Director Milos Forman didn’t hold back when he addressed the World Copyright Summit, likening internet pirates to Communists. It’s a charge that’s particularly strong from a man who was born in Czechoslovakia and lived under Nazi occupation and through the Stalinist regime. Since leaving Eastern Europe he’s become the Oscar-winning director of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus.
Forman charged that while pirates like to say that the Internet and what they are doing are inseperable from democracy, “What they are really doing is promoting a Communist ideology”.
He added, “Pirates see themselves as modern-day Robin Hoods, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, but they are in fact robbing from thousands of regular people, many of them poor, who depend on the creative industries for a livelihood… Pirates also think everything on the Internet should be free, but that is like going into a department store or supermarket, and just because you got a shopping basket for free, everything in the basket should be free, too.”
Interestingly at the same summit, an official from the MPPA (Motion Picture Association Of America), which has been at the front of the fight against piracy, made some suprisingly candid comments. Firtz Attaway observed, “We’ve got to do a better job of getting our works out to people who want them. We’ve done a lousy job of responding to changes in technology and consumer demands… For a creative community, we’ve been remarkably uncreative in showing the world that what we do benefits society.”