p2pnet - rss feed: Hollywood gets on China’s case
p2p news / p2pnet: This year’s Unmitigated Gall award goes to Hollywood’s Dan ‘Jedi’ Glickman for once again addressing a nation as though it’s a recalcitrant child, and the award for Most Fulsome Reporting goes to Reuters for offering the incident as though it was a genuine news item.
Under discussion is world’s most populous country and the story in question kicks off with, “Hollywood’s top lobbyist has urged the Chinese to crack down on movie piracy and open its markets to additional American-made films by the 2008 Olympics.
“Speaking on Tuesday at an industry convention in Beijing, Motion Picture Association of America chairman and CEO Dan Glickman said the Olympics is a perfect time to prove the nation’s commitment to ending copyright piracy and opening its markets, according to an advance copy of the speech provided by the trade body.”
Through Glickman, Hollywood’s personal mandarin, the MPAA has been hectoring China non-stop to get on the ball, damnit, about making more strenuous efforts to look after its owners’ commercial interests.
Recently, California governor Arnold Schwarzenneger teamed up to do a comedy anti-piracy routine in Hong Kong on behalf of the MPAA’s owners, the Big Seven movie studios, Walt Disney, Warner Bros., Universal, Twentieth Century Fox, Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Sony.
China’s Ministry of Culture and the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television signed up with the MPA (sams as MPAA, but with the ‘America’) during a visit of US Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez’s.
And to further underscore its efforts to toe the Hollywood line, Communist China, which has overtaken the US as the world’s Number One IT producer, has also created an MPAA-inspired anti-p2p unit called the China Film Copyright Protection Association.
Mind you, that he’d link the Olympic Games to Hollywood’s entirely self serving business interests shouldn’t come as any kind of surprise, and nor is China alone in feeling the sharp side of Glickman’s-read-the-Gang-of-Seven’s tongue.
He also regularly and routinely gets on Russia’s case. And Mexico’s. And, most recently, Canada too has been singled out for its failure to behave properly.
Meanwhile, movie industry revenues from world-wide ticket, video and DVD sales, as well as television rights, hit a mind-boggling $44.8 billion last year, an increase, not a decrease, of 9% over 2003.
And these numbers are the industry’s own.
With the Cheney/Bush administration with it in rigid lock-step, Hollywood says whatever it wants to whomever it wants.
Also read:-
Reuters - Hollywood asks China to cut piracy before Olympics, December 13, 2005
anti-piracy routine - Schwarzenegger in MPAA movie , November 18, 2005
signed up - MPAA, China division, July 17, 2005
anti-p2p unit - China enlists US ‘p2p’ help, November 4, 2005
=====================
If you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent website blocking outside of China.
Download it here and feel free to copy the zip and host it yourself so others can download it.
December 14th, 2005 at 2:27 pm
isnt a mandarin some kind of orange?
December 14th, 2005 at 5:16 pm
In pre “Revolutionary” (1911) China, a “Mandarin” was a member of the Imperial Civil Service (which went back centuries, if not millenia). The word (”Mandarin”) has come down to us as denoting someone who stands for excessive bureaucratic-control (and possibly “interference”).