When your job is to fix something, you often have the dichotomy of ideals in your head. You want to fix the problems that occur, but if you do such a good job that it will make your job useless, then why would you continue to be paid to do it? That's the position pro-copyright lobby groups like the MPAA suffer from, but its recent spate of ineffective blocks are keeping it busy enough that the movie studios that fund it have given it a near 50 per cent increase in budget over the past two years alone.

In a new tax filing with the IRS (revealed over at TorrentFreak), the MPAA's funding has gone from $41.5 (£26) million to $59.7 (£37) million from movie studios alone. This is despite the fact that last year it cut almost 20 per cent of its staff.

But where does all that money go?

Almost five million of it is allocated for the organisation's top few executives, including its current CEO, Chris Dodd, who takes in $3.3 million by himself. Another large body of funding goes into legal fees, which totalled more than $10 million. Lobbying fees were also substantial, with just under $5 million spent. Presumably a portion of that helped FACT (the UK arm of the MPAA) secure its recent extra blocks in the UK's high court

Despite all these increases in funding though, it pales in comparison to what the lobby group was being paid back in 2007: $84.7 million.

KitGuru Says: What's going to be interesting is whether the funding continues to head towards previous levels, or if it levels off a bit. Netflix and Spotify are knocking a big whole in piracy, which makes me think that the MPAA will become (even more) irrelevant over the next few years. 

What do you guys think?

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