Ted Johnson moderates discussion on property rights. (Photo by Gracie Zheng)

A panel of six participants from the Caucus for Producers, Writers & Directors held a discussion at the Beverly Hills Hotel Tuesday morning about the blackout of online piracy bills, SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act), and what it means to the creative community, calling for further legislation to protect property rights of content creators. 

"What these acts are trying to do is to hurt the heart of the Internet which is going to cause censorship," said Kent Raygor from Sheppard Mullin. 

He also said the two proposed bills have "some lack of clarity in the language," and helped Google and others to "frame the debate in emotional terms." He called for the industry and the Silicon Valley to work together in the coming months during the election year to create a more targeted and clearer message. 

Talking about the property rights protection, Melinda Demsky, senior vice president of content protection of FOX, mentioned two of China's largest websites, Youku and Tudou, similar to Youtube.

"Even though they're in Chinese, a lot of pirate websites or individuals around the world would store stuff there, and then they would name it something difficult to find. They link to it somewhere else," she said. "It was very difficult for us to locate it and find it."

"I think part of the problem is thieves steal from thieves. Pirates pirate from pirates," said Michael Robinson from the Motion Picture Association of America. 

"You may have an individual in Russia who goes into a theatre in Russia, records a movie off the screen because it was open on the first day in the U.S. to capture the audio and sync that up with the audio. Once it's up on the Internet, everyone is downloading that and re-uploading that because all these people that are engaged behind these activities….pay up-loaders for that content. They pay you based upon the number of downloads or views your content has had," Robinson said. 

Some questions from the audience:

Q: Years ago at Entertainment Tonight, we even had to train our own staff to recognize that just because something was black and white doesn't mean it's public domain. New people came and thought if it was black and white, it's old so they can use it. While today it seems because it's just been made, it's public domain and it gets out there. Is this movement toward that, the lack of education and extensive use of piracy across the world, is it going to change the definition of public domain? If that happens, what next?

A: I don't think it legally can change the definition of public domain, meaning that it's falling out of copyright protection. But as a practical matter, people think if it's on the Internet, I can use it. You do see that as a practical mindset. We're seeing some exceptions. There is a process- the Copyright Office every few years considers: "Should there be exceptions to the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act)?" The DMCA protects copyrighted content like the encryptions we put on DVDs. So under what circumstances do people break those? You see over the years the Copyright Office agreeing to more and more exceptions because users want to take parts of it, put them up on Youtube and create their own things. The problem with that is once you allow products out there to crack encryption, people are going to crack encryption for as many as they want. (Melina Demsky, FOX)

Q: Is there any reason we can't initiate a tax structure, a royalty revenue generator, so that everybody who has access to the Internet pays a few cents of tax per month on top of their distribution fee? 

A: It's a novel idea. In the music industry, ISCAP and BMI for years has worked that way, but that's with radio stations and television stations paying a fee and that money gets divided up. I think it would be very hard to get every person in America to pay tax for the Internet. (Jim Gladstone, Lionsgate)