Hollywood's Own Paper Says Congress Shouldn't Protect Hollywood

from the gotta-hurt dept

Didn’t see this one coming. Hollywood’s hometown paper, the LA Times, has an editorial today entitled: We Aren’t All Pirates, talking about how Congress shouldn’t pass laws that clearly go beyond the basic intent of copyright law: to encourage the creation of new art. It points out that many of the new laws being pushed by the entertainment industry break the delicate balance set up by copyright, and are clearly just about protecting one particular business model. The editorial notes that passing these laws “would impinge on devices that have legitimate uses and steer the development of technology, cutting off some innovation.” None of this should be surprising to anyone around here… but to hear it out of the LA Times is a bit surprising. How far has the entertainment industry pushed its luck when even its local paper is pushing back?


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Comments on “Hollywood's Own Paper Says Congress Shouldn't Protect Hollywood”

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19 Comments
jeremy says:

“How far has the entertainment industry pushed its luck when even its local paper is pushing back?”

Umm, I’m sorry, but the movie Industry doesn’t own the LA Times, if the LA Times stated that they support eating kittens would techdirt post it? There is a wide variety of opinions, and I think what will cause change in copyright laws is not some newspaper with a small group of people babbling, but with the consumers, which, in the movie industries’ eyes is potential profits.

Alan MadLeese (user link) says:

Re: Re: The times and the kittens

Well, one wonders about the Times and its kitten policy and whether it is in the pocket of this or that industry. I have minor relations with the L.A> Times. I worked there briefly in the Sixties and got drunk and left, not necessarily because the copydesk job was boring but I got into the bubbly. So that’s in the nature of full disclosrue, but in the past two months, sober and in Maine, retired and so forth, I found out, in conjunction with an L.A. blogger named Trent Lapinski, a lot of bad stuff about MySpace, which will soon become apparent to any Californian who can read, courtesy of ValleyWag and some other blogsites, that MySpace was problematic beyo0nd the extremes that critics have noted, and all that can be clared up, for the doubting Thomases, by googling m name or Konspiracy Korners or Scobleizer or Catbird Forum or Buzzmachine, that I seem to be in possession of a lot of uncirculated information about MySpace and the spam and sham and scam of it all, and I have called the L.A> Times on at least wo occasions, tipping them off toi the biggest news biz story of this cycle and the next two or three, and the folks at the L.A. Times, including their investigative team, heard my bleats over the voice machnine, and via the e-mail and deigned not t reply, but then they were not alone, and of course they are probably not in anyone pocket but their own little world which not admit of people calling at night to tell them what the fuck is going under their noses. Check it outl,, googlers may use the names Ted I. Wiederhorn, Andrew Alan Wiederhorn, Clarence B. (Uncle Bud) Coleman, and, to be sure, just lcheck out what your find when you ghoogle Christopher DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, andplease exuse the fucking ty0posd because I habve been writing shit like this for fouth months and still havent’ made a dent in the armor of the fragile ego of themsm. al macleese hallowell, maine, and you do know how to google, no?

dan says:

Re: Re: Re: The times and the kittens

Congrats, Alan!! You just set the world record for the longest run-on sentence in written history– 218 words!

Not a word of it was salient, cogent or coherent, but 218 words in one sentence is 218 words in one sentence. i couldn’t do that.

i think i now know why you really lost your job at the Times as a copy editor.

And Hemmingway rolls in his grave…..

— dan

Matt (profile) says:

Re: Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee

You MUST be in Houston to make a reference to Ms. Lee.

My favorite Lee-ism is STILL when she was in the control room at JSC when they had one of those Mars missions tooling around the surface. She asked the mission commander if it would be possible to drive the rover over to where Neil Armstrong landed.

Ahhhh… Can you smell the democracy?

ehrichweiss says:

LA Times and kittens

jeremy,

What the hell IS your point?!?!? The movie industry doesn’t own the LA Times, so why is that important? Nobody said they owned them, only that the entertainment industry’s own *local* paper didn’t support their propaganda.(emphasis mine, duh)

And at least someone is making some noise about this. That’s how consumers find out about this and realize that there are other points of view than what they might have previously considered.

jsnbase says:

So, it absolutely is significant that the LA Times

I completely disagree. If we were talking about Variety or some other trade publication I’d be with you, but no one out here considers the Times an ‘industry’ rag. Nobody in Hollywood is looking towards the Times as any kind of public opinion bellwether.I think you’re over-estimating the importance of proximity.

Alan MadLeese (user link) says:

Cabin Boys on Parade

Danny, boy, yeah, I do run on but at least I have passion while all you seem to got is snark and a very worrisome lack of imagination. And, oh, if you read other than my sort of drivel on line,have you noticed that every motherhumping thing I said is standing up, and yeah, danny, I was a little overtaken that nice, but it wasn’t the saucce, it was the pipes that had been calling. almac from hallowell, where snarks are politely ignored but I am only a relative newcomer. Hallowell Maine. U.S.A. Nice town. Good eats, fine lobster. Short enuf sentence, Danny?

Alan MadLeese (user link) says:

Oh Danny boy, the pipes are ....

Aside to Danny boy: Once I wrote a column for the FLint Journal all in one sentence, about 700 words. Before that, a friend of mine, a noted columnist for the Miami News, wrote a column all i one sentence, and before that a guy named Ben Stein wrote a column all in one word. Allof these columns were more than twice as long as the lousy 218 words that you counted, Danno, and, all things considered, I would guess if you couldn’t handle a measly 218words a whole column would defeat you. Since it usually only takes me about five minutes to write some shit lsuch as that, and since I was high as a Georgia pine, and didn’t realize that purists would be listening, why I just went on and on and on….and incidentally, me and Lapinski are going to put a big hurt on the bad folks that spawned MySpace on the wrong side of the blanket, well, who gives a rat’s posterior about such niceties as being salient, cogent or worse, terse. al macleese from Hallowell Maine,where bears and moose mate athwart the white lines on the roads high above the Kennebec, and sometimes a moose willconfuse a bear with one of its own kind!!!

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