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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.
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.
I don't think thats fair; take a look at the man's bio on wikipedia, 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.
It wasn't until he got into politics that he turned evil, and after all, didn't we forgive Darth Vader at the end?
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
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!)
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!
Darth Vader did something at the end to earn our forgiveness. As far as I can tell, Jack Valenti didn't kill the Emperor.
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.
>>that had done more in his life for his beliefs
His belief was that fair use should be outlawed because it interfered with corporate profits and you're praising him for that?
I understand it's crass to speak ill of the dead, but Valenti wasn't a terribly nice guy.
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.
A human being died. Show some compassion.
Oh who am I kidding. He was an asshole.
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.
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
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.
I totally agree with the sentiment that Valenti's family deserves respect, and should be allowed to mourn.
But that having been said, we're not talking about a "fallen enemy." He never lost. Valenti pretty much won the vision that he had. And that vision included heavy lobbying for the eggregious provisions of the DMCA, which to this day put people in jail for things that otherwise are defined as their right to do. Leaders still lionize him.
He instituted the hollywood ratings system, true, but he also ensured that the body was the most secrative and uncontestable organization inside the US. He also ensured that the people within that body followed his viewpoint about the world, and that it basically carried the weight of law, and as such became the most censurious organization in America. One could argue that, more than any other single individual, he's the reason why you can blow someone's head off in an R rated movie, but you can't show a woman touching herself through her clothes... Why violence is A.O.K. but physical intimacy is just wrong.
"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." When asked about using 4 second clips in a home movie project, he replied "There's no fair use to take something that doesn't belong to you."
And people really do go to jail over this stuff. We're talking about someone whose paranoia and lack of knowledge led to unbased responses which are now routinely taking chunks of people's lives away. And even before he was responsible for the death of real security research in the US, he was already the father of modern censorship here. Let's not forget his help in selling the Vietnam War to the population.
This is the perfect time to debate his actions. This is the only time to debate his actions. What is the measure of a man? Here was a man who repeatedly prioritized business over freedom. And while he may have had his own reasons for doing so, this is not the sort of thing we should be pointing to our children and saying "be like that."
There is, by and large, no such thing as evil people. Jack was not an evil person. But he did many, many bad things with the combination of misdirected intentions and personal charisma. And now, with the US forcing other countries to synchronize with our draconian copyright laws, his legacy will belong to the world too. This is the perfect time to acknowledge that good people do bad things, and frequently the people whom you would define as the best people have the power to do the worst things. Also, this is the perfect time to reflect upon how our modern culture is owned by large corporations in a similar fashion to how midevil culture was owned by the church. If we're to prevent another mickey mouse copyright extension, now would be the time to harden our resolve.
One may complain that we demonize the man because he took away something as trivial as movies. This is not true. We demonize the man because, for something as trivial as movies, he was willing to take away our freedom.
The ______ Agenda
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
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