industry:
"The music industry now is suffering nine, ten, fifteen percent losses in revenue. When you compound that over the next three or four years, the music industry is dead. I don't see a future for it. After awhile, who's going to produce it?"
I think I can answer his question. I suspect that the same producers will still be available if the music industry dies; I doubt that all the producers will be killed.
I think the question he really wanted to ask was "who's going to PAY to produce it?" The answer right now is that the musicians themselves pay to produce; the record companies just front them the money. If the musicians become about as popular as Britney Spears, they can earn enough to pay back the production costs out of their royalties.
So the question really is, who is going to front the musicians production money when record companies can no longer make obscene profits from their control of music distribution?
There are some possible answers to that, which I'll illustrate from experiments done by one of my favorite groups, King Crimson. The band owns its own record label, and they make 10 times as much money per copy on the CD's on their own label, compared to the CD's that they license the Record companies to distribute. Even if the current music distribution system collapses along with Valenti's predicted collapse of record companies, then independent record companies can still use their distribution methods.
Although King Crimson is a popular enough band to be able to provide their own production money, only their new releases are sure to make back the money. They also have a scheme for paying the cost of producing CD's from old concert recordings. They ask their fans to front them the money by contributing to an account, from which they buy for the CD's that they want from the ones that are produced.
Musicians and producers will survive the death of the current music industry. More and more musicians are bypassing the current record companies because of how badly they are being ripped off. I am confident that music will still be produced because either the artists or their fans will be able to front the production costs. If the big multi-national record companies no longer monopolize the distribution and promotion systems, I think you will find that the artists themselves will be able to take over. After all, the current system is really only helping the small number of hugely popular acts that dominate MTV. All other acts are simply getting screwed by the current system, which charges them for all the costs, but gives them only a tiny percentage of the earnings.
-- Pot is safer than Beer
The belief that movies, music, or books are somehow licensed to you is incorrect. It's a popular misconception, presumably because the copyright industry wants people to believe it. Don't fall for it, the debate over copyright is messy enough without people bring incorrect beliefs into the mix.
If you purchase a DVD, a CD, or a book, you have a right to that particular DVD, CD, or book. In general you have every right to that DVD as you do to a chair you purchase. You can sell it, loan it out, modify it, give it away, use it, and let your friends use it. The only restriction of note on your behavior if copyright law. Copyright law says you can't distribute copies, that right is reserved for the copyright holder.
The copyright industry is spending alot of effort to manipulate the language of the debate. Their goal is to make the debate impossible by removing or invalidating the language of the other side. Don't let them!
Search 2010 Gen Con events
He's being intellectually dishonest but not technically lying. If you lose $1 from a technology but gain $5 at the same time, you can smile at the net $4 extra you made or you can wail and moan about the unfairness of your $1 gross loss.
What I don't understand is why technologists don't just make a Valenti watch explaining how he's being dishonest and disinforming legislators. That would destroy his credibility as a lobbyist (legislators hate to be embarrassed by parroting a lying lobbyist) and badly hurt his employers, the MPAA.
And yet they still participate. According to Opensecrets.org the movie industry donated $20,172,249 to Democrats in 2002 and $713,874 to Republicans in 2002. Most of that money came in the form of soft contributions, the primary targets of the Mcain Feingold bill. See here for details. The Star player in the industry Disney came in at #66 in the all-time top donors list at opensecrets. See here for the list and here for their profile. They too favor a lot of soft money. Jack's own opensecrets link is here.
And yet he favors censoring technologies and code when his clients' profits are at stake. It's obvious that he doesn't consider code or engineering to be speech but still it seems odd to take this kind of firm line on one area of human endeavor and yet to be so closed off in another. Perhaps his speech is more important than other peoples' speech.
However:
In Jack's world of course we would all be happy to pay for new copies whenever this occurs. Here on earth however my wallet and I object to re-purchasing the same thing.
The same way that we always have with books, cd's and movies, by relying on sensible laws. And accepting the fact that the profit models just have to take a hit now and again.
Not completely true. It is illegal for me to copy the Spider man videotape and to share it with a million friends. It is not illegal for me to copy excerpts from it for activities covered under fair use restrictions. I agree with Jack that you cannot legally make backup copied of your tapes (unlike cassette tapes) but I would argue that this is wronmg and that this restriction, in light of the fair-use provisions, exists soley to guarantee a stream of new customers as tapes wear out and to permit hollywood to adopt a two-tier model of pricing whereby video stores pay more than the rest of us for each copy.
Just how old does he think video tapes are?
Seriously, Would I find one if I looked through my grandparent's house?
Other people have pointed this out already but just to rub his face in it the law is here. Since we haven't been using the Internet for generations he may not be used to it. In his testemony before Congress on the VCR he stated "I am suggesting that the copyright royalty fee lives under the canopy of fair use."
Actually he was opposed to the VCR and what he felt that it would do. The presentation before congress is a beautiful read in which he quotes excerpts from peoples' diaries as evidence not unlike the recording industry's current work with phone surveys. He also decries the first sale doctrine as a route to an unstable marketplace, spends time discussing the greed of Japenese companies and his desire to help the American Consumer. He even admits to infringing himself and asserts that the only purpose of VCR's is to "is to copy coyrighted material that belongs to other people".
He predicted:
Where the hell can you download >700mb in a matter of minutes?
Although this isn't in his article but in the testimony above I feel it should be commented on too:
If that is the case, then he has a lot of explaining to do about the DVD Reigon Encoding system.
Final quotes from Jack: