President and CEO of the Motion Pictures Association of America Chris Dodd has issued a strongly-worded statement regarding tomorrow’s planned outages and protests relating to the SOPA and PIPA legislation. If you didn’t already think the MPAA was a ship of fools, this will convince you once and for all.
It’s fairly brief, go ahead and read it. I’ve taken the liberty of pirating a copy for you (incidentally, under SOPA, Scribd would almost certainly be under fire for the duplication of private or copyrighted documents, or would at least have to prepare a legal defense against such allegations):
So, protests are “pranks,” websites like Wikipedia are only doing it “to further their corporate interests,” turning their users into “corporate pawns,” and are not “coming to the table.” Among other things.
We’ve seen some tone-deaf “official statements” in this industry, but this one has to be among the greatest.
Needless to say, his shaming is unlikely to sway the hundreds, if not thousands, of sites, services, and blogs that will be shuttering for a day in protest of what many credible authorities (to say nothing of millions of citizens) say is a gross affront to the freedoms that have made the web what it is.