Inspired by, but not really related to, [thread=355804]this thread[/thread], except inasmuch as they both relate to the MPAA.
Now, I’m not quite clear as to what was going on with the MPAA screener ban, much reported in the news around this time last year, but what I do know doesn’t seem to add up. Am I missing something, do I have something wrong, or is it just a fundamentally illogical situation.
Here’s what I have:
It was usual in movie awards season for the studios to send ‘screeners’ of their candidate films to prominent academy members, judges, and other people who might be selecting award winners, in case those persons had not had another opportunity to watch the movie.
The MPAA, deciding that there had been substantial piracy from copying these screeners, and that the techniques available to copy-protect the screeners or use tracing information to determine and prosecute who had been sent the particular screener that had been copied, ruled that no screeners could be sent out anymore by anyone.
The MPAA is a ‘trade organization’ made up of eight major studios… it has no government authority that I know of, though its members studios produce the wide majority of feature films.
Not all award candidate films are produced by MPAA member studios, though, a lot are produced by independents.
In some way that I wasn’t entirely able to grasp, though, the MPAA was able to enforce its ban over the independents, who otherwise would have stood to get a certain advantage by sending out screeners while their MPAA-studio counterparts could not.
That I guess is the meat of my question… what was the means of enforcement and what, if anything, was the MPAA’s authority for it? They don’t seem to directly have a mechanism for disqualifying films that were screened in violation of the ban from major awards… not in the sense that they’re running the academy awards, say. (though they might have enough influence with the academy to do this unofficially I suppose.) Did they get US congress to pass a law? Threaten to blacklist the independent studios out of distribution deals??
Thanks in advance for reading this and for any light you can shed on the situation.
The one piece of your logic that’s wrong is that the MPAA was able to enforce its ban over the independents. It couldn’t and didn’t.
However, a great many of the so-called “independents” are now actually owned by the major studios. Those complied with the voluntary rules of their association.
Okay… I found that too. But, well… did the major studios have the POWER to enforce the ban? Because if not, then there would have been no reason for any truly independent studios to take them to court. They’d just send the screeners out if they pleased. (And if the independents in this case were really owned by the majors, it doesn’t really make sense to take your parent company to court.)
[ranting]Another thing that puzzles me is the somewhat schizo attitude from the MPAA. “Piracy is bad, therefore we should ban people from sending their own work into a situation where we think it’s vulnerable to piracy.”
But their justification for why piracy is bad comes down to individual copyrights and the best interests of the copyright owner. If the copyright owner wants to send free copies to Aaronson and Zycowski, and anyone in between, they should have the right to. It’s like forbidding someone from putting a chair out in the back yard, because it might get stolen… warn them, sure, but if they say “it’s my chair and I’m going to take the risk of theft,” then they have the right to do that.
[raving]Even the awards competition doesn’t alter that clear fact, in my opinion. If the major studios want to stop sending screeners even though it might cost them awards, that’s their own call. They can’t insist that everyone else stop sending screeners in an attempt to ‘level the playing field.’ (As that article points out, IIRC, the really small independent studios were probably MORE dependent on screeners than the MPAA ones, because their movies weren’t distributed as widely on average.)
[raving][/ranting]
Sorry for the ranting and raving. Any other replies about how the MPAA got the power?
Some of the independents are truly independent. Some are not. You’re mixing up the two groups. Once you get past that, everything else falls into place.
Okay… which ones challenged the ban in court then?? The ones that aren’t-so-independent??
And if they did… (switching perspectives a bit,) how exactly did the court rule in their favor and determine that the parent company didn’t have the right to determine policy? Or… okay, first off:
What do you mean when you say that an independent is not truly independent? That they are owned by a major studio? That they are owned by all the major studios together? That they are partially owned by a major studio, as in a partnership or owning shares? That they are not dependent through ownership, but tied to a distribution contract that makes very specific demands on them??
I’m trying here, but things haven’t fallen into place yet. Have patience with me please!
Most of the big name “independents” are now owned, lock, stock, and barrel, by the major studios. Owned. Not a distribution partner, or anything else. Sony owns Destination and Orion. Universal owns Focus. Warner owns New Line. Disney owns Miramax and Touchstone.
And Paramount just bought DreamWorks. That means the almost every independent that was a major player in Hollywood is part of a studio.
The rest are small fish. Yes, they sued and won. They were in the right, which sometimes is important. But they account for only the tiniest fraction of the films you hear about at Oscar time.
Okay… thanks, but I still feel like there’s an element of my question that is unanswered. If there wasn’t some power or some negative consequences with which the big fish could threaten the small fish, they would never have had to sue for redress, whether they were right or wrong. It would have been:
MPAA (aka council of big fishes): Don’t send out screeners!
Little fish: Heck, why not? You may be big, but that, in itself, doesn’t give you the right to tell me what to do! (Little fish sends out some screeners, maybe just to be stubborn.)
Unless I’m completely misunderstanding, the MPAA had to have some way of enforcing its edict on the little fish, but I don’t understand the mechanism. Is there anybody who knows enough about the situation to explain??
You’re completely misunderstanding. The only way the studios - not the MPAA - had of enforcing the ban was that they were bigger. IOW, the big guys were trying to bully the little guys.
But it didn’t work. The little guys resisted, took the big guys to court, and won. No ban, no edicts, the big guys back down.
To go back to the OP: Q. What were the means of enforcement? A. There weren’t any. It wasn’t enforceable and it never got enforced.
So why did they try? Same reason as always: they thought they could get away with it. They were wrong.
But you seem to be missing the point. If the neighbors got together and voted that I couldn’t keep that chair in my backyard, it doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t sue them for my right to do so - I’d just leave it there. That’s the question - why was a lawsuit involved at all? If a trade organization that doesn’t include me makes a decision, what do I care? It wouldn’t change my actions at all. There’s no need for a lawsuit if I don’t cooperate at all - unless for some reason they tried to sue me into compliance. There’s no obvious reason why the actual independent studios would even bother listening to the MPAA, since it doesn’t represent them.
I think what’s confusing you is that most of the independents had distribution agreements with the majors, and the majors were using that to control sending of the screeners. See MPAA responds to screener lawsuit.
Again, the use of the MPAA is a red herring. I love the exchange quoted in that article:
