{mosads}

MPAA senior executive vice president for global policy and external affairs Michael O’Leary said there is no shortage of critics of any effort, regardless of how narrow or reasonable, to enforce U.S. intellectual property laws online.

He said those argument are typically “couched in overstatement and hyperbole” such as current claims the two bills mentioned would end the Internet as it currently exists.

“That argument has been thrown against the wall so many times and been proven wrong each time,” O’Leary said. “These folks have been wrong before, been wrong every time….and they’re wrong again in the context of the rogue sites bill.”

Shapiro said lawmakers on the House and Senate Judiciary Committees rely heavily on contributions from the content industries and argued copyright laws reflect the influence of their lobbyists on an upcoming episode of C-SPAN’s The Communicators.

O’Leary also decried what he called the false tension between content and technology, noting the inordinate amount of technological innovation that goes into making and delivering motion pictures. He said the furor over the copyright bills warrant greater attention from the public.

“This is just starting to feel so inside the beltway that we think it’s something people should take a look at,” O’Leary said.