Indie filmmakers say the MPAA is nothing more than a censorship group

Yesterday I told you about the post by Peter Sunde over at TorrentFreak that basically suggested that the entertainment industry was nothing more than a Mafia with the intent to manipulate court cases in order to put the telco on the defensive so that they could go after them for “protection money”.

Now today we have this little gem from indie filmmaker Helen Ferreira who says that entertainment industry lobbying and trade organizations like the MPAA or the RIAA are just some industry flunkies more interested in censorship than with actually protecting and standing up for the content creator.

The post, which is over on TorrentFreak, says that while she isn’t alone in her opinion Helen is one of the most vocal opponents of the very trade organizations that say they are there to protect her interests.

According to her, pirates are not the threat – it’s the MPAA that’s killing creative filmmaking through its censorship regime.

“What I see when I examine the MPAA is not a friendly guardian of feature film directors’ rights, even at the studio level. Instead, I see a very large lobby that began as a Christian right-wing organization instituted to keep minorities off motion picture screens, promote racism and homophobia, and restrict creative freedom in America,” she writes.

To back up her assertion Helen provides a few of the more trivial censorship rules imposed on them by the MPAA

• The Motion Picture Association of America has never written me a paycheck for anything. They’re not backing my picture. These are not nice guys. They are not in this business to help filmmakers at all.
• They’re censors waiting to pounce my film and yours with an NC-17 rating for violence or for showing two consenting adults laughing while enjoying sex (rape however is okay), while curiously no one censors the news media for showing [..] eight-year-olds Paris Hilton’s latest upskirt with very little pixellated out
• Isn’t that pauseworthy? If there’s no censors for the news, why for dramatic movies and television?

As far as Ferreira is concerned she’ll take the pirates over the MPAA anyday and thank them while saying “I hope you enjoyed it.”