A movie that wouldn't have any sound at all if it weren't for the fowl language.
Posted on 07/10/2006 8:14:23 AM PDT by steve-b
Deleting swearing, sex and violence from films on DVD or VHS violates copyright laws, a U.S. judge has ruled in a decision that could end controversial sanitizing done for some video-rental chains, cable services and the internet.
The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit brought by 16 U.S. directors — including Steven Spielberg, Robert Redford and Martin Scorsese — against three Utah-based companies that "scrub" films.
Judge Richard P. Matsch decreed on Thursday in Denver, Colo., that sanitizing movies to delete content that may offend some people is an "illegitimate business."
The judge also praised the motives of the Hollywood studios and directors behind the suit, ordering the companies that provide the service to hand over their inventories....
(Excerpt) Read more at cbc.ca ...
It appears that this case deals with copies of the movies that have been edited and then they are selling those DVDs. I agree that this would violate the copyright holder's prerogatives.
There is a separate question (at least I think it's separate) of a computer based DVD player that recognizes an inventory of movies that are inserted and the player skips over the "offensive bits," according to a program supplied by a third party. That, to me, would not be a violation of the copyright since you are dealing with the original work but are automating a process you could achieve manually with a remote control.
It's like playing The Wizard Of Oz on the DVD but turning down the sound and queuing up the Dark Side Of The Moon CD at the right point. It would be illegal if you pressed a new DVD with the altered soundtrack, but having the two things coordinated, even if a computer program helps synch it up, should be legal. (By the way, I've done it and it is uncanny how well it fits, whichever of the two queue points you use).
If this case is about the latter situation then I disagree with the ruling.
Problem is they turn around and distribute the edited content. You can edit stuff you own all you want, but you can't turn around and sell it. Heck the redistribution alone was a copyright violation even without the editing.
What if these businesses simply rearranged the order of events thus: We don't sell the cleaned-up videos. You bring us your legal copy of a movie and we'll edit it for you, then destroy the original copy.
Does the owner of a legal copy of a movie have the right to edit their copy? If so, can they pay someone else with the necessary equipment to perform that service for them?
A few years ago, I saw one on TV and learned the word "mothergrabbers" as an expletive -- that was funny as hoot.
A movie that wouldn't have any sound at all if it weren't for the fowl language.
I hate you.
Because they are charging fees for it and therefore profit from the original work. If they did it for free then the studios would not have a case.
I agree. I think the decision was correct, legally, but if someone get get more or their product into the hands of consumers, I don't see why they are unhappy. I suppose they see their movies as art, and it's tantamount to painting clothes on a nude.
susie
The media is probably getting this wrong.
If the part was renting the DVD's without a comercial rental agreement then we never get to the editing portion of the debate.
There is also the difference between renting and buying.
If I BUY the dvd and then edit it, it is MY DVD and I have done this for my own PERSONAL use. Thus if I take MY DVD and I have a service edit out the stuff of MY DVD then I think that is fair use.
Now rentals are a different story because they are akin to a movie theater.
I think the MSM is reporting the legal issues here wrong. (as always for the incompetent legal media) Artsy fartsy is irrelevant, the issue is the money derived from edited versions and fair use doctrine.
Hopefully this will be appealed.
I saw an edited broadcast edition of Animal House once.
.....saying it was not the same is a gross understatement. It was unrecognizable.
There are properties that were made to be shown one way...lets leave it at that and if you are a prig, then avoid it.
ps. I dont even like directors cuts of my favorite movies...the excesses of some directors are sometimes worse than the deletions.
AFAIK, they had a legal copy for each and every cleaned-up copy they sold. The whole process is simply rearranging the order of events. What's the difference if the customer bought the movie at Wal-Mart then brought it to a business that edited that copy for content?
I just don't buy the whole legal reasoning of this decision. These companies have not affected the actual content of the videos distributed by the studios, but only edited individual, legal copies of the movies for some customers. It seems to be a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot-just-to-prove-a-point situation. These studios will now sell fewer copies of their movies. It's just nuts.
DVD-editing software raises ire of Hollywood, interest of courts
6/29/05
http://www.news.uiuc.edu/NEWS/05/0629software.html
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.”
yeah, just look at what they did to "blazing saddles".......
They need to pay royalties, but they should be allowed to scrub the films. If I buy a book and ask a person to black out profanity before I read it, that should be fine.
Copywrite does not protect from editing by the end user. Only royalties are protected.
Oh. Hmmm....
susie
That doesn't wash either. Wal-Mart makes a profit by selling copies of the videos. Blockbuster makes a profit by renting them. Why shouldn't these businesses profit from the service of editing individual copies for content?
It could be argued that "...in the vast majority of Hollyweird products, sex, violence, and fowl language" IS the plot, in as much as after making money for those who prostitute all decency to make them, the main objective is to mainstream their values (or lack thereof).
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