President Bush on Wednesday signed legislation aimed at helping parents keep their children from seeing sex scenes, violence and foul language in movie DVDs.
The bill gives legal protections to the fledgling filtering technology that helps parents automatically skip or mute sections of commercial movie DVDs. Bush signed it privately and without comment, White House press secretary Scott McClellan said.
The legislation came about because Hollywood studios and directors had sued to stop the manufacture and distribution of such electronic devices for DVD players. The movies' creators had argued that changing the content - even when it is considered offensive - would violate their copyrights.
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My immediate reaction to this is negative, but I'll admit I'd want to think on it some more.
Copyright doesn't seem to mean much anymore. Once you create and release something, you lose control of it, whether through iniatives like this or through file sharing.
Of course, this also means that it's legal to create filters for DVD players that show only the offensive scenes. Hmm. An "all nude scene" DVD player. I sense a market opportunity here...
Posts: 7790 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
Such a capability, to selectively watch parts of a work you possessed a legal copy of, is part of fair use anyways. This just prevents companies that make it possible from being sued into oblivion.
However, that protection does not extend to companies which directly sell modified version.
The bad thing in this bill is the criminal penalties for any unauthorized sharing of a pre-release work known to be intended for commercial distribution. Most of the rest is either explicit protections for already existing fair use rights or a minor expansion of the ability of the government and libraries to archive obscure works and works in different formats.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
Doesn't this mean that you could edit movies in other ways too. I mean where is the line drawn and how will they regulate it. What keeps me from taking clips of different movies and putting them together, adding my own clips, etc.
Posts: 832 | Registered: Jan 2005
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posted
Very little, but again, you've long been able to do all that so long as you don't distribute your work at all.
You are perfectly allowed to, for instance, turn the sound off on The Wizard of Oz and put on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, just as you always have been.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
You can do redit or do anything you want as long as it is for your private use and you are not trying to sell the new movie
Posts: 1918 | Registered: Mar 2005
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posted
As one who makes use of such technology, I am pleased by this ruling.
I personally think that copyrights are too powerful right now. If I were king, copyright would expire after something like 25 years.
Posts: 751 | Registered: Apr 2005
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posted
I don't have a problem with this, though I do think the spirit behind it is quite childish. People can consume the intellectual property that they buy however they please.
But why people would want to limit their consumption of an artist's work in this way is a mystery to me.
Posts: 4600 | Registered: Mar 2000
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posted
I like this. Movies are a group effort anyway, with hundreds of people contributing to create the final product. I see this as one more step in the process of making a movie that a consumer wants to buy.
Teshi: That is an option. This is another option. It's not effectless - since the movie needs to be bought in its original form, it communicates that it was acceptable in that form. That reinforces that kind of movie-making, even if the unwanted scenes are later cut out. Avoiding the movie altogether doesn't reinforce that kind of movie-making and so maybe the movies would be cleaner the first time around, so there is a tradeoff.
posted
I suspect that the combination of the right to privacy and the extensive fair use rights conferred when there's no distribution whatsoever would make almost any home-made derivative work completely protected by the courts. Especially considering even in many minor civil cases the courts have far preferred it when the copyright holder has restrained himself to asking the infringer to remove the works and promise not to do it again.
Not to not mention in the same way Dagonee didn't that any attempt to enforce copyright on derivative works purely for private enjoyment is pretty much impossible and would likely infringe on some other right were someone to try it.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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quote:I suspect that the combination of the right to privacy and the extensive fair use rights conferred when there's no distribution whatsoever would make almost any home-made derivative work completely protected by the courts.
Law school has ruined my ability to say such things, even when I think they're probably true.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote:If I were king, copyright would expire after something like 25 years.
If you were king, you'd have all of the Berne Convention nations putting all kinds of economic pressure on you to put it back to the way it is now. Unless, of course, you mean that you were king of the world.
Posts: 4534 | Registered: Jan 2003
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posted
Heheheheh. This is one of the reasons I'm going to do my doctorate instead of law school, Dag .
And I could live with a longer copyright than 25 years . . . but not the current eternity we seem to be moving towards. As far as I'm concerned, life of the copyright holder or 50 years for non-human (that is, corporate and the like) copyright holders would be good.
Actually, what I'd love even more is a copyright that expired without a renewal fee ever decade or so, a small fee that went up with each renewal (say, $10 the first renewal, $100 the second, $1000 the third, $10000 the fourth, and $100000 the fifth, with that being the maximum number of renewals), with the high later fees almost completely subsidizing the cost of initial application (make it like $100).
20 or 30 year copyrights would be very cheap for anything worth keeping around, even 40 year copyrights ($1000 isn't much for a product that's still making money), but 50 and 60 year copyrights would start making it expensive for companies to maintain large, lengthy copyright portfolios.
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