Chris Dodd (previously) was once a Democratic senator who decried politicians who became lobbyists; then he became one of the highest-paid and least competent lobbyists in DC, taking the helm of the Motion Picture Association on America and leading the organization to failure, catastrophe and irrelevance.
Kim Dotcom, proprietor of the legally embroiled file-locker service MegaUpload, says that Joe Biden personally ordered the illegal raid on his business and his house in New Zealand. Biden's an old pal of Chris Dodd, the former senator who now runs the MPAA, and a TorrentFreak investigation shows that Biden met with Dodd and the execs from MPA Pacific-Asia, Sony Pictures, Universal, and Disney a shortly before the raid.
Former senator Chis Dodd is now the CEO of the MPAA, and was the primary moving force behind SOPA.
He's a bit weird.
His latest act of performance art, or fabulism, or whatever, is to make up a completely bullshit story about the history of Hollywood, in which the Hollywood film industry sprang into being because of strong "IP protection." — Read the rest
A petition to the White House asks for an official investigation of former senator and now-MPAA CEO Chris Dodd, who strongly implied that he believes his members' contributions to election campaigns are bribes.
— Read the rest"This is an open admission of bribery and a threat designed to provoke a specific policy goal.
The former senator and now CEO of the MPAA can't catch a break: "You've got an opponent who has the capacity to reach millions of people with a click of a mouse and there's no fact-checker." Must be terribly hard to represent the largest media empires in the world, who collectively own all the major newspapers, TV stations, radio stations, billboards, record labels and studios. — Read the rest
Former Senator Chris Dodd, now head of the MPAA, is pissed at Obama. He's threatened to withhold entertainment lobbyist money from Obama's upcoming re-election war chest over the administration's lack of support for SOPA and PIPA. As an ex-Senator, Dodd is prohibited from directly lobbying Congress for a couple more years, and some insiders tell me he feels that this hamstrung his efforts because he couldn't sit down over lunch with lawmakers who directly owed him personal favors and demand that they stay firm on SOPA and PIPA. — Read the rest
Warner Bros has sued talent agency Innovative Artists for running an internal-use Google Drive folder that let its clients and staff review movies in the course of their duties. They say the company ripped "screeners" (DVDs sent for review purposes) and put them on the server, whence they leaked onto torrent sites.
The Motion Picture Association of America today announced that it had effectively shut down the popular Popcorn Time "fork" and movie-sharing torrent destination YTS after court orders in Canada and New Zealand. — Read the rest
Trevor Timm writes a brilliant takedown of the ridiculous warning letter Sony's lawyer is sending news organizations, claiming it may be against the law for journalists to even look at them.
A lawyer retained by Sony has sent threat-letters to media outlets hinting at repercussions if they report on material in the huge dump of internal Sony docs from the North Korea hack that Wikileaks put online.
The telcos' ongoing battle against Net Neutrality have led them to make a lot of silly legalistic arguments, but one in particular has opened the whole Internet to grave danger from a legal attack from the entertainment industry, which may finally realize its longstanding goal of subverting DNS to help it censor sites it dislikes, even if it makes life much easier for thieves and spies who use DNS tricks to rob and surveil.
Kim Dotcom, proprietor of the defunct Megaupload, is convinced that the raid on his company was crooked, and he's put up a $5M bounty on information that will help him prove misdeeds on the part of the US or New Zealand authorities:
Once again, the "piracy-stricken" motion picture association has had a banner year, with box office revenue breaking all records (as they've done in most recent years). The biggest gains this year come from China — a market condemned by the studios as a hive of piracy. — Read the rest
The latest tax-filings by the MPAA show that the studios have increased their membership dues to $66.8 million — up 50 percent. Former Senator Chris Dodd, the architect of the failed SOPA law, has gotten a raise to $3.3M/year. MPAA staffing levels are still down 20% after 2011's layoff of 44 people.
U.S. District Judge Liam O'Grady in Virginia has scheduled a hearing to adjudicate a claim from Kyle Goodwin, a sports videographer in Ohio whose videos have been lost since the illegal raids in May on Megaupload, a file-locker service. The MPAA has asked to participate in the hearing in order to object, in principle, to the idea that the millions of Megaupload users who've had their files seized in the raid should be able to access them without "safeguards." — Read the rest
This anonymously funded movie satirizing the corruption of the copyright system in the USA has been viewed more than 10,000,000 times. The creators, who maintain the website political-prostitution.com, explain that "the U.S. Government is making a major push to enforce its laws abroad with complete disregard for sovereignty of other nations in order to extradite so-called 'criminals' to the US where they will be tried for their 'crimes' in American court." — Read the rest
Former Senator Chris Dodd, head of the MPAA, has hinted to the Hollywood Reporter that he's already greasing the wheels for a new version of SOPA, though he's shy about revealing details because of the public outcry that might ensue. Dodd is the guy who went on the record to tell Obama that he would instruct his members to stop donating to the Democratic party because Obama didn't usher in the laws they wanted. — Read the rest
Republic Report has released figures documenting the fact that the average member of Congress gets a 1,452% salary hike when she or he leaves office and becomes a corporate lobbyist. They point out that politicians are allowed to negotiate these raises while they are in office, and don't have to disclose this fact when they're working on legislation that will benefit their future employers. — Read the rest
The White House says it can't comment on a petition to investigate former senator-turned MPAA boss Chris Dodd for fraud over the remarks he made in which he implied that his industry's campaign contributions were bribes in exchange for specific legislation. — Read the rest
After snatching a notorious copyright troll's name at auction, a Swiss company is turning Righthaven.com into a web hosting service. The intended customers? Publishers worried about the kind of abusive legal threats spewed out by the domain's previous owner.
"The Swiss courts don't play games and registrars here cannot be scared," said Stefan Thalberg of Ort Cloud, an ISP based in Zürich. — Read the rest
