Chris Dodd (previously) was once a Democratic senator who decried politicians who became lobbyists; then he became one of the highest-paid and least competent lobbyists in DC, taking the helm of the Motion Picture Association on America and leading the organization to failure, catastrophe and irrelevance.
From his personal bungling of SOPA to his seeming indifference to the Sony hack, Dodd scored own-goal after own-goal as he cashed his annual $3m+ paycheck from the lobby group.
Mike Masnick has a good postmortem on Dodd's catastrophic career as a lobbyist, though Masnick fails to note that at the very least, Dodd managed to vindicate his earlier position that politicians shouldn't lobby after their public service!
Dodd is being replaced by Charles Rivkin, who is apparently a smarter operator than the former senator.
Other "highlights" from the Chris Dodd era include near complete silence after the Sony hack, a leaked plan on how the MPAA would help pay for lawyers to do the legwork for elected officials to attack Google, and even leading the movie studios to begin to question why they send many millions of dollars to the MPAA each year for very little return.
With that as backdrop, it's been announced that Dodd is stepping down from the MPAA and will be replaced by Charles Rivkin, who has worked in both government and in the entertainment industry. Dodd's contract ran through 2018, and news reports say he'll "transition" out of his role between now and September of this year. Hopefully Rivkin will be more forward-looking, and will recognize that (1) the public and (2) the internet are not enemies of the movie industry. That would go a long way towards improving the MPAA's approach to things, but we'll see.
Chris Dodd 'Stepping Down' From MPAA
[Mike Masnick/Techdirt]
(Image: Embajada de EEUU, Buenos Aires, CC-BY)
