Regarding the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Mr. Reihan Salam writes:

One gets the impression that a lucrative, politically influential industry is trying to get taxpayers to rescue it from its own incompetence and failure to offer compelling content in accessible formats. The case for bailing out Hollywood seems no more compelling to me than the case for bailing out the automotive or financial services industries.

Mr. Salam doesn’t seem to take any notice of real people in real jobs doing real work, only to see the fruits of their labor taken without compensation. Who in Hollywood is asking for a bailout? SOPA seems to be dead — but something needs to be done to address the problem of online piracy.

As someone who has spent 40 years in the motion-picture business, I can attest to the fierce competition, hard work, and entrepreneurial spirit of the American filmmaking community. Mr. Salam sees only the major motion-picture studios. I see fellow citizens, craftspeople, artists, technicians, accountants, marketing experts, distribution executives, public-relations people, entertainment lawyers, development executives, actors, writers, directors, agents, managers, and many more people I know as colleagues and friends.

There are two issues at stake — jobs and expression. Internet piracy threatens our livelihood and silences our voices.

First, jobs:

The entertainment business comprises tens of thousands of individual start-ups and the equivalent of mom-and-pop businesses: students writing screenplays, young filmmakers producing movies on their credit cards, entrepreneurs raising capital from friends, private equity backing filmmakers or slates of films, singer-songwriters working as waiters or cab drivers to pay for their recordings — the list goes on.

We rarely hear of the failures or the money lost. Occasionally we hear about the success stories. The American entertainment business is American capitalism in action — vital, dynamic, enterprising, creative, adventurous and altogether wildly successful. It’s still American movies and American music that make the world sing, laugh, dance, and cry.

If revenues aren’t returned to the producing companies (large, small, or in between), these companies cannot invest in new projects. The entertainment industry will contract; one of America’s leading exports will shrink; skilled jobs will be lost; the American dominance in global entertainment will be needlessly squandered.

Allowing Internet pirates an open field is tantamount to an attack on working professionals in the entertainment industry. It is a massive job-killer.

Glossy magazines and glitzy cable-TV shows show us images of pampered, spoiled, semi-literate movie stars barely out of their teens mouthing the most inane statements. In the real world, you can count such people on little more than the fingers on both hands. The overwhelming majority of those employed in the entertainment industry are entirely grounded, highly skilled, middle-class workers, already in a tough, competitive business with extended spells of unemployment. These people absolutely depend on their paychecks, residuals, and in some cases profit participation. If revenues cannot be collected because of piracy, these average citizens simply cannot survive. It is unfair, unjust, and counterproductive in both the short and long run.

Here’s how Hollywood actually works. The major companies collect the revenues, which are then distributed by contract to the working professionals, creative artists, and the risk-taking entrepreneurs who originally invested in the music, the film, or the TV show. If consumers download the content illegally instead of paying for it, the big entertainment companies cited by Mr. Salam will get squeezed but will survive. The real casualties are the small, independent companies and individual artists, who don’t have the financial reserves to survive these attacks.

Creative workers in the entertainment industry gained residuals and profit participation after decades of hard-fought collective bargaining by the Screen Actors Guild, the Directors Guild of America, and the Writers Guild of America. Are these decades of economic achievements to be undermined and devalued by anonymous Internet thieves? Next time you get to those seemingly interminable credits at the end of the movie, instead of leaving the theater or switching the channel, keep watching — carefully. Those are real people doing the kind of work that requires years of training and apprenticeship. They are your neighbors, your family, your friends.

Many of the movies I’ve written or directed over a lifetime are being given away free, or sold in pirated versions, on the Internet, and there’s nothing I can do about it. These movies were made by investors and professionals who are entitled to the rewards of their risks and labors. And not only are these off-shore thieves stealing my hard-earned income, my films (and most others) have been arbitrarily cut, the soundtracks altered, the color distorted and generally messed with in more ways than I can count.

Second, expression:

If screenwriters and filmmakers are bankrupted, in effect they are silenced, their voices lost to their contemporaries and to their posterity. Piracy is not even limited to shutting down one voice. It has the potential of shutting down many voices, indeed an entire industry. Piracy is such an appropriate term, because in effect what these pirates are doing is sinking enterprises and drowning voices.

The First Amendment is there to protect the individual from the encroachments of the state: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.” So, my argument does not invoke the First Amendment. But in a broader sense, piracy is a freedom-of-speech issue if foreign predators are successful in achieving the same pernicious result of what the government is constrained from doing.

Those arrayed against the anti-piracy bill like to present it as a battle between the big motion-picture studios and the little Internet entrepreneur or startup company. This is a fraud. This is a David-and-Goliath contest, but not in the way it’s been portrayed. On one side sit the multinational, multi-billion-dollar Silicon Valley companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter, which profit from users who illegally share content, and on the other the tens of thousands of filmmakers, writers, directors, actors, and workers in the entertainment industry.

Let’s be clear. No one in the entertainment business is opposed to the Internet. On the contrary, we celebrate the innovation, the global access, the free flow of information, and the proliferation of new business models that the Internet has created. We are, however, opposed to outlaws and highwaymen who roam its realm to pillage and plunder its lawful inhabitants, pilfer their possessions, skim their income, and encroach on their private property.

Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute makes this ridiculous “rough analogy”: “Since antipiracy crusaders are fond of equating filesharing with shoplifting: suppose the CEO of Wal-Mart came to Congress demanding a $50 million program to deploy FBI agents to frisk suspicious-looking teens in towns near Wal-Marts.”

It’s ridiculous precisely because we do have laws against shoplifting and ways to deter, catch, prosecute, and convict shoplifters. Because the Internet isn’t made of bricks and mortar, with security guards, scanners, and security cameras in a fixed location, the challenge is to implement comparable systems to protect intellectual property in cyberspace. Can’t this be achieved by a government responsible for protecting its citizens’ property rights and preserving the rule of law?

Simply put, this is a battle between expression and its abridgement, between the artist and the thief. Given that the SOPA debate will continue with the new focus on the alternative OPEN Act, Congress and our president must soon decide which side they’re on.

— Ron Maxwell is writer-director of numerous motion pictures including Gettysburg, and a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.