Valenti to Canada: Protect your content

On Feb. 7, Motion Picture Association of America chair/CEO Jack Valenti addressed the Canadian Film and Television Production Association annual conference. Friendly, funny and warm, his speech was well-received by the audience, but many are viewing his remarks in the light of both copyright reform within Canada and broader World Trade Organization talks coming up. Following is an excerpt from his speech:The hardest of all the art forms in which to achieve excellence is visual story telling. In the making of a movie, between the idea and the finished print so much can go wrong and often does. Last year in the U.S. some 684 films were produced. About 150 never saw the inside of a theater, never got a distributor. Keep in mind that no one wakes in the morning and declares, "Today I am going to make a movie that no one will want to see." But it happens. Every time you start a new film, you create a brand new enterprise that never existed before. One never knows the audience appeal of a movie until it collides in a darkened theater with unknown companions of a single night. If sparks fly up, you are triumphant. If not, you must try again with your next film.But some governments are infected with a theory which deludes them into believing that if they put up barricades to exile or restrict TV programs and films which may compete with local creativity, their local creative industry will leap into a prosperous future, like Athena springing full blown from the forehead of Zeus. Alas, it is a defunct mythology. No President, no Prime Minister, can command great programming to be made nor can any Congress or Parliament order citizens to watch what they do not want to watch. That is a truth of the human condition which rhetoric cannot ignore, nor laws distort. Indeed, I can sum up the entire visual entertainment enterprise in two sentences. If you make a TV show or a film that a lot of people want to watch, you will do very well. If you make a TV program or a film that few people want to watch, you will not do well.Competition breeds creative qualityEvery filmmaker from whatever country must be free to offer his creative wares to every other country. There should be no artificial governmental barricades which bar or limit entry.Competition should flourish. It is citizens in each country who decide what movies they want to see, what TV programs they want to watch. This kind of competition stirs creative juices. It lifts the level of quality in the creative community. When a government tries to defy that truth, the future of its national industry is put to hazard.Creative property must be protectedThere is one challenge which unites every creative community on this wracked and weary planet: How do you protect valuable creative works in the digital age, when on the Internet with a simple click of a mouse one can send a movie hurtling around the world at the speed of light? Canada like every other country must protect its creative property because in the digital age, that property is always prey to thievery. Or to put it another way, if you cannot protect what you own, you don't own anything.Canada, U.S. united in guarding propertyI congratulate the Canadian Film & Television Production Association and the Canadian broadcasting community. When a web site in Canada called iCrave started taking Canadian and American TV station signals without permission, reducing the size of the program on the screen and then selling advertising in the blank space without any compensation to anyone, the CFTPA and Canadian broadcasters joined American producers and broadcasters in a fight for creative integrity. iCrave was forced to shut down. It was a great victory for copyright protection. It was a special triumph for Canada's creative legions. That is the kind of international cooperation which must be on display as the Internet and broadband access grow exponentially.

Valenti to Canada: Protect your content

News | 02/22/2002 5:00 am EST

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