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Joe Biden, already facing allegations of sexual assault at home and nepotism in China, has chosen a former U.S. senator with his own political baggage on China, ethics, and women to run the search for a vice presidential nominee. Christopher Dodd, who retired from the Senate a decade ago, was a central figure in the 1990s China fundraising scandal, having served as the General Chairman of the Democratic Party at a time it and Bill Clinton’s campaign accepted illegal foreign donations and turned the Lincoln bedroom into a donor perk. The retired Connecticut Democrat also has long boasted a friendship...

Charles Rivkin, former President Barack Obama’s former ambassador to France and a former top State Department official under Obama who was Obama’s 2008 campaign co-chair and has since taken over the MPAA as its chairman, announced on Monday morning to the board of the MPAA that Fabrizio has been terminated as a result of the arrest.Rivkin took over the MPAA from former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), a longtime top Democrat who ran for president and has deep connections in Washington. When he retired from the Senate in 2011 after 30 years, he took the job at MPAA as its chairman....

A top executive at the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), a top trade association representing heavy hitters and power players from Hollywood in Washington, D.C., has been arrested by Metropolitan Police Department detectives for alleged “rape and blackmail,” a police report reviewed by Breitbart News states. The police report describes how Steven Fabrizio, who according to his LinkedIn page is the Senior Executive Vice President and Global General Counsel for the MPAA, struck up a relationship with a woman on a “dating website.” After what the detectives describe as a series of encounters between the woman and Fabrizio, which...

Full Title: Producer: My Christian Film Got Rated ‘R.’ It Has No Nudity, Sex, Bad Language, Gore, Drugs. The Motion Picture Association of America adds its name to a list of increasingly brazen leftist media powerhouses who discriminate against conservative voices in the public square. Facebook: Graphic images of a woman smashing and eating a baby do not violate “community standards” but quoting a Bible verse on homosexuality does. Twitter: Conservative voices and alternative news sources frequently find themselves muzzled while profane rants against them are celebrated. Google: Discriminatory algorithms ensure that articles praising the Second Amendment, President Trump, traditional...

The Motion Picture Association of America and its chief, former Democratic senator Chris Dodd, have yet to comment on the slew of sexual assault allegations against Hollywood giant Harvey Weinstein, a longtime friend and political donor of Dodd's. Dodd, who took the reins of MPAA in 2011 after a 30-year stint in the U.S. Senate, has made no public comment on the rape and sexual assault allegations against Weinstein that have piled up after numerous women told their stories to the New York Times and The New Yorker a month ago. The MPAA, which works with major film studios including...

It seems as though everyone and his publicist is commenting on Harvey Weinstein and the Hollywood sex culture, but there is an interesting exception: the Motion Picture Association of America.  The scandal is not noted on its blog, nor in its news section, nor in its press releases, nor in the recent speeches by its chairman extolling the First Amendment and the institution of copyright. One would normally expect a major trade association to be active on such a big issue, but the explanation for the silence seems pretty easy.  The MPAA chairman (until the end of this year, which...

Vice President Joe Biden told people at a conference on Friday that freedom of the press includes allowing journalists to “tell people the truth, and even tell people what is not the truth.” Biden was the featured speaker on Friday at the Motion Picture Association of America, a lobbying group headed by former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), which held its second annual Creativity Conference at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. […] “Of course, each society is different and some are fundamentally different,” said Biden. “But there’s certain common ingredients that make up success: Basic liberties so citizens can think and...

Connecticut could become the first state to curb loud movies under proposed legislation that’s drawing opposition from the Motion Picture Association of America. The legislature’s Public Safety and Security Committee is considering the bill, which would prevent theaters from showing a film or preview that exceeded 85 decibels. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health recommends noise should be kept below 85 decibels for workers for eight hours to minimize hearing loss. …

The filmmakers behind the faith-based flick “My Son” were shocked when their low-budget movie was handed an R-rating from the Motion Pictures Association of America. Now, the church behind the movie is charging that the MPAA handed out the strict rating because of the film’s religious message. “First of all there’s no [bad] language in the film at all,” Jarod O’Flaherty, the movie’s director, told Fox News. “But when you compare the content that is this film to even the mildest PG-13 action movies that are out there, the content of our film comes in as much less graphic… So...

BOSTON (AP) — A former Boston University student who was ordered to pay $675,000 for illegally downloading and sharing 30 songs on the Internet says he will continue fighting the penalty, despite the Supreme Court's refusal to hear his appeal. Joel Tenenbaum, of Providence, R.I., said Monday he's hoping a federal judge will reduce the amount, which he called "ludicrous." A jury in 2009 ordered Tenenbaum to pay after the Recording Industry Association of America sued him. A federal judge called the penalty constitutionally excessive, but the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated it.

The RIAA and MPAA would have you believe that piracy is responsible for their decline in sales. This is all of course blame to be laid at the feet of computers, the internet and the generic "digital boogyman." Even without getting deep into the flawed math in play, there are other reasons for the middling returns on investment Big Content is seeing. Cord-cutting is a big factor. Personal taste naturally varies, but in my view the advance of technology democratised content creation and enabled a generation of talented creators to capitalise on a resistance to innovation by established media. Reality...

Former senator and current head of the Motion Picture Ass. of America Chris Dodd hopes to resurrect the reviled SOPA anti-piracy legislation in another form, but it appears the US House of Representatives is beating him to it a new bill that makes SOPA look sensible. Dodd, speaking in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, said that he hopes to get a new version of the SOPA legislation ready for debate shortly, and that the MPAA was marshaling its forces for another attack on piracy. Dodd said he was confident that the new legislation would go through, and said there...

Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and other Internet service providers (ISPs) in the United States will soon launch new programs to police their networks in an effort to catch digital pirates and stop illegal file-sharing. Major ISPs announced last summer that they had agreed to take new measures in an effort to prevent subscribers from illegally downloading copyrighted material, but the specifics surrounding the imminent antipiracy measures were not made available. Now, RIAA chief executive Cary Sherman has said that ISPs are ready to begin their efforts to curtail illegal movie, music and software downloads on July 12.

Lobbyist bribery goes to waste for once, as Rep. Smith is forced to "postpone" SOPA indefinitely UPDATE: PIPA is "dead"/postponed too... details at the end of the piece. Over the weekend U.S. President Barack Obama's (D) cabinet hinted that he might veto the pending House's "Stop Online Piracy Act" (SOPA) (H.R. 3261) and Senate's "PROTECT IP Act" (PIPA) (S.968) out of concern that the bills Orwellian takedown provisions could damage the legitimate internet economy.   I. The Rat Returns With the support of politically enemy-turned-friend House Oversight Chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), Rep. Eric Cantor(R-Virg.) was compelled to promise to shelve any potential vote in the Republican-controlled House...

Consumer group Public Knowledge on Friday accused the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its head, former Sen. Chris Dodd, of trying to intimidate lawmakers into supporting a pair of controversial anti-piracy bills. In recent days, Dodd and other top Hollywood figures have threatened to cut off campaign donations to politicians who do not support their effort to crackdown on online copyright infringement. "Those who count on quote 'Hollywood' for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who's going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don't ask me to write...

Look for changes in the proposed antipiracy legislation that has giants in the entertainment and technology industries squared off against each other, but nothing extensive enough to please all of the legislation's opponents. That was the message from Michael O'Leary, the senior executive vice president for global policy and external affairs of the Motion Picture Association of America, during a telephone news briefing on Wednesday. "We will come forward with language that will address some of the legitimate concerns" of technology companies that have opposed the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House, and a similar Protect I.P. Act in...

EXCLUSIVE: I’ve learned that the Motion Picture Association Of America representing the Hollywood movie studios will be co-hosting a tribute to Ronald Reagan’s film career on November 14th in Washington DC. The other host will be the Ronald Reagan Centennial Celebration, which is the year-long commemoration of Reagan’s 100th birthday in 2011. All the movie studios are obtaining old footage of Reagan’s 53-movie legacy from 1937 to 1965 and are putting together around 5 cinematic profiles of the former Screen Actors Guild president for the bipartisan event. But I suspect the real reason behind this Reagan tribute is to remind...

Former Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd, a veteran Washington insider, is Hollywood's new chief lobbyist. The Motion Picture Assn. of America said Tuesday that Dodd will become the new chief executive of the MPAA, the lobbying arm for the main studios that also oversees the film ratings system. Dodd succeeds Dan Glickman, a former Kansas congressman and Secretary of Agriculture, who stepped down a year ago after five years on the job. Dodd will pull down more than $1.5 million in salary, 25% greater than the $1.2 million Glickman received.

Over the last few months, Google has received more than 100 copyright infringement warnings from MPAA-affiliated movies studios: most are directed at users of Google's public Wi-Fi service but others are meant for Google employees. The MPAA is thus warning the search giant that it might get disconnected from the Internet. "Copyright infringement also violates your ISP's terms of service and could lead to limitation or suspension of your Internet service. You should take immediate action to prevent your Internet account from being used for illegal activities," the movie companies write in various letters, according to TorrentFreak. Although the copyright...

When federal authorities shut down five Web sites last month on suspicion of copyright infringement, they gave no warning and offered no details of their investigation, and they have not filed any criminal charges since But after the seizure warrant used in the operation was released last week, the operators of several of the sites said in interviews that they were innocent of infringement, and criticized the investigation for misrepresenting how their sites worked.