SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA—MPAA CEO Chris Dodd didn't seem eager to talk about the aftermath of SOPA when he spoke at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club on Tuesday night. The former Connecticut senator would have preferred to wax poetic about innovation, California, and the collaboration between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. "Every studio I deal with has a distribution agreement with Google," said Dodd. "We've divided up this discussion in a way that doesn't really get us moving along as a people."

He couldn't ignore it for long. Gavin Newsom brought it up only briefly, but reporters approached Dodd after the event to get more details on how he viewed the SOPA aftermath, as well as the MPAA's Internet lobbying more generally. SOPA and its sister bill PIPA were both definitively killed off earlier this year after an overwhelming campaign of online action by citizens and tech companies.

Dodd sounded chastened, with a tone that was a far cry from the rhetoric the MPAA was putting out in January. "When SOPA-PIPA blew up, it was a transformative event," said Dodd. "There were eight million e-mails [to elected representatives] in two days." That caused senators to run away from the legislation. "People were dropping their names as co-sponsors within minutes, not hours," he said.

"These bills are dead, they're not coming back," said Dodd. "And they shouldn't." He said the MPAA isn't focused on getting similar legislation passed in the future, at the moment. "I think we're better served by sitting down [with the tech sector and SOPA opponents] and seeing what we agree on."

Still, Dodd did say that some of the reaction to SOPA and PIPA was "over the top"—specifically, the allegations of censorship, implied by the black bar over Google search logo or the complete shutdown of Wikipedia. "DNS filtering goes on every day on the Internet," said Dodd. "Obviously it needs to be done very carefully. But five million pages were taken off Google last year [for IP violations]. To Google's great credit, it recently changed its algorithm to a point where, when there are enough complaints about a site, it moves that site down on their page—which I applaud."

Dodd also continued to laud the "six strikes" plan that US Internet providers have agreed to enforce on behalf of the entertainment industry, insisting that it's an "educational" program aimed at illegal downloads. "If people are aware they're downloading illegal content, they'll go to a legal service," he said. "It's an experiment to see if we can get cooperation. It's not a law—you don't go to jail."

The MPAA won't have any kind of back-door to subscriber records at Verizon or other ISPs, Dodd said.

After the event, an EFF attorney in the audience asked, "Why wasn't that spirit of cooperation in the room when SOPA was drafted?"

"I don't know," answered Dodd. "There was no widespread conversation." Dodd seemed to think SOPA just wasn't seen as particularly controversial when it was first introduced, with nearly half the Senate listed as co-sponsors. "Going after foreign, rogue sites was not seen as an illegitimate idea," he noted. The bill may have been seen as an easy vote, until stiff resistance was seen in January.