Government owned by corporations

March 15, 2004 11:31 PM

Vans Stevenson, senior lobbyist for MPAA (the Motion Picture Association of America), was the last to revise a letter California State Attorney General Bill Lockyer is to distribute to other attorney generals. Lockyer is the president of the National Association of Attorneys General. - is your government owned? Lockyer receives thousands in campaign contributions from MPAA, RIAA, and '[via: The Register]..corporate and private donations from the major studios, including The Paramount Pictures Group, Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc., Warner Bros PAC, AOL Time Warner. Senior executives, such as Alan Horn and Howard Welinsky, respectively CEO and senior VP at Warner Brothers..." Adam Eisgrau of P2P United said that "the draft attributed to the attorney general's office contains many significant factual errors, eyebrow-raising metadata, and articulates a very broad expansion in several important respects of product liability and consumer protection law that would have enormous effects..' It's in The NY Times. Slyck has the original document.
posted by giantkicks (3 comments total)

Vans Stevenson, senior lobbyist for MPAA (the Motion Picture Association of America), was the last to revise a letter California State Attorney General Bill Lockyer is to distribute to other attorney generals.

Actually, that's not quite right, according to your link:

"The draft document, dated Feb. 26, was obtained by Wired News on March 12. Distribution of a revised version to other attorneys general is said to coincide with the spring meeting in Washington, D.C., March 15 to 17 of the National Association of Attorneys General, of which Lockyer is president."

The metadata certainly supports the idea that Stevenson might have been the last person to revise that particular draft that Wired obtained, but Wired is pretty clear to state that what they obtained was a draft document.

Doesn't change the core concern, of course, of business influencing government at that level of policy, but scrutinizing the metadata of an "obtained draft" should be done cautiously. Lord knows there's plenty enough to criticize in the text itself.
posted by bclark at 3:42 AM on March 16, 2004

I sorta wish this story didn't come out until after the final letter was distributed. Now Lockyer has an obligation to revise it and make it more factually correct. If they didn't know that Wired knew, we could have seen the final output and whether it was exactly what was dictated by the MPAA.

Of course, if the final letter was significantly different from the draft, Wired would have no story at all, rather than the scant story they have right now. Now we're guaranteed that they'll be different.

I can't figure out if this is activist journalism or opportunist journalism.
posted by VulcanMike at 6:17 AM on March 16, 2004

Looks like the MPAA is dealing with the best damn government money can buy.
posted by clevershark at 7:03 AM on March 16, 2004