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Comment by timvisee | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain me why this is good or bad?

On the bad side: the MPAA lobbies heavily for continually enlarging copyright protection (e.g. the DMCA) and aggressively pursues legal action against individuals. Netflix has deep pockets, so its membership provides the MPAA with increased funds for lobbying and legal muscle.

> and aggressively pursues legal action against individuals

Do they still do this? I thought they finally realized it wasn’t worth the trouble.

Netflix has deep pockets? Have you seen their balance sheet and debt obligations?

MPAA membership dues are on the order of USD 10 million per year.

Which is chomp change for any major company.

One reason is the org offers some kind of moralistic authority over art through its ratings system.

This has influenced what we get to see in theaters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Film_Is_Not_Yet_Rated

And that's bad.

I wonder if it was worse? I think there are more distribution mediums for art available now than when that film was made that are less beholden to content rating.

Perhaps the new specter is YouTube and its recent banning of security videos?

I agree there are more mediums available, but if someone finances their work they'll probably have little choice in distribution mechanisms which props up tradition.

The MPAA has a chilling effect which I think is harmful to creativity. I think the human mind is a lot tougher than the vocal few lead us to believe.

I believe the MPAA is involved in pushing the recent CASE Act:

https://act.eff.org/action/prevent-copyright-trolling-tell-t...

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190711/00001742562/congr...

They destroy peoples lives, like DVD Jon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Lech_Johansen#The_DeCSS_pr....

It doesn't have to be good or bad. Generally speaking most things are some form of gray.

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