• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, March 17, 2008

Motion Picture Association of America head Dan Glickman recently went on record against net neutrality, arguing that a law banning Internet service providers from discriminating against certain types of lawful applications would somehow hurt anti-piracy efforts.

Net neutrality laws, he said, "would impair the ability of broadband providers to address the serious and rampant piracy problems occurring over their networks today."

"Technology," Glickman continued, "is handing us the opportunity to deal the first real body blow to online piracy, to begin to reach toward the day when we might be able to take it off the table and debug the system."

But Glickman is mistaken to equate peer-to-peer services with copyright infringement. Obviously some content shared on peer-to-peer services is pirated. But an increasing amount is not. Companies like Qtrax, Joost and Vuze, to name just a few, rely on peer-to-peer technology to lawfully distribute music or video.

What's more, Glickman's comments seem to stem from a larger desire to turn Internet service providers into copyright police. Hollywood studios not only want networks to be able to interfere with traffic to peer-to-peer sites, but also apparently want them to filter out transmission of copyrighted material.

Doing so is virtually impossible. Some pirates have already figured out how to encrypt material to evade filters. At the same time, people are legally entitled to make fair use of copyrighted material, but filters don't know whether particular uses are lawful or not.

Glickman may speak for the major studios, but independent filmmakers are irked by his remarks. "The Internet offers the only truly open opportunity for independents (whether or not commercially oriented) to reach consumers because both free and cable television have been foreclosed in the wake of massive industry consolidation," Jean Prewitt, president and CEO of the Independent Film & Television Alliance, wrote to Glickman in a letter dated Friday.

"The issue is not whether government should regulate the Internet but whether there will be effective oversight to prevent a handful of corporate giants from imposing their own version of private regulation to the public's detriment," Prewitt wrote.