SCREENING COPIES AND PIRACY
I haven’t had time to comment on the MPAA decision to ban screening copies of movies, but the Los Angeles Film Critics Association has responded by canceling their annual awards. They don't think they can view enough movies to make valid choices with the ban in place.
The whole ban idea is nonsense. If movie owners think that screening copies are being pirated they can choose to not to send out their movies. Since the film owners are the ones who face the economic perils of piracy, why should anyone but them make this decision? There is no industry wide argument that can be made. It doesn’t hurt Warner Brothers when Miramax has a film being duplicated. But the argument that smaller films will be hurt by this ban makes pretty good sense.
The idea the MPAA can step in a prevent a movie owner from distributing his movie in any way he chooses reeks of the Washington D.C. mentality of knowing better than the rest of us. Someone should take the MPAA to court.
UPDATE: Roger Simon gets his screening copies.
No comments:
Post a Comment