Former Democratic Congressman from Kansas and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman has a presidency now: the presidency of the Motion Picture Association of America. And Dan Glickman vowed as he took his post to pick up where Jack Valenti left off, waging the film industry's war against Internet piracy, including lawsuits.
"I think there are a lot of strategies to deal with piracy," Glickman said, after Valenti introduced him as the new MPAA chief at a July 1 press conference. "Education is one of them; enforcement, litigation is another strategy. I don't think you can just go with one strategy."
Internet piracy is estimated to cost the movie industry about $3.5 billion a year, and stopping it will remain the MPAA's top priority under Glickman's leadership.
"It's been a long ride, it's been a great ride," Valenti told the press conference, often in tears. "But everything comes to an end." Valenti's leadership saw among other things the introduction of the voluntary ratings system in 1968, which many credit with warding off government attempts to censor sex and violence in art. The MPAA said Valenti would continue supervising the ratings system.
But Valenti also provoked a controversy that presaged today's battle against Internet file swapping. Testifying to Congress in 1982, he compared the videocassette recorder to the Boston Strangler – and unwittingly gave technology advocates a club to beat the film and other industries with when arguing that some copyright law enforcement actually harms rather than protects innovation.
Valenti praised Glickman for "demonstrates wise and decisive leader[ship] who in his roles as Secretary of Agriculture and as a member of Congress was able in his public career to construct a respectful rapport with both sides of the aisle." Glickman himself alluded to that when he said he preferred to be a diplomat rather than "a bomb thrower."
Glickman had more on his mind than just Internet piracy, saying he was enthused especially by sustaining and enlarging the MPAA's role in film around the world and in the American economy. "As America's most wanted export," he said, "the American movie is also a great source of economic growth."
Glickman headed the Institute of Politics at Harvard, running a program aimed at encouraging students at Harvard and elsewhere to get into the American political process, and taught at the Kennedy School of Government, after his career in government ended.
