Posted on 04/27/2005 10:22:11 AM PDT by SmithL
WASHINGTON - 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.
The legislation, called the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, creates an exemption in copyright laws to make sure companies selling filtering technology won't get sued out of existence.
Critics of the bill have argued it was aimed at helping one company, Utah-based ClearPlay Inc., whose technology is used in some DVD players. ClearPlay sells filters for hundreds of movies that can be added to such DVD players for $4.95 each month. Hollywood executives maintain that ClearPlay should pay them licensing fees for altering their creative efforts.
Unlike ClearPlay, some other companies produce edited DVD copies of popular movies and sell them directly to consumers.
In a nod to the studios, the legislation contains crackdowns on copyright infringement by explicitly providing no legal protections for those companies that sell copies of the edited movies, creating new penalties for criminals who use small videocameras to record copies of first-run films in movie theaters, and setting tough penalties for anyone caught distributing a movie or song prior to its commercial release.
The legislation also reauthorizes a Library of Congress program dedicated to saving rare, culturally significant works, such as home movies, silent-era films and other works that are unlikely to be protected by the big studios.
This is great news!
Thanks for posting this. I love this President. What a great day for families all across America. I don't even have kids, yet, but now I will be able to sit down with good friends and watch a movie without being embarrassed!!
Any word on how long before we can filter offensive actors instead of just scenes?
I bet airlines will love this technology. They'll be able to offer only the cleaned up version of the movie on inflight entertainment systems without having to get custom edited versions.
Excellent!
Nowadays you only need a limited vocabulary to be a scriptwriter. F***, S***, A**, G*******, Kn*ckers, semprini...these and a few other words will get you up and running!
/sarc
Yeah, but the headline in BS:
"Bush signs bill to let parents strip offensive scenes from films"
The scenes are not "stripped", they are AVOIDED. The media hasn't been changed and the content is still available. More "This-admistration-is-pro-censorship" spin...
THANK YOU PRESIDENT BUSH!
Now you are on to something. LOL!!
The public will snatch up these devices.
I can't wait to put in a michael moore film and watch the machine start smoking, and self destruct.
I wonder if this would allow somoene to sell DVDs of the original Star Wars movies that George Lucas claims no longer exist.
Why would kids want to watch Pulp Fiction? I thought it was a film aimed at adults.
And also the super yummy five dollar milkshake. There's always room for a good milkshake!
(Now THAT is a tasty burger!)
The "creative types" are just idiots on this issue.
When a person uses the filtering service they get an UNcensored original DVD AND an edited version.
The studioes still make their money.
This is no different than the editing for broadcast TV only without the creeping deviance.
What are the studios afraid of? That they will not make money? no because each DVD is paid for. The issue is their indoctrination efforts.
It is pure elitism. View this movie and think what I tell you. Imagine technology that advances so much that whole characters can be edited seamlessly.
If I buy a book, am I legally entitled to skip certain pages?
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