It’s also a no-brainer that you never, ever make threats you’re not absolutely certain you can deliver on.  Dodd doesn’t speak for ‘Hollywood’. He knows that; even worse, so does the White House. Loser.

…that there are plenty of hard working people whose livelihoods might be on the line if the investors in Hollywood decides that the payout isn’t worth the risk of funding entertainment because of piracy.

If those investors were capable of coming up with another way to make money, they would have updated Hollywood’s business plan to accommodate current technology instead of whining about how they’re being ‘pirated’.

Tactically, the ‘correct’(if evil) move at this point would be to STFU about the issue and quietly kick it to some obscure trade tribunal with zero public input, an unpronounceable acronym that even policy wonks can’t remember, and alarmingly broad powers. Once they’ve quietly hammered out a ‘framework’ that is based on ‘consultations’ with the ‘stakeholders’ it can be silently voted on somewhere, ratified by executive order under some sort of  ’fast track authority’ and then the domestic laws of various western nations and allies can be ‘harmonized’ with the new treaty obligation.

After the surprisingly swift and vicious public backlash, whining on national TV about how mean your enemies are just seems absurd…

Now this argument is one that could be made with actual data, and it’s telling that it ISN’T being made that way.  Instead it’s being supported by made up figures about piracy and imagined pie-in-the-sky scenarios about how much the studios “could” have made if only the evil pirates hadn’t “stolen” so much material.

But it is something that needs to be addressed.  Because the whole Hollywood machine right now works because investors dump massive amounts of capital into the system to keep it running on the promise that there will be massive, massive payouts in return.  If those massive, massive payouts become just masstive payouts, some average regular people are probably going to lose jobs.  (I’d like to believe that the CEOs of the studios will be forced to take a paycut, but I’ve lived more than 40 years on this planet now and I know that that idea is so laughably idealistic that I can only consider it in my occasional daydreams these days.)

Here’s the lead sentence (in the paragraph after the topic is introduced):

“Three widely cited U.S. government estimates of economic losses resulting from counterfeiting cannot be substantiated due to the absence of underlying studies.”

https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/!/petition/investigate-chris-dodd-and-mpaa-bribery-after-he-publicly-admited-bribing-politicans-pass/DffX0YQv

Asking for a friend.  100,000 of them.