8 Jack Valenti Quotes on Policy

Jack Valenti quotes on policy

6. On-line service providers and others have a key role to play in freeing cyberspace of the taint of copyright lawlessness. Accountability for copyright violations committed by users is as essential for advancing this indispensable goal. Who is responsible if a valuable copyrighted work is downloaded from a provider, and then copied on a digital video machine from which thousands of copies can be made, the last copy as pure and pristine as the first? And if no one can be held responsible, then who and what is to prevent the flood that will surely follow? This is a loophole larger than a parade of eight-wheelers through which a dam-busting avalanche of violations can rupture the purpose of your bill every day.

22. Copyright term extension has a simple but compelling enticement: it is very much in America's economic interests.

27. I think lobbying is really an honest profession. Lobbying means trying to persuade Congress to accept your point of view. Sometimes you can give them a lot of facts they didn't have before.

33. I knew that the mix of new social currents, the irresistible force of creators determined to make 'their' films and the possible intrusion of government into the movie arena demanded my immediate action. ... My first move was to abolish the old and decaying Hays Production Code. I did that immediately. Then on November 1, 1968, we announced the birth of the new voluntary film rating system of the motion picture industry ... the emergence of the voluntary rating system filled the vacuum provided by my dismantling of the Hays Production Code. The movie industry would no longer 'approve or disapprove' the content of a film, but we would now see our primary task as giving advance cautionary warnings to parents so that parents could make the decision about the movie-going of their young children.

35. We count it crucial to make regular soundings to find out how the public perceives the rating program, and to measure the approval and disapproval of what we are doing... The rating system isn't perfect but, in an imperfect world, it seems each year to match the expectations of those whom it is designed to serve - parents of America.

39. I invite all of you to work with me to strengthen our copyright laws in all of the ways available to us. As you know, there is also Jack Valenti's proposal for term to last forever less one day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress.

40. Jack Valenti etched the letters G, PG and R into American cinema. That cultural legacy came early in his stewardship of Hollywood's top trade group, when he established the movie-ratings system still in place nearly 40 years later.

42. I thought Jack Valenti was wrong about most of the tech-policy issues that he spoke about, but I'm going to miss that guy... One of the lingering regrets of my career is showing up a few minutes late to a Post boardroom luncheon with Valenti that had started with him denouncing a column I'd written about the MPAA's 'technological totalitarianism.' When I sat down, then-managing editor Steve Coll leaned over to summarize Valenti's opening statement as 'he took your name in vain'; I felt like I'd missed the whole show.