ECONOMICS AND TRADE | Achieving growth through open markets
10 March 2008
Hollywood Goes to University to Teach Copyright Lesson
Movie industry tries education and political clout to curb piracy
Washington -- College kids cannot get enough of the movies. And the movies have mined collegiate life for countless tales of love, adventure, rebellion and triumph -- and that’s just in the 1978 film Animal House. From Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman to the Marx brothers’ Horsefeathers to Reese Witherspoon’s Legally Blonde, the love affair between Hollywood and higher education always has been passionate.
But nowadays, the movie industry is troubled by the behavior of its best customers, some of whom have grown accustomed to watching new releases for free, not by sneaking past ticket-takers, but by using lightning-fast computer connections to pirate Hollywood’s offerings.
The movie makers, unlike colleagues in the recording industry, have elected not to slap lawsuits on students nabbed with purloined material on their hard drives. (See “On Campuses, Free Music Aplenty and Letters from Lawyers.”)
Instead, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is trying to convince college presidents to crack down on the thievery and is pushing Congress to punish campuses if they do not take action against use of high-speed networks for illicit file-sharing.
Taking students to court “is not our primary strategy,” says Stewart McLaurin, MPAA executive vice president for education affairs. “We want these people to have positive feelings about our product. We don’t want them to hate our industry and hate movies.”
The industry is not just educating college kids. It recently linked up with Weekly Reader, a magazine distributed in elementary classrooms, to put lessons about copyright protection into the hands of younger students. McLaurin said kids learn download misbehavior as early as third grade.
The MPAA recently made an embarrassing admission: a piracy study that it commissioned and publicized was wildly off in blaming college students for 44 percent of losses due to film piracy. Attributing the mistake to the consulting firm L.E.K., the MPAA revised the estimate downward to 15 percent.
Even at 15 percent, that pilferage amounts to a loss of nearly $250 million, the MPAA maintains. McLaurin regularly visits campuses and academic conferences to press the issue. “Three to four years ago, this would have been a topic discussed pretty much with the CIO [chief information officer] on campus,” he said, but now university presidents and governing boards are involved. Some universities strip students of computer privileges for repeat offenses.
McLaurin said that “every college in the United States” could be affected by the rewrite of the Higher Education Act pending in Congress. Both Senate and House have passed provisions requiring universities to advise students against piracy and warn them of the penalties. The House version would require campuses to “explore technology-based deterrents” to illegal downloading.
Critics scoff that this is easier said than done. The American Council on Education and a dozen other higher education lobbies are trying to get that House provision killed, arguing that “online alternatives and technical deterrents are immature and expensive” and that students using campus networks may be responsible “for just 3 percent of the losses due to illegal downloading.”
The MPAA, under Dan Glickman, a former Kansas congressman and secretary of agriculture, long has basked in a reputation as one of Washington’s most potent lobbies. But cracking down on piracy is a tough sell to young people who grew up accustomed to getting things for free on the Internet. When Glickman spoke at UCLA in 2005, students greeted his remarks with a chorus of the pirate yell, “ARRRRGGGHHH!”
McLaurin believes progress is being made. The recording and music industries joined with universities in 2002 to form the Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities to seek common ground. In the fall of 2007, MPAA and the University of California system hosted 200 leaders from academia, Hollywood and the technology industry to foster an understanding of different perspectives on the issue.
“In any relationship, when you’re only dealing with the difficult, hard and challenging issues, the relationship is going to be difficult, hard and challenging,” McLaurin said. “We feel it’s important to our industry and our members to reach out and build relationships and have a different dimension and traction on the problem than just [filing] lawsuits.”
