Chris Dodd Rewrites Hollywood's History To Pretend That It Came About Because Of IP Laws

from the well,-sort-of dept

Ah, Chris Dodd. Can you open your mouth without saying something ridiculously misleading? Sometimes, it doesn't seem possible. The latest is that he's claiming that strong IP laws were the reason Hollywood was created:

The truth is that neither the content nor the technology industries could survive without strong protections for intellectual property.

Many of you are familiar with how the name Hollywood became synonymous with the birth of the American film industry. It was in Jacob Stern’s horse barn, at the corner of Hollywood and Vine, the story goes, that Cecil B. DeMille screened the first full length feature film 100 years ago.

Well, when it comes to the tech sector, replace “Jacob Stern’s horse barn” with “Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room” at Harvard, and you have almost the same story with the birth of Facebook.

In these and countless other examples throughout our history, the ability to give birth to an idea and convert it into economic success, whether it is the content of a film or the technology of the internet, depends on copyright and patent protection

Of course, that's all hogwash. Well, in a very twisted way, he's right. Hollywood did come about because of strong patent protection, but not the way Dodd seems to be suggesting. Instead, the reason that filmmakers moved out to Hollywood was because it was about as far away as they could get from Thomas Edison, who held the patents on basic filmmaking technology, and demanded exorbitant licensing fees. So the main reason that Hollywood is in Hollywood is because they were seeking a place to hide from patents.

It's a bit ridiculous for Dodd to try to rewrite this well-known history, and pretend that Hollywood developed because of strong IP protections when the exact opposite is what happened. I realize that Chris Dodd spent most of his adult life as a politician, so perhaps it's a bit naive to expect him to actually tell the truth, but at some point someone who works for him (I'm sure there's someone on staff who has accessed the internet once or twice) might want to explain to him that people can fact check him these days with relative ease online. Perhaps the next version of SOPA can be used to block people mocking Chris Dodd's inane statements as well...

Filed Under: chris dodd, edison, hollywood, intellectual property, mpaa

DailyDirt: Wacky Inventions and Inventors...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Inventions aim to improve anything and everything. So there are a lot of pretty trivial inventions out there, but every so often there are some really cool things, too. Here are just a few quick links about inventions and inventors.

• This device has to be seen to be believed -- and even after watching it, there's some doubt that it isn't some kind of video editing trick. Don't cry over spilled ketchup... [url]
• Stephen Wolfram wonders if machines can discover axioms or invent interesting mathematical conjectures. Sounds like someone wants to replace an infinite array of monkeys with a server farm. [url]
• One of the first voice recordings for sale to the public was a 12-second clip of a woman singing 'Twinkle, Twinkle, little star' for a toy doll. Thomas Edison would probably be impressed that the 123-year-old recording could be played using modern optical scanning techniques that don't physically touch the metal cylinder that the soundprint is etched into. [url]
• IBM has named a group of employees 'Master Inventors' -- and one of them admits he usually helps invent pretty obscure things. It seems a bit presumptuous to call someone (other than Necessity?) a 'master' of invention. [url]
• To discover more interesting tech-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: edison, gel pickup, inventions, wolfram
Companies: ibm