Film Fund-amentals: COICA Bill – Back to the Barricades

Hollywood loves the digital revolution. They love it so much that they can’t wait to give it a big old bear hug and squeeze the life out of it. This is pretty much the focus of the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA for short).  Supposedly, the bill is designed to deal with the legitimate issue of online piracy and copyright infringement. But the reality is a little different.

COICA is supported by the Motion Picture Association of America, the Screen Actors Guild, the US Chamber of Commerce, Viacom and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts of the United States. In other words, the usual suspects.

The bill is opposed by an odd consortium of legal scholars and law professors, the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and virtually every Internet engineer currently alive (or yet to be born).

The folks who want this bill do have good reasons. There is a lot of illegal activity out there in the digital wilderness. Heck, I have heard of websites where you can download Star Wars, Episode 7 to 9. Twenty-some minutes of footage from the new Harry Potter film got leaked onto the net. Whole chapters of Sarah Palin’s new book were being reprinted online (presumably forcing her to read what her ghost-writer wrote). Where copyright is concerned, it’s a virtual crime wave out there.

However, COICA doesn’t actually address this issue in any rational manner. As the bill is currently written, it would allow the US Attorney General to take action against the domain name under which the offending link was found. The Attorney General simply needs a judge to sign off on an injunction and all targeted web sites will then be shut down. The sites will have the right to appeal after they have been closed down.

In other words, if a bank on the ground floor of an office building is in the process of being robbed, don’t bother calling the police. Just send in the Air Force and nuke the whole place. If anyone survives, they can complain later.

Admittedly, it is a pretty aggressive approach to law enforcement (kind of like Dirty Harry, before Clint Eastwood got sensitive). It also isn’t too picky about constitutional issues and legal stuff like due process. In fact, it is a very badly written and extremely repressive bill designed to beat the stuffings out of the rapidly evolving state of Internet downloadable access and application (which actually makes this issue important to indie filmmakers – many of whom are using sites that will be affected by this bill).

Gee, would the MPAA (which is one of the main figures behind this bill) be out to screw over indie filmmaking? Oh no…that couldn’t be. OK, they have been on a bit of a roll recently. Earlier this year they got Congress to ban the whole concept of futures trading on movie box office receipts. To be honest, the idea was strictly so-so and the current track record of anything involving Wall Street is enough to scare the public (though one of the companies involved in this plan was offering to put a percentage of profit into a fund for indie film financing – this was one of the major interesting aspects to the proposal). But what I really liked was the main argument the MPAA used against the idea: The system could be crooked by the dirty lousy sleazebags who run Hollywood (in other words, the people whom the MPAA slavishly represents). Hey, if they want to say that about themselves, I’m not going to argue.

Then there is the Blue Valentine controversy. The movie was a critical sensation at Sundance and has received much praise for its extremely serious (and emotionally draining) presentation of a collapsing marriage. It also has gotten notice for receiving an NC-17 rating from the MPAA because of a single scene that isn’t actually that unusually explicit, just wrenching. Yep, they slapped it down for adult dramatic value. By the way, if you’re simply looking for cheap sexual titillation, go to any R-rated teen flick. It provides much more of that sort of stuff than Blue Valentine.

So to round off their jolly year, the MPAA has decided to declare war on the Internet. In an amazing coincidence, virtually every major Hollywood company is looking to enter the digital zone. That is part of what Comcast is looking for in its takeover of NBC Universal. Disney is cooking a deal for digital download release in connection with Wal-Mart, (which already sounds like a union between Lord Voldemort and Dick Cheney). Viacom (one of the backers of the bill) has previously tried to sue YouTube over this issue  (in a suit that bears a striking resemblance to the COICA bill) while also pulling the plug on programs on Hulu. Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch and his media empire are looking to shake down everybody for everything all over the Web.

The promise of the digital future is that it will create a level playing field. The type of control that can (and will be) exercised under COICA will betray that promise. In their pursuit of money, power and control, the major media companies will squash the emerging indie distribution system via the Internet. After all, once you successfully attack the domain name, you have pretty much won the war.

Which is one of the big reasons why I think this bill is a really bad idea. So I guess I am signing the petition against the bill.

By the way, I also think we should demand that the MPAA change its name to the Motion Picture Association for Un-American Activities.