I pray that one day soon we will sanitize our nation of these punk judges who are hell bent on keeping America's moral compass pointing south all the time.
Good! Films are pieces of art, and the director and producer should have the say as to whether they can be tampered with.
Unhh, no. If someone is selling edited copies of a work without permission, THEY are "rewriting the ending". I've gotta agree with this ruling.
The scrubbing caused an uproar in Hollywood, resulting in several lawsuits and countersuits.
Directors can feel vindicated by the ruling, said Michael Apted, president of the Director's Guild of America.
That's laughable. Movies on airlines and television are scrubbed in a similar fashion. The only question left unanswered is why are studios pursuing this action?
Typical AP story. There is no stating whether these movies are pirated copies or not. The Hollywood statements seem to be that they are not so then the question is was there some agreement that now is being rescinded? Were they allowed to edit some movies and presumed they could continue with subsequent releases but were not authorized?
This article is void of very basic facts which I guess means I will have to do further research to fill in the gaps.
AP blows.
The decision is correct. That said, I really enjoy watching scrubbed movies on TV. They are hilarious. The best one--in Major League when Dorn says to Wild Thing "Strike THIS GUY out!", with "THIS GUY" in a clearly different voice than the rest of the sentence. Cracks me up every time I hear it, and I always utter it at baseball games.
Perhaps the scrubber companies should take a hardware approach: sell a special DVD player that can apply the appropriate editing on the original disc on-the-fly.
Not good enough. They'd have to scrub every scene with Kate and/or Leonardo to make it close to palatable. In fact, everything not involving a boat or iceberg should be scrubbed.
You buy the DVD, send it to us, we make a scrubbed copy, and send back both to you. Do as you wish with the original.
Anyone here object to that?
Mark Reutter, Business & Law Editor 217-333-0568; mreutter@uiuc.edu
6/29/05
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — What Hollywood studios call censorship and copyright infringement, software companies call freedom and parental choice. Any wonder that the legal issues raised by new film software is winding up in the courts and before Congress?
The technology that has Hollywood angry allows consumers to skip over scenes and mute words of copyrighted films. The technology comes in several forms. CleanFlicks Media offers more than 700 DVD movies that are digitally edited to remove profanity, nudity, graphic violence and sexual content. CleanFlicks says it complies with copyright law by buying a copy of each video it edits. The edited videos are then rented to consumers by the Utah-based video chain.
On the other end of the software spectrum, ClearPlay licenses what it calls advanced parental control filters on DVD players. The filter skips movie frames based on a menu of options selected by the viewer, deleting scenes containing violence, sexual situations, vain references to God, ethnic slurs and other objectionable content. Unlike CleanFlicks, ClearPlay does not edit the movie; instead it sells software that controls how the movie is displayed on the home screen.
What the two companies share, however, is the contention that Hollywood studios, despite owning the copyrights to movies, “should not dictate what people watch in their own homes,” writes Carrie A. Beyer in the University of Illinois Law Review.
“The studios, on the other hand, claim that third-party editors violate their copyrights by copying or altering the content of their movies,” wrote Beyer, an editor at the law journal. The conflict between the parties is, at its essence, who controls movie content after it leaves the big screen.
Beyer pointed out that there is a long history of editing or censoring books for commercial as well as moral reasons. “Condensed books leave the major storyline intact, but remove words or descriptions that an editor deems superfluous.” Wal-Mart refuses to sell CDs that require the attachment of a parental advisory sticker. “Artists producing explicit music, therefore, must choose between creating a ‘clean’ version for Wal-Mart to sell and simply not selling the music through that particular retailer,” Beyer wrote.
In the world of home-viewed movies, the next step could be changing an image on the screen to match a user’s preference. In one display of the power of emerging technology, a company showed a revised version of the nude-sketch scene in “Titanic,” in which the actress Kate Winslet appeared, not unclothed as in the original, but clad in a computer-generated image of a corset.
Needless to say, litigation is under way. In a pre-emptive move, CleanFlicks sued Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Robert Redford and other prominent directors in Colorado federal court seeking a declaratory judgment that its activities are lawful.
The directors countersued, for what they say are violations of the federal Lanham Act (for false designation of origin) and unfair competition under California law. They have included ClearPlay and other content filterers as counterclaim defendants.
The filmmakers charge that the companies are trading on their names by wrongly circulating versions of their movies that they never approved of. Hollywood studios, meanwhile, allege that the cleaned-up movies are both “second-generation copies” with inferior technical standards and “derivative works” of copyrighted material, thus violate the trademark-dilution provisions of the Lanham Act as well as U.S. copyright laws.
Analyzing the sundry legal arguments, Beyer concluded that copyright laws are elastic and that technology will continue to alter the boundaries of copyright infringement, leaving directors and studios a step behind third-party editors with the latest digital equipment.
“By releasing their own ‘clean’ versions of the films, the studios would meet the demands of consumers while maintaining control over the copyrighted work,” Beyer wrote. “Studios could either produce an entirely separate DVD or include a ‘clean’ version on the same DVD as the original movie.”
By competing in the edited-movie market, she noted, the studios could undercut the fair-use defense of the editing companies and reassert a filmmaker’s right to protect intellectual property. Filmmakers already cut big-screen movies for television programming and for “airline movies.”
In April 2005, Congress clarified aspects of the dispute by passing the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act. The law made it a federal offense to videotape a movie in a movie theater and increased the criminal penalties for pirating material from a film, especially pre-release material.
On the other hand, Congress amended the copyright law to make it lawful for ClearPlay and other companies to distribute filters to a “household for private home viewing from an authorized copy of (a) motion picture.”
The law, however, did not address the Lanham Act arguments against ClearPlay and others for dilution of a movie product, and did not protect film “masking” that adds or substitutes material to a film rather than skips over or mutes objectionable passages.
In short, expect more litigation as well as unforeseen consequences – such as technology that takes the clothes off of actors in G-rated movies.
Beyer’s article is titled “Fighting for Control: Movie Studios and the Battle Over Third-Party Revisions.”
___________________________________________________________
I have no problem with software/hardware that allows one to choose to by-pass certain profanities, gory scenes etc. It is not physically altering the actual disc for rent - just how it is viewed.
But the one that actually makes edited copies I believe is rightfully declared illegal even they do a buy one-edit-rent-edited-copy type of gig.
Even this article presents some of the facts in a murky manner.
So, If I buy a book, edit out objectionable language, then resell the book, I'm breaking the law??? That's crazy ...
I have to side with the studios too...if these guys want to watch an edited movie then they can wait until it's shown on TV. As someone who likes to write, the idea of someone taking my work and editing it and then selling it without my permission is something that I would take great offense to. Especially if it's for somebody else's agenda, no matter how well intentioned.
I doubt this will affect Clear Play, as they simply have filters loaded onto the DVD player, and original films are edited as they play by computer.
We love our Clear Play DVD player.
Wow, a lot of people on this thread have pretty out-there views on copyright law. You can't alter someone else's creative work and sell it. I can't believe that's such a controversial proposition.
The movies on TV are sanitized all the time. WTF?
That's a very disingenuous thing to say. The choices of the third-party editor are not "arbitrary," they are specific; The audiences of the santized films know good and well what vision they are assured of receiving.
What they did was illegal. They should have helped their customers procure a new license for every copy they distributed by buying a clean copy each time they sold an edited version. Then it would have probably been legal - they would then be just providing a service for the customer who legally purchased the movie but wanted it edited for their own private purposes.