Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton has gone and mildly stepped in it, confirming corporate bias and general cluelessness by saying, at a breakfast panel yesterday co-hosted by the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and The New Yorker, “I’m a guy who doesn’t who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet, period.”

Well, of course not. Is there a studio executive who isn’t, at core, a status quo guy or gal? To a degree, this is why studios can drive such an unreasonable bargain with respect to online residual payments to artists. It’s not because they’re negotiating from a position of ultimate strength, as some think; it’s because, pushing on 15 years into the Internet Age, they’re still uncertain — scared shitless, really — of new business models, and would rather just put their fingers in their ears and make noises instead of making choices and infrastructure improvements that move entertainment consumption options forward in a truly progressive manner. They know change lurks out there, so they’ll protect profit percentages in draconian fashion and just bide their time, maybe hoping some governmental underwriting (in the form of copyright extension and embedded anti-piracy software with federal broadband legislation) eventually kicks in.