Are you a college-affiliated academic who could use an extra $20,000? Do you have strong feelings in favor of copyright protections? Then the Motion Picture Association of America has a deal for you!

The folks at TorrentFreak point out that the MPAA has been quietly running a research grant program that pays up to $20,000 for research into “increasing public understanding of digital technology, marketplace, and intellectual property policy issues that affect creators and distributors in the United States and around the world.”

Ostensibly, that’s a good thing. Consumers and businesses should all be having an informed discussion on the evolving impact of copyright and intellectual property in the digital age. It’s a complicated and sometimes counterintuitive issue that has implications for everything from international trade agreements to some stupid free video game your 4-year-old plays on your old iPod Touch.

And former U.S. Senator-turned-MPAA CEO Chris Dodd himself has called on the academic community to “provide unbiased observations, data analysis, historical context and important revelations about how these changes are impacting the film industry.”

But it’s what is going unsaid publicly by the MPAA that is cause for concern. A recently leaked e-mail from the top MPAA lawyer to executives at Paramount, NBC Universal, Sony, Disney, Warner Bros, and FOX reveals something the MPAA doesn’t put in its website for the research grant program.

The MPAA General Counsel writes that the goal of the grant program is twofold: “to solicit pro-copyright academic research papers and to identify pro-copyright scholars who we can cultivate for further public advocacy.”

First, this statement seems to be counter to Dodd’s belief in unbiased research by referring to the solicited works as “pro-copyright.” That would seem to imply that any research that calls into question the MPAA’s stance on these issues would not be accepted.

Beyond that, the MPAA isn’t just looking for research that it can use to bolster its case for stronger anti-piracy laws and stricter rules on consumers’ use of their products. It’s also aiming to develop a stable of go-to talking heads and researchers for the long term.

And, as TorrentFreak notes, that appears to be where the real MPAA money is for academics, pointing to the more than one million dollars that the MPAA has provided for the Carnegie Mellon project on piracy. CMU research has resulted in multiple papers that the MPAA now uses to support its position on the topic.

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