Bush signs bill to let parents strip offensive scenes from films

AP ^ | 4/27/5

[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.

[Modernman]

This is no different than my buying a brand new car, and taking it to a customizer to alter it.

Actually, this technology doesn't even go that far. It skips past objectionable material based on information downloaded into the DVD player but it doesn't actually edit the DVD. If you take the DVD out and play it on a normal player, the movie you would see is the unchanged version.

This is really no different than fast-forwarding through a scene using your remote.

[BykrBayb]

Don't tell anybody, but I have a copy of that. I had to have shipped from some place in Europe.

[BykrBayb]

GM does not get upset when I customize a car or pay someone else to customize a car.

Actually they do. They really hate those after-market auto parts stores.

[jess35]

Whatever happened to parents screening a movie before allowing their children to watch it?

[billbears]

Whatever happened to parents screening a movie before allowing their children to watch it?

Well see that's the conservative thing to do.

Now the Republican thing to do is to get Congress to pass a bill to protect one company and a fledgling industry from simple lawsuits over making an idiot box (and anyone that buys one of these things IMO is an idiot) that allows a child to watch an edited movie. An edited movie that if the parent was doing their job, the child wouldn't be watching the movie, edited or not, in the first place