Taking a well-deserved dump on SOPA and PIPA recently may have been the internet’s finest moment, but it’s likely we’ll see similar bills before long because the MPAA is pushing hard for it. Producer Gavin Polone even wrote a whole editorial for Vulture on why he supported the bills as they were, even though pretty much anyone sane thought they were heavily flawed. In any case, I doubt you’ll see me quote Wil Wheaton here very often, but I thought he had a pretty good point in all this. Writing in response to Chris Dodd’s threats against politicians who take MPAA money but don’t support the bills, Wheaton said:
Not that it matters, and not that I’m some kind of rich mogul, but I’ll say this again: I have lost more money to creative accounting, and American workers have lost more jobs to runaway production, than anything associated with what the MPAA calls piracy. [WheatonTumblr]
I’m certainly not one of those people who thinks illegally downloading movies is a great thing and it’s totally okay (I’m not sure whether dub-step is Napster’s fault, for instance, and I wouldn’t want movies going that way), but given that “Hollywood Accounting” is a pervasive enough issue to merit its own tag on my site, I thought Wheaton’s response was worthy of a at least a hearty “touché,” or possibly even a “ho, snap.” Hypocrisy isn’t a blanket justification, but it is a little funny to see an industry that’s been excusing thievery for years and where it’s taken as a given that a net-profit deal is essentially worthless complain about theft. That’d be like me complaining about someone not wearing pants.