Up until now, as long as you purchased or rented a movie from a legal source such as a Video rental store, you may think you've not done anything wrong. Well if you pop that disc into your player, and grab the remote to fast-forward through the commercials you're not interested in, this upcoming bill would class you as a criminal, just like those who pirate movies.
This bill is known as the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2004 and includes other changes to copyright law that further restrict "Fair use" of copyright material as well as help target file-sharing piracy. The MPAA claim that skipping commercials costs them too much in lost revenue and want to class commercial skipping as a crime. On the other hand, the Consumer Advocacy is fighting to protect the consumer's right to not watch commercials if they do not want to.
So far, the bill has been amended to protect the ability to fast forward or bypass objectionable / violent scenes such as that to allow parents to show films to their children while being able to skip unsuitable scenes. However the bill will exclude the right to bypass commercial content. This is also likely to affect PVR's such as the ability to fast-forward through Ads in programmes recorded on a TiVo, ReplayTV or any other video recorder. GristyMcFisty used our news submit to send in the following news:
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According to NBC news the new law allows families to use new DVD technology self censor explicit scenes of sex and violence but forbids them to edit out advertisements. Consumer advocacy group, Public Knowledge is fighting the bill saying that it is ever American's right not to watch advertisements if they don't want. It claims that the movie industry is leaning on its tame senators to prevent the loss of revenue. However the Motion Picture Association has been fighting hard to prevent people using the latest DVD technology to allow users to skip the advertisements. It added that it supports other parts of the act, "particularly those provisions that will help combat the theft of motion pictures". If you can see how the two things are connected we would love to know how. More info on the Philadelphia Inquirer here. |
With the current DVD standard, it is possible to place flags that prevent skipping content such as commercials, much like how most DVD's have a flag to prevent the viewer from skipping the initial Copyright warning. However, what this bill would likely do is make it illegal to tamper with a DVD player (or PC software) to unlock the DVD playback limitations.
In my opinion, if a person is willing to go out to pay for a movie or rental, then they should be entitled to watch it in any way they like and not be forced to watch specific content. While some consumers may be happy to watch commercials on new releases, having to watch out-of-date commercials on older releases will be enough to aggravate many viewers. 🙁 This is a very bad move to put on paying customers.
The most likely thing that would happen if DVDs forced this measure is the way consumers prepare to start watching their movie. First pop in the disc, press play and then go out to the kitchen and prepare a big bowl of pop-corn. Then, hopefully by the time the viewer returns to to their living room the movie would be just starting. :p Unless another bill mandates security cameras or dial-in phone lines watching on consumer's viewing habits or police doing spot checking on homes of those who purchase movies, enforcing this bill is not going to be as easy as the MPAA think.
Source: The Inquirer
