Slashdot Mirror
Jack Valenti, Dead at 85
saforrest writes "Jack Valenti, a man whose influence in both Washington and Hollywood was profound, died today at age 85. He first became famous as special assistant to Lyndon Johnson: he can even be seen in the famous photo aboard Air Force One. In 1966, he quit this job to become president of the MPAA, from 1966 to 2004."
...right on his grave.
Rot in hell, you son of a bitch.
Or, at least, it's a good start.
How we know is more important than what we know.
There's no point in acting like most of us liked him, even a little. We don't have to celebrate his death, but we also don't have to pretend he wasn't a douche.
Ahh, poor Jack. A nice guy who liked movies but didn't have a clue about how other people enjoyed them in the 21st century.
Rest in peace Jack.
(In heaven, there's no copyright law to violate. Everything is P2P. For reals!)
Jack Valenti may have been a pro-copyright lobbyists that we all despise, but he was still a human being that had done more in his life for his beliefs than we can only hope to achieve. I send condolences to his friends and family.
He should have been hung as an enemy of our rights as Americans.
I know some people that were sued by the MPAA under his regime, who didn't have any pirated movies, and who were nearly ruined by legal expenses.
I don't care about angry MPAA fans and their mod points, he deserves a long line of people waiting to piss on his grave for the laws he and the RIAA have inflicted upon an unwilling majority of citizens in this country.
It's been ages since I've been to a movie because of him.
It's all anime for me now.
Not a dime to the MPAA-affiliated studios until the DMCA is shot down and buried for good.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
While Jack was quite the luddite in his waning years, he was instrumental in replacing the movie industry's repressive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_Code">Hays Code [no sex, nudity, excessive violence, etc.] with the less-evil MPAA classification system. He also opposed the "clean DVD" proposal which would've seen sanitised versions of films -- a dangerous idea, if there ever was one.
Not all of us are pure evil, and Jack has to be applauded for moving the industry in the right direction. I only hope his successor is a forward-thinking visionary.
"The problem with our economy is that our budget is balanced by people who aren't" - A.E.N.
I know this man wasn't exactly our mascot, but can we please not celebrate the death of another human being?
I'm not asking for a moment of silence or anything. I'm just saying that the man deserves some dignity. He was misguided, at least, but he was a human being.
Even though he lobbied for the the DMCA and is a proponent of DRM, he did however start the rating system which replaced the much more militant Hays Code, allowing movies to be less censored.
If you are a part of the RIAA and/or MPAA copyright regimes. Do you want to end like Hitler, Castro, or Valenti with large numbers of people celebrating your death? I don't mean in a HAHA way either. I wanted to be respectful and not to spit on the graves of the dead but I couldn't help but smile when I saw this headline.
I was worried that the /. community would go overboard in their artificial hate for a man they never met or knew.
I'm glad we save our energy to tackle real problems like world hunger, war, government encroachment, etc...
A human being died. Show some compassion.
Oh who am I kidding. He was an asshole.
Are you seriously lumping Hitler, Castro and Valenti together?
REALLY?
Will the textbooks five hundred years from now speak of the great 20th century tyrants and mention Hitler, Stalin, Castro and Jack "PG-13" Valenti?
How would that work? Hitler murdered his millions....Stalin murdered his tens of millions....Valenti was a tool of the MAFIAA....
Politics is personal. It's personal when someone can lose his house, car, etc. because a political lobby got copyright expanded in both scope and duration. It's personal when a cartel's desire for more profits makes criminal the free use of our computing equipment. Friend, there's not much more personal than having your freedoms taken away for the sake of someone else's business model.
So you're right - what I posted does not make me a great person. But Jack Valenti couldn't have made it much more personal if he tried.
I wish his family solace at this time.
Speaking to those of you who have expressed distasteful feelings here, try to remember that there is such a thing as "winning gracefully," "being a good sport" or whatever you wish to call it.
I don't like Valenti on the balance. He did some good things, but his last actions in life were, in my opinion, bad. This isn't the time to debate them.
One of the great measures of a person throughout our history is how they treat their fallen enemies. Take care how you treat yours now. Don't debase yourself, the community or "the cause" with your immature comments.
Don't post innacurate information
If you do, I swear by my pretty floral bonnet I will end you.
Get the fuck off the high horse, and put that crack pipe down.
No one stabbed this douche in the face for 85 years, I'd say that was a good long life.
A life with which to propagate evil and murder countless innocent civilians from 30,000ft during the second world war.
To devalue your rights and the very constitution upon which your country was founded.
To rape the living shit out of you whenever you buy or watch a movie.
Understand? Nah you wouldn't.
"this is the same place where the murder of millions for such high crimes as being of a particular religious sect* is equated with the damnable offence of wanting video games that are rated "m" to not be sold to minors (because that's censorship, you know, the reason the founding fathers took up arms?)"
Exactly, and it mirrors to a larger extent where a portion of society is headed -- to the looney sections of the extremes; bored and stupid looking for a "problem" to solve.
Everything becomes "evil", the same kind of "evil" as genocide, etc.
Now you can no longer define what evil really is.
Murder is no longer of consequence because "we can't watch our entertainment".
Everything you want to do becomes a "right", as in a "constitutional right".
Now you can no longer define what a right is.
Your right to enjoy a DVD is now more/as important than my right to life.
Your right not to be offended is now more/as important than my right to free speech.
Have we become so bored / stupid that we must take these problems and fill them with such vile rhetoric so that we can placate our egos when we "solve" them?
Stop it, damn it, just stop.
I mean, are there even enough available mod points floating around to tag 99% of the replies here as "Redundant"?
he was at one time a valuable member of the human race, and flew 51 combat missions as the pilot of a B-25 during WWII.
He did his duty and that is admirable, but his record for oppressing others afterwards leads me to believe that his choice of sides was an accident of birth. Good and evil involve more than bravery and sacrifice.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You know, in recent years, I had been feeling that the quality of discourse on /. has been going up. People usually have been taking things in perspective, even when the topic is Microsoft.
/. I've always known and loved! It's back, baby! :) :P
But now there are suggestions of celebrating a person's DEATH, and desecrating his grave, just because he didn't want you to watch some movies for free. Now, I'm a big advocate of copyright reform--I even donate to the EFF--but to show such hatred that you're happy about the end of a human life? Just because you disagree with him about copyright law? Wow.
Just, wow. Now there's the
Okay, we all hate the guy, or at least what the guy stood for: money. But really, all he was doing was trying to keep himself employed. His tactics sucked ass, and his technique was a little bit... sub-par, but what I've seen of this story so far, the reader-base response has been pretty ugly.
The guy is dead. No need to be disrespectful of a dead guy. Don't send flowers, that's fine. But no need to piss yourself over it.
just my opinion, feel free to disagree.. it's your right. Someone out there probably liked the guy..
"Advocating a different IP scheme than you" is "a ridiculously insignificant aspect of life"?
I hate to break it to you, but copyright is a free speech issue, and speech is pretty damn important. What he did at the MPAA was no better than advocating any other form of censorship. Should we be sad about the deaths of book-burners too?
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Speaking to those of you who have expressed distasteful feelings here, try to remember that there is such a thing as "winning gracefully," "being a good sport" or whatever you wish to call it.
The most disrespectful sentiment is that his death is some sort of victory. It's not because the bad policies and laws he fostered and believed in are still here. His passing brings some hope of change and that is what we celebrate.
This isn't the time to debate them [unAmerican laws].
On the contrary, now is the perfect time to reflect on the man and his beliefs and what he accomplished. What better time will there ever be?
He believed in digital restrictions until at least 2004 and probably went to his grave without understanding the real social cost of such control. To this day, I'm forced to chose between digital freedom and participation in popular culture. There is no middle ground because people like him considered you and me an insignificant minority who should use other options. Rights don't work like that. You can't violate people's rights because few people would bother to exercise them. While many of the things he said have been repudiated for 20 years, the logic he used never changed and he continued to say things we all hate. Those things hurt all of us every day.
The passing of generations is often the only way real change happens. Mr. Valenti was a product of a different time. His loyalties reflect those times but his intransigence is timeless. The run away success of the VCR was helpful to those he professed loyalty toward, and his opposition was harmful to them. It is surprising that he never learned the lesson. We can all feel sad for his family but we can also look at the world as a place that's a little less hostile.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Sadly true. Mindset can be the hardest thing to change in the world. This is how dictatorships live on, in the sociology and in the people's mind, long after they have been overturned. I'm from an Eastern European country, so I feel this firsthand. Progress is greatly hindered by the fact that at least the third of the voting population became a pensioner before or around 1990.
It is a problem, because in a lot of these people's minds there is no moral difference between the two systems. In other words, they live by the patterns they learned in the dictatorship, while enjoying the benefits of a democracy. Thing is, this doesn't really work, because they don't understand the fundamental issues of living in a democracy, like making the leadership accountable. That is the duty of everyone that lives in a democracy. This is a price we have to pay for enjoying the benefits of democracy. It is not a convenient thing to do, to carefully evaluate and then elect the best candidate and if he messes up, hold him accountable.
That was the theoretical part, but it has very real consequences and it is a very real problem. The people who spent most of their lives in a dictatorship, combined with a democrafically aging society makes a very bad match for democracy. Most of these people still evaluate parties based on who will give them the most gifts, who appellates more on the 'politics' of their youth, which was a dictatorship. They aren't troubled if some politician (dare I say prime minister) acts like as if he's still back in that dictatorship. It is the "we'll throw you some bones, just don't question the leaders" philosophy of a dictatorship. I'm sick of the way it permiates into and poisons a would be democracy through the minds of people who have suffered in the previous system.
The future is more hopeful though. The youth who didn't live in that system rejects those ideas with a big majority. The age line which divides the younger people and the more democratic parties from the old people and the ex state party is going up. Normal thinking is slowly spreading as people are born who were not poisoned by a regime.
This might not be too closely related to the MPAA, but should tell you something about the power of the mindset and it's effects.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Every DVD ever published. No region code for heaven. :-)
RIP Mr Valenti. May you make it though because you tried to do good.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I know this man wasn't exactly our mascot, but can we please not celebrate the death of another human being? I'm not asking for a moment of silence or anything. I'm just saying that the man deserves some dignity. He was misguided, at least, but he was a human being.
I'm sorry if this comes as a surprise to you, but many of us on Slashdot are assholes, and honest enough to admit it to ourselves. Furthermore, to paraphrase Ecclesiastes, there is a time and place for everything. I trust no-one here would disturb the mourners at the funeral, but for geeks everywhere, the end of his life merits at least a sigh of relief, and Slashdot is as ideal a forum for such as may be found.
Yes, a human being is dead. He doubtless had personal friends and family, and I feel some pity for the sense of loss they now experience. Losing someone is never easy. On the other hand, I never encountered the man in person. Instead, I encounter the DMCA he championed, the copyright extensions he supported, and the diminishing recognition of the "fair use" he disbelieved in. For those who interacted him as human being, feel free to mourn. For those who love humanity for its own sake, his life was long and rich, and with less to mourn in its ending than thousands who die each day across the face of the world. But for those of us who have only interacted with his legacy as a tool of corporate power, some may choose to celebrate, for having outlived the man, we have a better hope of outliving his ideas.
On the other hand, his ideas are thriving, so there's not all that much to celebrate. Ding, dong, the witch is dead... now, get back to work . There's still a DMCA.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.