When a parent goes out to get a DVD marked "Parental Guidance" for their children to watch, they would need to watch the disc first to know which scenes to skip for their children. An alternative has been to get either pre-edited DVDs or a DVD player that has built in filtering, however up until now the studios claim their copyrights were being violated by due to their work being edited without authorisation and resold for profit.
Just recently, a new bill called the Family Movie Act has been approved by the House of Congress, which is expected to be signed by the President soon. This bill makes it legal to alter a motion picture to edit out content that may not suit minors. However, this bill does not allow one to sell an edited version of a movie, such as what CleanFilms and Family Mix are doing. While these two companies buy in an original film for every edited version they sell, they are still selling an unofficial version not approved by the studios. Hollywood is looking forward to this bill as it also allows for harsher penalties for bootleggers, which includes file sharing.
The company ClearPlay apparently will be covered by this new legislation. Rather than sell edited discs, ClearPlay's solution is to offer filter templates that allows a ClearPlay compatible DVD player to filter out content based on the template and the options the customer chooses to filter out. As they are only selling a template and not an unauthorised copy, this bill effectively protects them from copyright liability.
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Overall, the bill is a big win for Hollywood, with significantly harsher penalties for common bootleggers. But the 'family movie' provision, championed by US Representative Lamar Smith (Republican, Texas), Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee's Internet and Intellectual Property Subcommittee, indemnifies any company that makes prudish versions of movies available without authorization. File sharing will remain a crime, but so long as all the good parts have been purged, a sort of Puritanical bootlegging will be tolerated, if not encouraged. The bill does not address companies such as CleanFilms, Family Flix, and others, that produce sanitized versions of movie DVDs. These outfits claim that they do not violate copyrights because they buy a copy of the original each time they create a bowdlerized version. These claims amount to no harm no foul: the studios are selling just as many copies as they otherwise would, and perhaps more when one considers the number of people who would not buy the original versions. Read the full article here. |
To the movie studios, it seems like when they release a DVD, the customer must watch the entire movie from start to finish. It was not long ago that the MPAA tried getting a bill through that would criminalise commercial fast forwarding on DVDs. In this case, the studios should be happy that parents would be willing to purchase movies knowing that they can filter out unwanted content. This means more sales, since parents would purchase DVDs that they would otherwise avoid or only watch for themselves.
Feel free to discuss about ClearPlay compatible DVD players on our Stand Alone Devices & Home Entertainment Forum.
Source: The Register - Internet and Law
