Hollywood - The Big Stumbling Block

Hollywood are at war with their own public, their own customers. By Kjell Häglund.

Get It Try It

Honestly, dear film industry. Did you really want IPRED, private police forces, judicial decay, and copyright debate at preschool level?

In an era of booming cinema culture, continually increasing sales of DVDs, and record profits across the globe, all in symbiosis with an equally booming file sharing - wouldn't you rather have taken a bit more time, thought a bit about the long term consequences, prioritised the independent research reports over the ones provided by Hollywood lobbyists, and used calm logic instead of your ravenous reptile brains?

The 'no' I might hear in reply won't be coming from you - but from Hollywood.

For it's only Hollywood who chose to start a war against their own public, their own fans, their own customers, and their own greatest pro-bono marketers; who've demanded governmental interference from Sweden and paved the way for an insane un-Swedish law that defies the nation's legal traditions and security.

And I can't understand why we haven't a single time put Hollywood up against the wall for their transgressions.

The most bizarre example is the raid on Swedish Internet provider Bahnhof in 2005, orchestrated by the Anti-Piracy Bureau and ordered by the disgraced TPB magistrate Tomas Norström. The day after the raid the Motion Picture Association of America sent out not only a personal 'thank you and congratulations' letter to Henrik Pontén (documented in 'Veckans Affärer' magazine in October 2005) but also published a 'press release' about their propaganda victory on their website.

What they hadn't considered was that inasmuch as the document could be downloaded as an MS Word file readers could use Word and invoke its 'trace changes' command.

The result, as seen in the work of world famous IP expert and Harvard professor of law Lawrence Lessig, should have had the Swedish media shaking from scoop frenzy, Swedish film workers asking pointed questions of the Anti-Piracy Bureau, and all awake Swedish citizens questioning the methods of their police.

One could namely see in the document that Hollywood began preparing their press release the same day the Swedish police carried out the raid. And along with the traditional hyperbole they heralded proudly that 'the servers were also used to distribute training instructions for the terror group the Yellow Brigades'.

So Hollywood had direct access to the contents of the servers. And they were terribly interested in connecting file sharing with armed terrorism.

It's just that those Yellow Brigades - a gang of elite soldiers who served under Gustav II Adolf - haven't been active for close to 400 years.

What does this say about Hollywood and their propaganda machine? That we can trust their intentions and representatives, that we can let our own government bargain with them? Or as historian Rasmus Fleischer put it: 'how trustworthy can they be if they storm into server halls chasing ghosts from the battle of Lützen?'

And yet these hostile infiltration methods are taken officiously and seriously. Hollywood send out red carpet invitations to US and French presidents and English and Swedish ministers and get them all to listen to and read their - and only their - studies. Hollywood have done what they do best: created a sugar coated reality, a cinematic narrative, that politicians in precisely the right Internet-clueless age group swallow along with the extra salted buttered popcorn.

Portrait of the file sharer and Bahnhof Internet account holder who was simultaneously arming and training terrorists. As Henrik Pontén and the MPAA originally planned to tell the world.

Sweden should have submitted a sharp protest to the White House for what happened in the run-up to the raid on The Pirate Bay. Instead minister of justice Thomas Bodström classified 737 (seven hundred thirty seven) electronic messages between himself, the MPAA, and the White House - and judging from the intensive research by state television news programme Rapport - lied about his own involvement: his own cabinet secretary Dan Eliasson effectively admitted to governmental interference when he, presented with overwhelming evidence by Rapport in June 2006, corroborated that the United States had threatened with trading sanctions if the Swedish government did not force the police and prosecutor's office to immediately shut down The Pirate Bay.

And this is but a small fraction, but a few days of work, of the drastic and crass liberties the Hollywood propaganda machine have taken in recent years, in courtrooms, in hundreds of local pirate raids, in falsified research studies, in bribes and other illegal activities.

At least some of this should have been in the consiousness of the Swedish media when the Anti-Piracy Bureau's Henrik Pontén started his own personal campaign for the EU elections. For a few days there he turned up in a slew of newspapers with a number of messages and attack angles: from an attack on Dreamhack and a full page sob story about how 'the piracy movement's new tactics' resulted in a counterfeit name change to a suddenly aggressive reply to a blog post from the Pirate Party several years old.

And it's very easy - for ordinary half-interested readers but also for people in the film industry - to in all these Ponténesque appearances see an honest hard working spokesperson for Swedish film workers - almost as an idealistic union representative.

But if you ask the MPAA: Henrik Pontén is their representative - on their website the MPAA describe the type of work Pontén does in Sweden as 'the equivalent of a state department'.

Parts of the MPAA document analysed by Lawrence Lessig. All materials on the 'pirate server' were planted by Stockholm policeman Peter Bergström on orders from Henrik Pontén of the Anti-Piracy Bureau. The removed mention of the 'Yellow Brigades' can be seen on the right.

The MPAA do not represent individual film workers - but the film companies whose business idea is to pay those film workers as little as possible. The MPAA and Henrik Pontén are for all practical purposes working against the interests of the film worker unions. At the same time Hollywood created a cash cow out of their rabid lawsuit campaign against file sharers in the US the same film companies were drawn into legal battles from the other flank: sued by workers cheated out of their money through shell company schemes the companies use to make their revenues disappear. 15 (FIFTEEN) actors from The Lord of the Rings franchise have sued for breach of contract.

I believe in the principle of copyright and I long for a functional digital pay system which can solve the primary issue - the lack of access caused by an all too limited time/region system. Which in turn is caused by a quilt of multi-layered agreements which represent a big part of the industry's business model - but at the same time is incompatible with a digital cultural globalisation.

So it's Hollywood and not the file sharers who are the big stumbling block. No matter who they think they can blame - Gustav II Adolf's old elite troops or 'X-Men Origins: Wolverine' fans.

And I think we all have to begin to realise Hollywood and their Ambassador to Sweden Henrik Pontén do not answer to Swedish consumers and film workers but only to a few of the southwest United States' most powerful film industry magnates and shareholders who already have far reaching plans to (so to speak) 'integrate' our free but hopelessly open communication societies with governmental and corporate controlled dictatorships.

Culturally aware Swedes from the 1930 to the 1950 generations have for decades warned that we're in the toxic clutches of Hollywood. And now when we truly are in their toxic clutches the same people are ready to deliver the first blows and lethal injections.

I don't believe this is what a Swedish film enthusiast wants to deal with. I believe the desperation is suggested. As a new huge Hollywood blockbuster production of 'The Manchurian Candidate'.

Kjell Häglund is a Swedish cultural journalist who writes primarily about film and television. He runs and contributes to several websites.