Posted on 11/15/2010 8:11:19 PM PST by DemforBush
Hollywood is once again going to battle with the puritans.
A coalition of major studios including Paramount, Warner Bros., MGM, Disney, Universal and Fox has filed a lawsuit against a defendant who has taken movies, altered them to be free of objectionable content, and is distributing them to consumers as "family-friendly."
(Excerpt) Read more at blog.movies.yahoo.com ...
Nope. The First Sale doctrine allows you to transfer the copy without restriction. You can watch it, you can rent it, you can sell it, and you can give it away. In that sense, it is yours to dispose of as you see fit.
But that's not what is happening here. If you buy a work, it's not yours to copy. Here, the company has (presumably) copied the work twice: once to the computer, where it is edited, and then once to the DVD-R, where the copy is then sold to the consumer. Each instance of reproduction is a separate violation of the law.
This is why your book analogy is faulty. Once you own a copy of a book, you can certainly mark up the pages and give it away. No problem. But you can't copy the book, mark up the pages on the copy, and then sell it.
Those rights include making unauthorized copies and/or derivatives.
Changing the content is both creating a derivative and making a copy NOT authorized by the copyright owner.
On software license agreements, it is explicitly stated, and an acknowledged agreement required to proceed; on DVDs it is only the copyright notice that is there, but ALL of the copyright law provisions are thereby invoked.
Please— that is ridiculous. By that definition, a Netflix video is being copied multiple times, if only from the DVD player’s hard drive and into the cache/buffer.
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