Sen. Dodd Urges Industry to Address Content Theft

Sen. Chris Dodd, chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, encouraged Hollywood and Silicon Valley to come together—and urged both communities to join him in the fight against content theft, Wednesday at the SMPTE Conference in Hollywood.

“I will fight as hard as I possibly can to see that we bring an end to content theft,” asserted Sen. Dodd, who starting his work at the MPAA roughly eight months ago. “It must be a collective effort.

“Content theft is stealing,” he said. “It is not a victimless crime; 373,000 people have lost their jobs in this country because of content theft. Some $16 billion in earning are gone; $3 billion in revenue for taxes are gone because of content theft.”

Sen. Dodd pointed to search engines as one area of this problem that needs to be addressed. “When you knowingly provide a venue to an audience that wants to see (the content), you are an accessory to the crime. There is nothing neutral about providing a venue that tells someone how they can steal something.”

As to uniting stakeholders, he said: “Hollywood and Silicon Valley mutually benefit from their partnership. One of my top priorities at the MPAA will be to grow and strengthen that partnership. We cannot survive without each other. But together we can give our mutual customers experiences that defy imagination.”