ASPEN, Colorado – Jack Valenti may not understand much about technology, but he sure knows how much Americans love movies.
The legendary 79-year-old lobbyist, a veteran of the Johnson White House and head of the Motion Picture Association of America, said Tuesday that before films will be available for anyone with fast connections to download online, strong copy-protection technology will be necessary.
"Once valuable works can be protected, broadband and the Internet will take off," Valenti told the Progress and Freedom Foundation's annual politics-and-tech summit. Right now, Valenti said, "movies cannot flourish on the Internet because of thievery."
Last week, five movie studios announced a joint venture that would provide video-on-demand services over the Internet encoded with Sony's "Moviefly" digital rights management technology. They're hoping this will fend off Napster-like file-swapping services that have plagued the music industry.
Valenti, a fixture in the movie industry since he left the White House in 1966 to take his current job, seems a little bewildered by the details of content protection technology. Valenti talks about "these Windows" sold by Microsoft and readily offers up remarks like: "I don't know what a killer application is and I don't really care."
What Valenti does care about is protecting the revenue stream of the movie industry, and he sees content protection technology – which critics say will inconvenience consumers and perhaps eliminate "fair use" rights – as the best way to do just that.
He said he's not looking for "absolute security" through technological means, but only "enough security so the hacker cannot ply his unruly mischief." Predicted Valenti: "If you give people a legitimate alternative to stealing, they'll take that legitimate alternative."
Valenti's animus toward hackers runs deep: The MPAA coordinated a lawsuit against the hacker-zine 2600 magazine for distributing a DVD-descrambling utility. A federal appeals court in New York heard arguments in the case in May, and a decision is expected at any time.
But the audience really paid attention when Valenti predicted that online movie delivery would lead to a spike in consumer spending on broadband connections. While previous Aspen gatherings were notable for their enthusiasm for all things Internet, with speakers lauding the "digital revolution" and forecasting a sunny dot-com future, this year's tone is so gloomy that the possibility of increased spending on broadband is one of the few bright spots.
Verizon vice president Tom Tauke acknowledged the "detritus of the new economy is all around us" and admitted that Americans are still waiting for the broadband revolution that should have happened long ago.
Tauke said that Verizon is investing $10 billion this year on wireless and data traffic, but it's still lagging in providing DSL connections because of "ungainly bureaucratic processes" at the FCC.
AT&T President David Dorman offered a different view: The Bells, he said, "did not get to the top of the telecom heap because they are entrepreneurs or technical innovators."
Dorman said that legislation that Congress is set to consider next month, called the Tauzin-Dingell bill, would extend the Bell monopoly and reduce the incentives for competitors such as AT&T to offer broadband services.
Stephanie Joyce, a lobbyist for Patton Boggs in Washington, said that the DSL wars are over, and the Bells have succeeded in squashing competitors: "The local network will never be the platform for competitive broadband service."
Joyce said the only realistic alternatives are technologies like fiber and wireless that bypass the Bells' networks.
