Michael and Mathew both cover the latest effort by the US movie industry to pretend that movie counterfeiting is a serious problem in Canada – yet another step in its campaign to embarrass the Canadian Government to accept the US’s most visible cultural export – its intellectual property law regime.
What concerns me almost more than this news, though, is the Globe’s inability to cover the issue with any discernment. Reporter “Tenille Bonoguore” does little more than parrot back Warner’s nonsense. Indeed, the only discerning observation from the nation’s newspaper of record comes from the blog of one of its writers – Mathew’s joint. This is simply shameful.
Update: Ditto Reuters. Honestly, this coverage is almost imbecilically juvenile.
Updater: More debunking from Michael, this time from the Financial Times and the OECD, which is to release a report describing movie piracy claims as being exaggerated. Gist:
The report, due for endorsement by the OECD board later this month, could prove embarrassing for international business lobbies, which have used the higher estimates to lift intellectual property rights up the global political agenda and to demand crackdowns in China and elsewhere.
And what do we get from the Globe? More gullible repetition of MPAA nonsense, containing not a single sign of intelligent life, and void of any actual reporting. Speechless. Absolutely speechless. We’ve seen this movie before, of course: lobbyists plant their spin in the media, and then sell the media coverage back to a gullible public and easily-led politicians as evidence that the issue is real (‘If it’s in the Globe, it must be a problem’).