MPAA Boss: If The Chinese Censor The Internet Without A Problem, Why Can't The US?
The MPAA is getting pretty desperate, it seems. MPAA boss Chris Dodd was out trying to defend censoring the internet this week by using China as an example of why censorship isn't a problem. It's kind of shocking, really.
Context & Ripple Effects
Chris Dodd has been MPAA chairman for less than a year, and his messaging is fraying fast: in November he gave a speech insisting there was no real 'Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley' fight, then this week defended censoring the internet by holding up China as proof it can be done without a problem. The framing lands on an organization whose numbers were already shaky — the MPAA admitted back in 2008 that some of its piracy statistics were bogus, and analysis circulating last month claimed its anti-piracy operations cost Hollywood more than US BitTorrent piracy does.
The remark comes mid-fight over SOPA-era site blocking, an agenda the MPAA has been pursuing through quieter channels too: taking down a dozen torrent sites via hosting complaints with Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN in January, and reporting RapidShare to the US government alongside the RIAA as a 'notorious market.' Dodd invoking China turns a technical lobbying argument into a free-speech one.
First-order effects
- SOPA opponents get their most quotable exhibit yet: the bill's leading backer on record arguing that Chinese-style censorship proves filtering works, which shifts the debate from piracy losses to speech rights.
- Dodd's own November claim that no Silicon Valley war exists becomes harder to sustain when the MPAA's chairman is openly endorsing censorship as a governance model.
Second-order effects
- Tech companies and civil-liberties groups gain a unifying frame for opposing intermediary liability rules, forcing lawmakers weighing SOPA to defend site-blocking on its merits rather than as a narrow anti-piracy tool.
- The MPAA's parallel enforcement track — hosting complaints, BREIN cooperation, USTR 'notorious market' listings — now reads as part of the same censorship impulse, raising the political cost of each takedown request.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, content-industry enforcement keeps migrating up the stack from individual infringers to the infrastructure layer — hosts, registrars, search — making distribution-layer liability the durable battleground regardless of which single bill passes or dies.
- Trade-group rhetoric this extreme tends to harden the coalition against it: the more enforcement is framed as censorship, the more any future site-blocking proposal inherits that stigma.
The trend: Copyright enforcement is shifting from targeting pirates directly to pressuring the intermediaries that carry them, with the MPAA's escalating rhetoric — culminating in Dodd's China comparison — turning each proposal into a referendum on internet censorship itself.