Testimony on internet piracy?

(Spoiler alert....if tl;dr, at least skip to the bottom!)

Mr. VALENTI. I am merely coming to start off by talking about the American film and television industry, not as an economic enterprise, but as a great national asset to this country, to the U.S. Treasury and the strength of the American dollar. And I am not just talking on behalf of people whose names are household words, like Brad Pitt and Megan Fox. I am speaking on behalf, as he is, as he will no doubt tell you on behalf of hundreds of thousands of men and women who without public knowledge or recognition, who are not besieged by fans, but who are artisans, craftsmen, carpenters, bricklayers, all kinds of people, who work in this industry, not only in this State but in the 50 States where American films are shot on location. And they deserve no less, Mr. Chairman, than the concern of the Congress for the preservation of their industry.

But more than that, which I think is paramount to the national interest, the preservation of a huge trade asset. American films and television dominate the screens of the world and that just didn't happen. It happened because of the quality and caliber and the imagination and the way people construct fragile imaginings that we call the American film.

But now we are facing a very new and a very troubling assault on our fiscal security, on our very economic life and we are facing it from a thing called the Internet and its necessary companion called the computer. And it is like a great tidal wave just off the shore. The Internet threatens profoundly the life-sustaining protection, I guess you would call it, on which copyright owners depend, on which film people depend, on which television people depend and it is called copyright.

Now, my first card, Mr. Chairman, deals with what I consider to be one of the essential elements that you cannot ignore and, indeed, you must nourish. The U.S. film -- and I will read this -- "The U.S. film and television production industry is a huge and valuable American asset." In 2009, it returned to this country almost $12 billion in surplus balance of trade. And I might add, Mr. Chairman, it is the single one American-made product that the Chinese, skilled beyond all comparison in their conquest of world trade, are unable to duplicate or to displace or to compete with or to clone. And I might add that this important asset today is in jeopardy. Why?

Because unless the Congress recognizes the rights of creative property owners as owners of private property, that this property that we exhibit in theaters, once it leaves the post-theatrical markets, it is going to be so eroded in value by Internet piracy, that the whole valuable asset is going to be blighted. In the opinion of many of the people in this room and outside of this room, blighted, beyond all recognition. It is a piece of sardonic irony that this asset, which unlike steel or silicon chips or motor cars or electronics of all kinds -- a piece of sardonic irony that while foreign industry are unable to duplicate the American films by a flank assault, they can destroy it by promoting and profiting from Internet piracy......

.... Nothing of value is free. It is very easy, Mr. Chairman, to convince people that it is in their best interest to give away somebody else's property for nothing, but even the most guileless among us know that this is a cave of illusion where commonsense is lured and then quietly strangled. That is what it is all about.

Now, these file-sharing websites are advertised for one purpose in life. Their only single mission, their primary mission is to copy copyrighted material that belongs to other people. I don't have to go into it. The ads are here. Here is the Pirate Bay, advertising a million free downloads.

Now, Mr. Chairman, how many people would go to these file-sharing websites if there weren't any copyrighted material on it. The site would be useless and this is what the Ninth Circuit said. They advertise their site blatantly and deliberately saying the way to use it is to copy somebody else's copyrighted programs. ..........

.......The permission of the copyright owner is required for the use of their programs in all markets. Now, I those markets include theaters, cable, pay cable, pay television, network television, syndicated television, video discs. Every one of those markets is going to be competing for Mr. Cruise's new film "MI4" They are going to license that film at a negotiated price.

Now, we cannot live in a marketplace, Mr. Chairman -- you simply cannot live in a marketplace, where there is one unleashed animal in that marketplace, unlicensed. It would no longer be a marketplace; it would be a kind of a jungle, where this one unlicensed instrument is capable of devouring all that people had invested in and labored over......

......Now, that is where the problem is. You take the high risk <that a film will not recoup its investment at the box office alone>, which means we must go by the aftermarkets to recoup our investments. If those aftermarkets are decimated, shrunken, collapsed because of what I am going to be explaining to you in a minute, because of the fact that Internet piracy is stripping those things clean, those markets clean of our profit potential, you are going to have devastation in this marketplace.

Now, is this all? Is it going to get any bigger? Well, I assure you it is. …...... We are going to bleed and bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects one industry that is able to retrieve a surplus balance of trade and whose total future depends on its protection from the savagery and the ravages of the Internet.

Now, the question comes, well, all right, what is wrong with the Internet. One of the Internet lobbyists, Mr. Ferris, has said that the Internet-- well, if I am saying something wrong, forgive me. I don't know. He certainly is not MGM's lobbyist. That is for sure. He has said that the Internet is the greatest friend that the American film producer ever had.

I say to you that the Internet is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.


Now, for a reality check...., everything in bold has been changed from the original text. Where it says Internet or Internet user, put in VCR or blank tape. For download, substitute record. For file-sharing website, put in VCR manufacturers. For China or foreign industry, put in Japan. For a date, put in 1982ish. For star 'x' put in Clint Eastwood and co. For 12 Billion, put in 1 billion. It would appear that the VCR didn't hurt their growth that much....

The certain destruction of the entertainment industry and the loss of countless american jobs, circa 1982

You see, this is a redacted, but not otherwise edited except as noted above above subset of a hearing before the house on the Home Recording of Copyrighted works, circa 1982. That bill didn't pass, and there was no VCR apocalypse. They are using the same tired arguments, but this time to wreak havoc on an economically critical industry infrastructure that brings in hundreds of times their revenue, not just pesky Japanese VCR makers.

It would be such a sad commentary on the state of the union if these same, rehashed arguments succeeded this time, when so much more is at stake.....Do your part to fight SOPA/PIPA!