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BAD INTERNET: The panel was about the future of filmmaking, but that didn’t mean anyone had to like what they saw. “I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet,” said Sony Pictures Entertainment chief executive officer Michael Lynton. “Period.”

At a breakfast cohosted by the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and The New Yorker Thursday, Lynton wasn’t just trying for a laugh: He complained the Internet has “created this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time. It’s as if the stores on Madison Avenue were open 24 hours a day. They feel entitled. They say, ‘Give it to me now,’ and if you don’t give it to them for free, they’ll steal it.”

Co-panelist Nora Ephron, who started her career in print, said the Internet has had a greater effect on “our beloved print than it’s had on the movie business.” But, she conceded, “We’re in the last days of copyright, if you want to be grim about it….Stop it. I dare you.”

Lynton tried out another simile. Referring to the Obama administration’s goal to spread broadband access without, he said, regulating piracy, Lynton compared it with building highway systems without speed limits or driver’s licenses. “We do need rules of the road,” he said. (Lynton may not have liked Ephron’s chosen analogy for the way some people in the movie business are paid: “It’s a giant Ponzi scheme set up to compensate a few people at unbelievable rates,” she said, adding, “These people live like pashas. You cannot imagine the scale of wealth in Hollywood. People live like that here, but we live in apartments so you can’t see as much.”)

Though Anne Hathaway, also on the panel and wearing Stella McCartney, lamented the Internet “inhibits your ability to get lost,” either in a role or in watching a film, she shrugged off moderator Ken Auletta’s question about whether the blogosphere had coarsened coverage of actors like her. “It was always true,” she said. “It’s just giving everyone a bathroom wall to write exactly what they think.”

— Irin Carmon