In a speech that steered clear of policy proscriptions, but that urged a need for creative thinking about copyright and content distribution, former President Bill Clinton on Friday called for further discussion “about the need to give people an appropriate return on their ideas and development of them, and presentation of it, in film and music and in other areas, and the need to give it as quickly as possible to the world.”

Clinton’s speech came at the Creativity Conference, a half-day meeting hosted by the Motion Picture Association of America, Microsoft, and Time Magazine, where participants ranging from House Majority Leader Eric Cantor to HBO CEO Richard Plepler discussed issues in the creative economy ranging from federal research and development investment to copyright. While there was a clear consensus on the first issue, with even Cantor, who has focused on spending cuts, suggesting that the government had a valuable role to play in research and development, some participants spoke frankly, and even harshly, on the subject of copyright.

“So I think a very good business plan [is] here, use somebody else’s content for free, deliver it, don’t pay them anything, and build a $500 billion silicon valley company, and then have cool slogans like ‘We just want to help the world,’” said Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of the Weinstein Company, appearing to refer to YouTube and its parent company Google. “They’re stealing. That’s what they’re doing. My artists, they can’t be artists if they’re hungry. The starving artist, trust me, that’s a myth. When you’re starving you’re starving. It’s hard to be creative in that situation.”

Clinton, by contrast, sought to establish a different framework in his remarks, suggesting that the conflict in creating copyright policy was not between who should be allowed to profit from the creation of individual work, from music to pharmaceutical development, but between balancing the interests of content finding a wide audience and making it sustainable to develop. “We have to keep struggling to find the right balance between creativity, broadly and quickly shared, and as widely understood as possible, and making it reasonably profitable for people to be creatives,” Clinton argued. As one example, he praised Saint Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, which does not accept fees for services, but encourages patients whose families can pay to make ongoing donations to the institution, and which voluntarily makes public significant amounts of its data to aid in drug development.
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Per The Hollywood Reporter, the Motion Picture Association of America and the National Organization of Theater Owners have announced plans to try to make it easier for parents to get information about film ratings, a move that’s a response to the debate over the role of violent media in inciting or inspiring real-world violence:

Following through on a commitment made to Vice President Joseph Biden in the wake of the December shooting in Newtown, Conn., the Motion Pictures Association of America and the National Association of Theater Owners are making minor tweaks to the movie ratings system in order to better inform parents. The new “Check the Box” campaign, unveiled at CinemaCon, will highlight descriptions of why a movie received a certain rating. Also, there will be a tag attached to trailers explaining that the trailer is approved to play with the feature they came to see. The campaign also includes a new PSA, as well as a new poster that will be displayed at theaters across the country.

Given that the ratings system is intended to give parents information that will help them decide whether or not their children should be allowed to see given movies, any movie that makes it easier for them to get details on why the ratings board decided to assign a given letter rating is a useful one, even if highlighting the rationales won’t placate people who object to any given decision.

And I think it’s a smart move to try to align trailers with the content they’re paired with. It’s easy to start with the theater owners, of course, because trailers and movies are governed under the same ratings system, and so it’s not tremendously difficult to pair up trailers that have been cut to the same standards as the movies they air in front of. And though it would be much more difficult, I think this kind of alignment is something the movie industry should strive for with television as well. It might mean some financial hits for networks if they stop accepting violent advertising for movies to air during general interest programming like sporting events, and it might require some creativity on behalf of the people cutting trailers to make spots for R-rated content that’s appropriate to air before general audiences, or that doesn’t feature guns or gun violence. But these constraints don’t seem like they would completely paralyze either television or movie studios.

On Friday, Motion Picture Association of America president and CEO Christopher Dodd took the stage at the National Press Club to talk about his first several years on the job. It was an interesting talk less because of policy issues that Dodd focused on, or that he discussed during the question-and-answer period, but because of the way he talked about movies, and what they’ve come to mean to him as art during his almost two years at the association. In arguing for movies’ unifying role in a politically divided country, and movies and television as key tools of cultural diplomacy, Dodd’s talk raised some fascinating questions for me about how we approach and analyze movies, and what levels of responsibility we want to assign an art form that claims that potential impact.

Dodd admitted that before coming to the MPAA, “As a father of two very young children, 7, now almost 8, and 11, my movie selections were limited.” But as he’s reconnected with the product that his member companies produce, Dodd made an argument that both serves to burnish the reputation of those companies, and potentially exposes them to higher standards than your average producer of widgets.

“They tell stories, stories that help us make sense of our world and ourselves…Consider the focus on racism in To Kill A Mockingbird or Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” Dodd said. “The best movies ground us in common values and ideals. America’s a big place, as we all know, with red states and blue states…But gathered together in a darkened theater, regardless of our differences, we become, in spite of our differences, one place.”

The ability of movies to achieve that unity or provoke that kind of thought doesn’t mean that all movies have to meet that aspirational standard. But it does suggest that movies that do aim to tackle big ideas deserve to be taken seriously, which means being examined critically. Often, debates over accuracy get dismissed as nit-picking, which if the only question at stake is whether a movie is a literal translation of historical events or not, is potentially fair. But the questions of why and when movies choose to diverge from the historical record is can be rich ones, particularly when those questions happen in the realm of character interpretation, as in the presentation of President Lincoln’s attitudes toward black Americans in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. As a critic who writes about the politics of entertainment, it’s been exciting to see academics, policy reporters, and political commentators enter the debates around Lincoln, Argo, Django Unchained, and Zero Dark Thirty because their desire to play on this turf is a reaffirmation of the idea that gives life to my career, even if I’m not always thrilled about how these arguments have functioned. The battles over how to interpret Zero Dark Thirty , for example, seem to me to have narrowed down to debates about whether the film is an accurate transcription of a murky historical record, rather than exploring the more revealing questions of how the script and directing choices shape the movie’s message about the immorality of torture, and why Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow felt compelled to portray the movie as an unbiased piece of reportage in the first place. That latter choice in particular says as much about the state of our debate about the use of torture as the movie itself.

If we’re going to take film seriously on the grounds that it has a unique power to influence audiences, we need to examine how well it does at getting audiences to do interpretive work—and leaving them space in which to do it—to open themselves up to new ideas, and to inhabit new perspectives. The blunt statements of opinion writing or cable news appearances, or the clear conclusion-drawing of long-form journalism aren’t necessarily the things that serve those goals well in film, where an indirect approach may lead otherwise-resistant audiences to a point they might not have accepted when presented bluntly, and manifestos can make characters seem like strawmen, rather than flesh-and-blood humans.
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A documentary about the life, work, and opponents of the late conservative publisher Andrew Breitbart, Hating Breitbart, is on its way to theaters, and its director, Andrew Marcus, is perturbed that the movie received an R rating from the Motion Picture Association of America. He told the Daily Caller that the rating should have come from “gutter behavior of the Congressional Black Caucus and their enablers in the progressive institutional left media” depicted in the movie because ““The hatred aimed at Andrew and the tea party was pornographic!” But like Bully, the documentary about children who are tormented for reasons ranging from their sexual orientation to simple social awkwardness, Hating Breitbart was rated R for the language that appears in the film. And like Bully, which eventually cut a number of incidences of the word “fuck” to earn a PG-13 rating, Marcus is trimming Hating Breitbart to try to bring the rating down.

The best argument for giving both Bully and Hating Breitbart PG-13 ratings even with all the original language in them intact is that it’s a realistic, honest look at the behavior of both sets of subjects. There was something perverse about protecting children from words in Bully that were spoken by children in the target demographic. And Breitbart’s use of language was a part of his style, as the Daily Caller suggests in a description of one of the scenes in the movie:

But Breitbart is the one uttering a few choice adult words. During one sequence early in the film, he looks into the camera and inveighs against what he saw as a conspiracy among liberal media elites to cast conservative politicians and commentators as Neanderthal throwback villains.

“What the left has stood for with political correctness,” he says on screen, looking into the distance, “is to try and get those with whom they disagree to shut up. And the tea party movement, and Sarah Palin, and Michele Bachmann, and Allen West and all the people who have gone out there against the mainstream media and said, ‘You’re going to call us racists? You’re going to call us potential Timothy McVeighs? Fuck you!’”

Then Breitbart looks into the camera and takes a pregnant pause before half-whispering his conclusion.

“War.”

Marcus may be irritated that his movie got an R rating, but the decision is in no way inconsistent with the MPAA’s previous decisions. I’d be in favor of a standard that recognizes that life, even as 12-year-olds are exposed to it, is sometimes obscene. But as it is, the ratings are fairly consistent in shielding younger viewers from obscene language, if not the ideas that animate it.

The MPAA has pulled together some interesting statistics on race and movie attendance that really ought to be getting more attention, especially in the context of Think Like a Man‘s two-weekend long stretch atop the box office. White moviegoers buy more tickets than people of color simply by virtue of there being more white people than people of color. But people of color turn out to be somewhat more dedicated moviegoers than white folks.

Latinos make up 25 percent of moviegoers even though they’re only 16 percent of the population. The average Latino moviegoer makes it to 5.3 movies a year, compared to 3.7 movies per year for African Americans and 3.5 movies per year for white moviegoers.

I tend to end up pointing to the performance of movies with African American leads or diverse casts to point out that there’s an underserved market there, and I think that point remains true. But maybe an ancillary point is that African American moviegoers are, by a narrow margin, and Latino moviegoers are by a wide margin, more dedicated customers of Hollywood’s existing products than white audiences are, and their numbers are growing. You’d think Hollywood would want to hold on to those customers, and to recognize that the day is coming when those consumers’ preferences will be more important than the white consumers who no longer have either numerical superiority or proof that they’re more loyal customers. Nothing about the state of writers’ rooms and directors chairs suggest that movies are television are actively preparing for that eventuality. And I wonder how ready white entertainment consumers are for a day when pop culture doesn’t automatically reflect their faces because we no longer have the numbers or the proof of market power to expect that we be the default.

I think MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd is right to say, in the wake of the controversy over the initial R rating given to the documentary Bully (it was lowered to PG-13 after cuts), that the association’s ratings system, which carries great power, should be more transparent to the public. There’s a perception, fair or not, that the ratings weight certain content—like sexual content between gay couples—more heavily in moving towards an R rating, and that the system fails to acknowledge how context mitigates content. That last perception was at issue in Bully: the R rating depended on incidences of profanity deemed inappropriate for teenagers, despite the fact that those profanities were uttered by teenagers and directed at teenagers. More data about how the ratings panels make their decisions would help outside observers determine whether these perceptions of inconsistency and failure to contextualize were true, or to debunk them.

Discussing whether transparency might be a good idea is not the same thing as committing to it, of course. Releasing the exact counts of words that trigger ratings might be one place to start. And while making it clear who’s in the ratings panels might open up the possibility of bribery, it would also let outsiders look for patterns in raters’ behavior the same way political analysts score the leanings of judges. Any other thoughts on what data it would help to have in the open? It’d be nice to have this be the kind of thing that doesn’t just float into conversation and disappear.

Over at Ars Technica, Tim Lee brings news of a disturbing lawsuit, now supported by the Motion Picture Association of America, that could set a legal precedent that embedding copyright video, rather than hosting it, counts as copyright infringement:

“Although there is nothing inherently insidious about embedded links, this technique is very commonly used to operate infringing internet video sites,” the organization writes. “Pirate sites can offer extensive libraries of popular copyrighted content without any hosting costs to store content, bandwidth costs to deliver the content, and of course licensing costs to legitimately acquire the content.” The MPAA also notes that embedding can enable sites to monetize infringing content by surrounding it with ads…

Numerous websites embed content from third parties they have not personally inspected. Under the theory articulated by Grady, and supported by the MPAA, these websites would be responsible for this content, exactly as if they had stored it on their own servers. This could create a serious disincentive for sites to allow users to post embedded content, hampering the convenience and user-friendliness of the Web

I, and the rest of my colleagues at ThinkProgress (not to mention our peers elsewhere on the internet), would have to dramatically reassess the way we do business, were this precedent to become law. Embedding is an elegant tool for journalists, and a great convenience for readers. It lets us write posts and stories that have a neat flow to them, framing a piece of content, letting the reader consume that content, and then move on to our analysis all without forcing them to click away, perhaps never to return. Sure, it keeps people on our site and lets us make money, but it’s also a convenience for the reader that provides a coherent consumption experience.

If this legal precedent is established, it would create a hugely complex situation. There’s a lot of content that the copyright holders would like to see widely embedded and distributed, whether it’s move trailers, music videos, campaign ads that no one actually intends to spend money to air but they would like to be seen, speeches, etc. That desire isn’t going to disappear if a new legal regime governing embeds comes in place. And that creates a terrific problem for both people who want their content embedded and those of us who need to embed a wide variety of content to do our jobs. Given the huge amount of content out there, and the large number of vectors through which it’s made available, it’ll be extremely difficult to comply with a new regime if there’s no clear way to tell if the content’s licit or not. And without that clarity, media outlets might be less willing to distribute even licit content if they can’t clearly document its provenance. That skittishness could prevent transmedia campaigns like the Peter Weyland TED Talk that’s being used to promote Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, where video is meant to appear sui generis rather than clearly coming from a studio, from taking off, which would be a loss both for the content producers themselves, and for the people who would enjoy that content if it was distributed to them.

Given the fuzzy, burdensome precedent this lawsuit could set, I’d like to see the clear numbers that explain why the potential use of embedding for intentional copyright violation is so harmful that it justifies upending the legitimate use of embedding for the rest of us.

Roger Ebert, invaulable as always, intervenes in the controversy over the R rating of Bully with a reminder of what the MPAA was trying to do in the first place when it introduced its ratings system:

The MPAA began to set this trap for itself when it got into the ratings business in the first place. It was intended at the time not to promote public decency in language, but to provide the motion picture industry with a plausible way to head off local censorship boards. When I started at the Sun-Times, the city had a board of censors made up of the widows of police captains, and their rulings were often inexplicable. There was also the question of whether censorship was even constitutional. Jack Valenti, in 1968 the new head of the MPAA, came up with the rather brilliant notion that a new code should be “voluntary,” and thus no test of the law. Studios and theaters would be asked for voluntary compliance…

The one thing the MPAA cannot ever do, Valenti argued, is get into the business of value judgments. It can advise parents that a film contains the f-word, for example, but not whether that use is appropriate. Now that 20 members of Congress have come forward to sign a petition protesting the R rating of “Bully,” we can assume that the film uses the word for justifiable reasons.

And he also reminds us that Valenti’s code was a break with the Hays Code, the set of rules that dictated that, for example, even married couples in the movies had to be portrayed sleeping in different beds. If the MPAA’s ratings system has become more conservative than the communities it’s meant to serve, and if it’s no longer helping movies get into communities and in front of audiences that might otherwise be barred from seeing them, then it’s not fulfilling its original intention. Such certainly seems to be the case with Bully, which had schools prepared to bus their students to see it, and has a strong case for letting teenagers, especially those whose parents might not be appropriate and supportive discussion partners, see it on their own. If that’s so, there’s precedent for breaking with the past and starting over.