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April 27, 2007, 02:40 PM ET
Jack Valenti, Hollywood's Top Copyright Crusader, Dies
Jack Valenti, the indefatigable Hollywood lobbyist who shaped the Motion Picture Association of America's controversial stance on copyright, died yesterday of complications from a stroke. He was 85.
Mr. Valenti took over the MPAA in 1966, after serving for nearly three years as an aide and adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson, and he quickly became one of the country's most powerful -- and most iconic -- lobbyists. While he may still be best known for devising the MPAA's film-rating system, Mr. Valenti had more recently been celebrated and reviled for aggressively preaching the trade group's strict stance on copyright law.
He expounded the details of that stance with polemical fervor and rhetorical flourish: In 1982 he infamously told a Congressional panel that "the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone."
And in 1995 he depicted public-domain works in terms as vivid as they were debatable:
A public domain work is an orphan. No one is responsible for its life. But everyone exploits its use, until that time certain when it becomes soiled and haggard, barren of its previous virtues.Statements like those turned Mr. Valenti into Public Enemy #1 for many digital-rights activists. And Mr. Valenti's tireless support of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act certainly earned him little love from scholars and campus technology officials.
But Mr. Valenti was unrepentant about the MPAA's intellectual-property policy. In 2004 The Hollywood Reporter asked him to revisit the much-mocked "Boston Strangler" quote. "I like to say: How many people have ever said anything that stays so memorable for 22 years?" he responded. "The answer is, not many." --Brock Read
Categories: Campus-Piracy
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