Within the past five years, we have been lambasted for several issues about downloading music off of the internet for our own personal use. Almost everyone knows by now that the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA for short, has their clan of greedy, self-righteous pigs, whose only goal in life it seems is to shove manufactured artists that we would otherwise not care about so far down our throats, it would be a surprise if we didn’t choke on them, and then get angry if we end up liking any of these artists enough to buy their records and then doing with them what we desire. Isn’t the album essentially ours once we buy that album, and shouldn’t the posting of lyrics on the internet be the decision of the actual writer that wrote a song, instead of the monopoly of record companies?
However, this is not at all about the RIAA’s quest to get as much money as they can because they can’t get any money by any conventional way. In fact, this is about another entertainment company that has found a new way to make money to make up for how much money it has been losing because of a similar issue that the RIAA has been having.
This is, of course, the Motion Picture Association of America, or MPAA, who has hit the fanfiction world as hard as they can, and has become much more of crooks than the RIAA could ever be. Maybe the RIAA should take some lessons from these people, who think that because they came up with the ratings system that was put into place in the 1970s, that they are suddenly the be all, end all of the entertainment world. They have decided that it is illegal for anyone in their right mind to rate a story as the same rating as what the MPAA would rate a movie in the theaters.
For the record, I do not use this ratings system to rate my own stories, I never have, as I thought that the ratings system that TV Shows have used for the past nine years are more telling of what a fanfiction contains, and more precise.
Of course, copyright infringement is always a crime, we have known that for some time. However, it’s one thing to protect your claim, or as some would say your turf. It’s another to go in a door to door search, for anyone who even dares to have the letters G, P, R, N, and C, and the numbers 1, 3, and 7 printed anywhere on a written document, suing them for whatever they could possibly come up with, whatever escalating hysteria they could have in order to come up with any type of frivolous lawsuit. The MPAA has even sued the people of this great country for the very fun of it.
And who has the MPAA sued? Just about everyone who would dare to use the ratings system. That is, anyone who wouldn’t in their right mind have enough resources for enough legal counseling to fight back against these cowardly hooligans. Quite possibly the MPAA has taken the lessons from the RIAA and decided that they were going to trump them in some sort of sick contest to see who could sue more people who wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of being able to win because they were the big corporate monopoly who has so much money that they were drowning in it against someone who would not ever have any chance to get enough money to even hire an attorney. The MPAA has enough money to buy off at least a thousand of the top attorneys in America for their cases.
This is the reason why the MPAA has decided to go after the little guy. They know for a fact that if they were to go after some of the bigger names that host this so-called “copyright infringement”, they would have to go against someone who had a little more money than a fourteen year old person who is writing for fun, and has the resources necessary to actually make the legal battle fair and just. That is not what the MPAA wants. They want it to be unfair. One wouldn’t be completely off the mark to make an assumption that the MPAA would even pay off some of the judges that see some of these frivolous lawsuits, in order for them to make some of the outlandish decisions that they have made concerning these suits.
If it was only this one issue of the MPAA playing without the word fair in their dictionary, it would be just something to yawn about. However, this issue goes much deeper. The MPAA goes onto uncontested actions, some in which would sicken even the RIAA. At least with the RIAA, you are giving a fair chance to rectify the situation before legal action is taken. Or at least we would all like to believe so. The MPAA has apparently been allowed to skip that step, and go straight to the suing. This is a violation of due process of a lawsuit altogether, and actually prevents the defendant from actually doing anything about something in which he or she may have not even been aware of their crime. This is both excessive and draconian, and no judge, whether or not any plaintiff may or may not be right in his or her claim, should allow such behavior, and no one, not even these hooligans that commit these cold machiavellis, should be allowed to commit them. Yet our judicial system has failed us in this yet again, being biased and allowing the MPAA to continue in these actions, in order to line their own pockets with green, and to allow their faces to be free of the smearing that they may get from the MPAA should one rule against them. How dare any of these people allow this to continue on. How dare the judicial system allow the MPAA to continue to use draconian methods to get their way, and how dare they allow these people to continue to be exempt from having to go through the standard procedures of filing a lawsuit. This is the same as denying someone their rights in this country, which, according to the fifth amendment, which is supplemented by the fourteenth, states: "No person shall be... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law....". The MPAA has been allowed to continue on this tirade without even acknowledging that this amendment, and the Fourteenth that expanded the Fifth’s power to the states, even exists.
And what is this issue about in the first place? If the MPAA is being frivolous in these lawsuits, then why are they even filing them? It’s not about any copyright infringement, in which even I wasn’t aware that letters of the alphabet were copyrighted at all. It is about sagging box office dollars. The overpricing of just about everything in the theater these days, from five dollars for a small bag of popcorn to three dollars for a small drink or seven to even ten dollars just to get a ticket for a movie you want to see, or to even get into the front door, has contributed to the losses that the MPAA has been experiencing. File sharing and digital video disc copying did not cause any sag in the amount of dollars that the industry has lost in the numerous years, nor did any fanfiction that has used its ratings system. The MPAA’s price gouging, along with the lack of quality motion pictures, has caused that alone. And in addition, what has the MPAA spent its money on, besides paying top dollar to allow these outlandish actions to continue? Donating money to the Bush Administration, who, by the way, won’t even accept any responsibility what-so-ever, for anything that led to 9/11. No wonder the MPAA also refuse to take any kind of responsibility for their own sagging dollars. They are getting their influence, in just dues.
And where is the outrage in this issue? Where are the freedom fighters who have said that it was our right to download music off of the internet freely on this very issue? Why hasn’t anyone spoken out against this lambasting of our laws and freedoms, to even have a due process of law, because someone does not want to be responsible for their own monetary losses? The Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF, should be in an out roar of anger from how the MPAA has conducted itself on these and other issue of so-called “copyright infringement”. I am sure Shirley Temple, Marilyn Monroe, and other big time Hollywood names who have passed on would be turning over in their graves if they saw just how much the MPAA has spit in the face of the movie industry and the people who make such an industry a living. The EFF should do everything within its own power, to help the victims of this mockery of our judicial system seek some form of legal counseling, in order for the fights to be a fair fight. One can only hope, that the EFF, and organizations like them, take note.
In closing, the MPAA has been the monopoly masters for years, and to cover their own selfish hides, they have decided to get every last dollar they can, from us, from you, from me, from the very people that buy the DVD’s, buy the tickets, buy the popcorn. And what do we get in a thank you? The notion that we cannot use certain letters in stories that have far surpassed anything that the MPAA has given us within the past five years, maybe even more, and the insinuation, that the witch hunts that were so popular in early modern Europe are still allowed to continue to this very day for anyone who would only come home with a two hundred dollar paycheck that is unknowingly violating some sort of unwritten rule that they were never aware of. With no one willing to come to their aid and with no way in order to get the kind of treatment that these terrorists, yes I called them terrorists, there is no way that anyone can expect a fair fight in the courts, which is what the MPAA has been seeking ever since they started in this cowardly witch hunt. One can only hope that the MPAA finds its soul, and finds it fast. Because whining about people using the same ratings system as they do, a ratings system in which Roger Ebert, as well as many other top film makers and critics, had even pointed out that the system was flawed and biased anyway, is beyond incomprehensible. It gives the motion picture industry a black eye, and shows the world, that the MPAA is nothing more than a cult of greedy, self-centered, right-wing hyenas, that do not deserve the respect of the average movie goer.
Maybe we as fanfiction writers should take their advice and change our ways of rating our fanfics. It has become proven that our fanfics deserve better, than the MPAA. We all do.
Good night, and good luck.