Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Wed, 1 Aug 2012 12:00:00 PDT Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120731/18195619901/is-this-real-is-this-recall-mpaa-hosts-screening-total-recall-to-educate-congress-benefits-ip-protection.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120731/18195619901/is-this-real-is-this-recall-mpaa-hosts-screening-total-recall-to-educate-congress-benefits-ip-protection.shtml both on the policy front and with its movies. So how perfect is it that the MPAA's gift-of-the-month to Congress is a showing of the remake of the movie Total Recall? As we noted in our post about the MPAA's special showing of the latest Batman flick, to get around breaking gift giving guidelines, the MPAA includes a special "educational component," before its movies, which somehow makes it okay. We heard from attendees of the Batman showing that (amazingly) no mention of copyright or piracy issues was made in the "educational" component. Rather it was a presentation about the Natural History Museum and how it was doing things with IMAX, as well as a Time Warner presentation about its online offerings like HBO GO, TV Everywhere and Ultra Violet.

However, this month, the MPAA will more directly address the copyright issue, as you can see in the invite below, where they note the "educational" component will be about "the impact of film in the global economy and the benefit of IP protection to global trade." As the tagline of the movie says, "Is it real? Is it recall?" One has to imagine that the "educational" content will be particularly one sided, and I'd question how "real" the lesson will be. The stats that the MPAA is fond of throwing out are rarely anywhere close to reality. The presentation almost certainly won't "recall" the fact that due to the MPAA's own ridiculously extreme position on "IP protection" in "global trade," the ACTA agreement has more or less killed the agreement (at least for the majority of Europe).

If Congress wants an educational lesson on the role of IP and international trade, they might want to "recall" that the MPAA is just about the last place to go to get any sense of "reality."

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