What About Copyrights?
News reporter gets the wrong problem when reporting on the firing of a teacher for showing a bootleg copy of The Simpsons Movie to young students.
The complaint is that showing a PG-13 film to 3d-5th graders is inappropriate. Nothing is said about how showing a bootleg of such a film is inappropriate. In my not so humble opinion, the latter is the worse offense. The rating system is private, voluntary, and pretty arbitrary. The film might well be just fine for children in a supervised classroom setting. Copyrights, however, are the law. Teachers should be fired for infringing copyrights in the classroom before we even get to the question of whether the material was age-appropriate.
I agree with your post but I’ll just add this:
“The rating system is private, voluntary, and pretty arbitrary.”
The MPAA ratings are private in name but I believe they were forced upon the movie industry by the government. Kind of a “create these ratings or else.” Also, they are dominated by a religious ethics; sex is evil, etc. etc.. So, one could argue that they are not really voluntary.
The system was indeed created as a response to Congressional threats at censorship. But no movie made is required by law to be submitted to the rating board.
On the other hand, distribution can be quite difficult for a producers who do not obtain ratings. The major distributors, the theatres, and the MPAA all have contractual agreements effectively closing the major distribution channels to producers who do not play the game. And pay membership fees. In my year and a half as a projectionist for Large National Movie Theatre Chain, we had limited showings of NR films on only two occasions; both were exhibited from DVDs instead of film prints and were of considerably low budget.
Today, ratings are mostly a marketing tool. They are voluntary on the level of the individual film, and are part of the producer’s marketing consideration. Any producer could choose not to have his film rated and still release wide. The market is much harder for NR films (finding a distribution, exhibition, and an audience can be tricky), but there’s nothing legally compelling participation by individual movies.
The really sad part is that the system probably isn’t voluntary, even today. If MPAA did away with it, there’d be much gnashing of the teeth from all over the place, and Congress being Congress, we’d see a renewed push for a national censor board. Yuck.
~Q