Hollywood is Watching You

Hollywood for years has had a fascination with spies. Some are action spies, like the various incarnations of Bond, James Bond, or cerebral spies like Alec Guinness' masterfully subtle George Smiley. All sorts of people have played TV spies, from Robert Culp and Bill Cosby to Patrick McGoohan, Robert Goulet and the fabulous Lady Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee.

There have been spies who watch and listen to us without our knowledge. Gene Hackman had a creepy turn as the telephone eavesdropper (technically not a spy, although he spied) in The Conversation in 1974. Ten years ago Will Smith's Enemy of the State played off of the then-paranoid "fantasy", now a reality, of the all-hearing National Security Agency (NSA). The current crop of Bourne films shows a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with the technical capability to listen and see anything and anyone at any time.

It wouldn't be an issue if Hollywood's fascination with monitoring our words and images was confined to fiction. But over the past couple of months, the fourth wall has been broken and Hollywood is now setting itself up to play a new spy game for real. In this new game, the public departs from its traditional role as movie fan, and would now be movie victim. And instead of using the resources of a super-secret government agency to do its spying, the movie industry would use the resources of the companies who do the bidding of the super-secret government agencies -- your once-friendly local telephone companies.

The movie industry wouldn't call what they want to do "spying," of course. They have more polite, more indirect ways of couching their goals. Exhibit A in that regard is a speech by Dan Glickman, the chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) given March 11 at an industry event in Las Vegas.

The speech was breathtaking not only for its internal inconsistencies but also for its obvious obfuscations, particularly concerning Net Neutrality.

He started off with a positively giddy report on how well the movie biz is doing as the industry "could hardly be better at the box office." Some of the data points included 17 movies earning $100 million, up 50 percent from 2006; seven movies making $200 million; four movies making $300 million; 1.4 billion tickets sold in the U.S. last year; 600 films produced, up from 450 in 2006. As Glickman said, "film is alive, well and growing as an American art-form and consumer experience."

But despite all of this good, even great news, there's still the threat to the industry of "what happens when one illegal copy [of a movie] makes its way to the Internet -- God forbid on opening weekend -- and is instantly available to the world." What happens? There would have been 18 $100 million movies? The technology hasn't changed all that much in the past couple of years. Chances are some movies escaped onto the Net before or at release. And yet, things still look pretty good, according to Glickman.

To stop that one copy from being spread to the world, Glickman said, "new tools are emerging that allow us to work with Internet Service Providers to prevent this illegal activity. And, new efforts are emerging in Washington to stop this essential program."

Glickman said: "This effort is being called by its proponents 'net neutrality.' It's a clever name. But at the end of the day, there's nothing neutral about this for our customers or for our ability to make great movies -- blockbuster first-run films -- in the future. If Washington had truth in labeling, we'd call this proposal by another name: Government regulation of the Internet. Government regulation of the Internet would impede our ability to respond to consumers in innovative ways, and it would impair the ability of broadband providers to address the serious and rampant piracy problems occurring over their networks today."