If you’re an academic who loves conservative interpretations of copyright law, the MPAA might be willing to pay you enough to go see The Avengers about 1,500 times (not in 3D, though).



In an effort to “fill gaps in knowledge and contribute to a greater understanding of challenges facing the content industry”, the Motion Picture Association of America is available to fund academic research to the tune of $20,000 per successful proposal, according to guidelines released recently by the movie industry lobbying group.

An email from the Sony WikiLeaks hack, quoted by copyright news site TorrentFreak, had a fairly direct statement about the conference’s purpose from Sony global general counsel Steven B Fabrizio: “[T]he MPAA is launching a global research grant program both to solicit pro-copyright academic research papers and to identify pro-copyright scholars who we can cultivate for further public advocacy.”

Among the topics the group is interested in seeing academic research about: “Copyright and Economic Development”, “Growth of Creative Industries”, “Digital Content”, and “Notice and Takedown Regimes”, each of which is accompanied on the MPAA site by a short description of how the organization would prefer to see those topics attacked. They’re the same topics the MPAA solicited for the program last year.

Under “Notice and Takedown Regimes”, the MPAA said that it seeks “empirical analyses of how notice and takedown procedures operate under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the US, or comparable systems in other parts of the world, including recommendations for increased effectiveness”.

Howard Gantman, a spokesman for the MPAA, told the Guardian that while the group approves the projects, it doesn’t exert any influence over the findings of the scholars who receive its $20,000 grants. The MPAA sees itself as fighting fire with fire. “There are similar grant programs run by some of our harshest critics,” Gantman said.

Lobbying groups commissioning academic papers isn’t a new practice by any means; Google put together an entire conference at George Mason University three years ago. But it is comparatively unusual to see a public call for papers from a non-academic institution with such a large and specific sum attached to it – and with the stated promise of help publishing the papers from the organization itself.

“The MPAA Global Research IP Program will post the report on its website and make best efforts to encourage publication in a scholarly journal,” reads the site, “and distribute it both to the academic and public policy community interested in issues related to intellectual property.”

The deadline for applications is in August.