Well, this is charming. The National Association of Theater Owners has decided to respond to the Weinstein Company’s complaints that the MPAA rating system was too rigid and context-resistant to deal with Bully in a nuanced, intelligent way…by being even more rigid and context-resistant! Deadline reports:

Surveys of America’s parents reflect their very strong concern with the use of harsh language in movies. The vast majority of parents surveyed have indicated that the type of language used in “Bully” should receive an automatic “R” rating. You ask us to ignore the preferences of America’s parents and our own ratings rules because of the merit of this movie. Yet were the MPAA and NATO to waive the ratings rules whenever we believed that a particular movie had merit, or was somehow more important than other movies, we would no longer be neutral parties applying consistent standards, but rather censors of content based on personal mores…I have nothing but tremendous respect for you and the work of TWC. Our industry is so much the better for your involvement. But if you decide to withdraw your support and participation in the rating system, and begin to release movies without ratings, I will have no choice but to encourage my theater owner members to treat unrated movies from The Weinstein Company in the same manner as they treat unrated movies from anyone else.

In most cases, that means enforcement as though the movies were rated NC-17 – where no one under the age of 18 can be admitted even with accompanying parents or guardians.

I’m not a parent, but this reads to me less as an attempt to be responsive to America’s parents and much more as a nuclear option to try to limit the audiences for movies that come out of studios that have the temerity to say that the ratings system doesn’t work for them. It’s one thing to enforce the ratings system, and another to jack up the rating that a movie would have gotten otherwise if a studio doesn’t want to comply with the system. That’s not safeguarding community standards: it’s about showing you have power. Particularly since some school districts are going to try to get permission for their students to see Bully anyway, something that would become impossible if the theaters started enforcing rules that required parents to accompany their children to the movie during the workday.

And of course, this is also a move that will limit tickets sales for NATO members who carry Bully. I wonder if showing you’re willing to get into an arms race with one of Hollywood’s best salesmen is worth the lost revenue.

After the MPAA refused to change the rating on Bully, a documentary about the impact of vicious anti-gay harassment on teenagers, from an R to a PG-13, Harvey Weinstein, whose company is releasing Bully, has suggested that it might be time for him to depart the MPAA. Weinstein is a showman par excellence, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s using the ratings system as a way of bringing attention to the movie. But he’s also correct that the ratings system isn’t working to truly get people the information they need to make decisions about what movies their children should see, and in setting standards for which content children absolutely shouldn’t be able to see without their parents present.

First, we need to move beyond the contradictory ideas that ratings simultaneously need to be responsive to community standards, and that they also should be consistent over time. It’s much more important that ratings be responsive to contemporary community standards, broadly defined, than it is that they be consistent from the onset of the ratings system until the present day. If we were still abiding by the standards of the 1947 People v. Wepplo decision that declared material obscene ” “if it has a substantial tendency to deprave or corrupt its readers by inciting lascivious thoughts or arousing lustful desire,” most American popular entertainment couldn’t be marketed or made at all.

More importantly, the American public as a whole isn’t actually served by holding on to certain old standards. A significant majority of Americans believe that gay couples should at least be able to get the legal protections of civil unions, and we’re edging towards a majority of Americans supporting equal marriage rights. It doesn’t serve the interests of that majority to treat depictions of sexual contact between gay couples differently than depictions of those same acts between straight couples—it serves a minority who are resistant to the consensus that the rest of the country has reached about the normalization of gay couples.

It also doesn’t particularly serve the public interest to have the only grounds for a movie to be moved from R to PG-13 even if the profanity it in would normally trigger an R rating is if “based on a special vote by a two-thirds majority, the Raters feel that most American parents would believe that a PG-13 rating is appropriate because of the context or manner in which the words are used or because the use of those words in the motion picture is inconspicuous.” That doesn’t leave any room for precisely what Bully is trying to accomplish: illustrate that certain language is the opposite of inconspicuous, that it’s pernicious, and damaging, and that it can take lives. One would hope that most American parents believe that it’s a worthy goal to communicate to their teenagers that harassing their peers to the point of suicide is horrendous and a message that doesn’t have to—and in fact shouldn’t—wait until children are of age.

We need a ratings system that more clearly breaks down the reasons parents might find a movie unsuitable for their children, and that provides some sort of context for tagging a movie with those elements. I’ve long thought it might make sense to have a universal ratings system that applies across popular media so parents don’t struggle with the different, and not particularly analogous, systems that are used to label music, movies, television, and video games. And while I don’t think it’s perfect, the television ratings system that appears before programming begins and breaks ratings down into discrete and clear elements seems to me to be the one that provides parents with most information. Parents expose their kids to different things at different rates—I might let my kids hear mild curse words before I let them see Darth Vader cut Luke’s hand off—and they should be given information consistent with that. It’s very, very difficult to reconcile efficiency in label with the goal of providing as much context as possible to parents, but we need more than a single tiny box with several letters in it to truly serve the needs of communities and individual families.

Linda Holmes raises a vital point about Bully that illustrates the difficulty of getting a ratings system right. In theory, it would be good for every student to see a movie about the worst consequences of bullying and harassment with an adult who can help talk through its lessons, be that teacher or parent. But there are also students who may be struggling dreadfully with these issues who might not be safe seeing the movie with a parent or teacher because those people are among their tormenters. We live in a day and age when teachers can use the platforms they have to make life harder for gay students, and when gay teenagers have disturbingly high homelessness rates because their parents are not always supportive. When the ratings system is based around parental decision-making rather than an impossible-to-reach standard of audience wellbeing, it’s going to flounder in cases this one.

What could have been a tense session at Sundance yesterday in the wake of the failures of SOPA and PIPA to advance, turned into a generally genial conversation between MPAA President Chris Dodd, National Association of Theater Owners president John Fithian, and filmmaker Christine Vachon, with occasional tough interjections from moderator and New York Times reporter David Carr.

“My take is that your industry vastly underestimated the intimacy and closeness of the relationships between tech companies and the consumer,” Carr told Dodd. “The people we want re-engineering the Internet are not your people or your old people.”

Dodd acknowledged that the protests against SOPA had been “a watershed event,” and said that the conversation would continue about legislation to address the problem of overseas sites that distribute pirated content. But he generally pivoted towards talking about the need for technology and content providers to recognize their common interests rather than dwelling on their differences. He pointed out that the same consumers who want content available on a wide array of devices are also the consumers who go to movies in theaters most frequently. “The person who loves technology loves content,” Dodd said. “They’re not the enemy of this industry at all. They’re the future in many ways.” He and Fithian also both emphasized the need to give consumers more choices in theaters.

“The screens in the film world got dominated by big pictures,” Fithian acknowledged. “We don’t need Harry Potter playing on 6 screens in our megaplexes. Maybe 4. And maybe we can pick up some independent movies.” He pointed to Open Road, the distribution company owned by AMC and Regal Cinemas as proof of the theaters’ intentions to begin acquiring independent movies and acting as distributors themselves. And Fithian said that the move towards digital projection will dramatically lower the cost of getting a movie in theaters from $1,000 per print to $100 for digital copies. In a reversal from prior approaches, Fithian suggested that NATO might reconsider offering Video On Demand sales in theaters so consumers could immediately get multi-device-capable copies of movies they’d just enjoyed.

And Vachon, who is at Sundance promoting her LCD Soundsystem documentary Shut Up and Play the Hits, which I’ll see on Wednesday emphasized that just as the MPAA and NATO are changing their approaches, so are filmmakers. “I think theatrical exhibition as the only means of measuring the success of a movie is changing, and fairly rapidly,” she said. “We are experimenting as much as we can with length, with format. We’ve always experimented with content…Our budgets have come down drastically, but the methodology of making a movie…that hasn’t come down…the creative margin is what has to be reconciled and reworked…we are constantly looking at different kinds of different distribution, ways we can directly market our work to the consumer.”

In my Tuesday conversation with MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd, he cited the Swedish film industry as one that had been harmed by piracy. Sweden’s Cultural Counselor, Eva Berquist, writes in to set the record straight. I’m reprinting her letter here:

To whom it may concern:

It has come to our attention that MPAA Chairman and CEO, former Senator Chris Dodd, in remarks at a Centre for Aemrican Progress event on Creativity and Copyright on December 13th, stated that Sweden’s film industry has been wiped out by piracy.

Illegal download and piracy is an unfortunate reality affecting the global film industry. The Swedish government deplores copyright violations. The claim that piracy has wiped out the Swedish film industry is however not a correct statement.

Production of film in Sweden remains steady at around 50 feature films a year. Releases are also stable with around 40 per year. Sweden comes in second after the U.S.A. when comparing market shares per country of origin.

A number of Swedish films and film makers have won awards and accolades in recent years. To name a few: Black Power Mixtape, Apflickorna/She Monkeys, Let the Right One In, Thomas Alfredson’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and the Millenium TV series that won an Emmy for best Mini Series last month.

Eva Bergquist
Cultural Counselor

I know some folks couldn’t tune in to yesterday’s event, so here’s me and Motion Picture Association of America Chairman Chris Dodd talkin’ copyright, thanks to our wonderful CAP video guru Andrew Satter:

I tried to draw from a lot of different tranches of issues here, and thanks to many of you for your help. Because of some timing issues, I had a bit less time than I expected — Q&A starts around the 25 minute mark. But I hope it will be rewarding to those of you interested in everything from the relationship of independent producers and the MPAA to whether we should rule out the uses of certain technologies like circumvention of IP and DNS blocking to preserve America’s moral example in the world. There’s a lot to talk about, not just this week, and not just on this legislation. And I appreciated the chance to get some initial questions in as Dodd begins his tenure at the MPAA.

Or almost right now. Our conversation will be streaming live here when we start at 10 a.m. EST. And as soon as we’ve got a final cut of the event, I’ll embed it.

We’ve had quite a few conversations here about copyright, innovation, piracy, customer service, residuals, and international law. And so I’m pretty excited to announce that I’ll get to take some of these questions straight to the source next Tuesday at 10 a.m., when the Center for American Progress hosts a conversation with Motion Picture Association of America Chairman and CEO and former Sen. Chris Dodd. I get to ask Dodd a first round of questions and then we’ll open up the floor, so if you have thoughts, please email or leave comments, and if you’ve got questions you want to pose in person, I hope you’ll come (an RSVP is mandatory for this one). I’ll look forward to seeing you there, and I’ll try to make sure we can post video after.

As the arguments over the Stop Online Piracy Act and the PROTECT IP Act continue, a report from the Swiss government illustrates why even if the SOPA passes and it becomes harder to download content you’re not paying for in the United States, it will still be very hard to establish a consistent international copyright regime.

Ars Technica reports that after considering a three-strikes law like the one in effect in France, or an internet-filtering system like the one proposed in SOPA, the Swiss Federal Council takes the position that the status quo, in which Swiss citizens can download copyrighted content they don’t pay for as long as they only use it for personal entertainment, is just fine. First, the report says that the money that its countries citizens aren’t spending buying DVDs and CDs end up coming back to the arts and entertainment industry anyway, because rather that diverting that spending to other kinds of goods, they spend it on concert and theater tickets and entertainment merchandise. And second, according to Ars’ translation of the report (which is in German), “piracy is only a significant concern for ‘large foreign production companies.’”

As you all know, I’m not particularly sympathetic to “let’s screw the man!” arguments against restrictive copyright laws. “Large foreign production companies” employ middle-class people as well as extremely wealthy ones. 73 percent of the Directors Guild of America pension plan, 60 percent of the health plan for the members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, and 23 percent of the Screen Actors Guild pension and health plans are funded by residuals. I imagine they care what happens to those residuals, whether they’re thinking about uncompensated downloading or the structure of those funding plans. But the fact that those arguments have taken hold not just at the consumer level but at the national one illustrates a real challenge for advocates of stronger copyright law: it’s not going to be easy, or even possible, to get all countries on board with the same copyright norms. Blocking sites that offer pirated content in the U.S. may lock down part of the market, but if you can’t get China on board, content producers still have a problem.

This is not to say that getting innovative delivery mechanisms that can help cut down on piracy adopted internationally is going to be totally simple either. Netflix is moving forward country-by-country (it’s not in Switzerland yet, and it’ll be interesting to see how norms in that country change when it arrives there), but it isn’t just automatically available everywhere. Hulu is only available in Japan, and the site explains that “we don’t have a timetable or any news regarding expansion beyond Japan at this time…Our intention is to make Hulu’s growing content lineup available worldwide as quickly as possible. This requires working with the content owners to clear the rights for each show or film in each specific region. It’s a long-term project.” It’ll be interesting to see how the combination of legislating and enticing new norms works, both here and abroad.