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Directors Counter-Sue Movie Bowdlerizing Company
crazyhorse44 writes "The lesser of two evils? 'The Directors Guild of America is suing more than a dozen companies that delete scenes depicting violence, sex and profanity from Hollywood films, saying the process violates federal copyright law. The lawsuit, filed Friday in Denver, was a response to a suit filed last month by Clean Flicks of Colorado, which is part of the Utah-based rental chain Clean Flicks. The company had asked a judge to rule its practice legal, despite protests from several well-known directors, including Robert Redford and Steven Spielberg. Clean Flicks argues it doesn't violate copyright law because it purchases a new copy each time it edits a film and because customers are technically owners of the videos through a cooperative arrangement. The edited tapes also carry a disclaimer that the film was edited for content, the company says.' Whose side to take? The DGA is defending the desecration of many of our favorite films, while Clean Flicks is strongly advocating for the copyright rights of the consumer to edit and/or alter the media that they purchase. At the extreme you have folks who want to eliminate all traces of sex and violence from the popular media against the movie industry who wants to eliminate all property rights of the consumer. Whose side would you take? Links at Salon, USA Today and FindLAW." We've had previous stories here and here.
This would be a good story to base a poll on!
My vote is hung, can't decide.
Compaclft
I think, on this one, they're solidly in the right.
/market/ that... seems idiotic, to me. I'm hoping the directors win.
Sure, people have a right to not be exposed to that sort of content. They're free to find other movies to watch, ones that mesh better with their ideals. The idea that they have some sort of right to take a knife to someone else's work... and then
Now, I have no problem with people doing their own editing. The main issue, as I see it, is that all these little companies are making money off of the destruction of someone else's creative vision. And that... just sits very badly with me.
is there a sister company called Dirty Flicks, which makes films consisting solely of all the bits they cut out?
"At the extreme you have folks who want to eliminate all traces of sex and violence from the popular media against the movie industry who wants to eliminate all property rights of the consumer. Whose side would you take?"
This is an easy one, you quite clearly take the side of the consumer, even though in this case you may not agree with their use of their rights. Free speach is to be supported, even if no one person could support, say, the racist and anti-racist uses that this may be put to. So first you support the fundamental principle and then you critisise those who would use that right for what you may consider to be "the wrong ends".
Those silly americans are suing everyone for everything.. there is always only one winner in the end and that's a lawyer. He always wins.
That, or "CowboyNeal."
You know what happens when you censor a non-family friendly movie. you get a nff movie with annoying bleeps in it. you know what happens when you edit out the nff content of a nff movie. A badly editied nnf movie. Sheer Genius.
So, having items rated isn't good enough? Explicit Violence, Some Sex Slang, Full Frontal Nudity. sheez, I wouldn't have guessed anything in there would offend then moral MINORITY. Funny part is, the people who would like services like this are the people that say we are born guilty into this world.
I am the Barber of Seville.
C'mon - this is not an issue. I will happily take the side of someone arguing for end-user rights. Full stop.
Just because a company who is willing to defend this right decides to sanitize films for overprotective parents does not make them less worthy of it. Further, the fact they make those sanitized films puts me under no obligation at all to be their customer.
We should be supporting them if we agree with the goal of making copyright law more sane, and protecting the right to use products that we purchased, not questioning what they do with that right.
- - - Non Caffeine Drink or Drink Error
Unfortunately, these days I wouldn't be surprised if an infants first words were "sex" instead of "mama" or "papa". Why? Most media has gone way too overboard with sex and profanity in films. Sure, when I'm with the guys its fine but if there are little kids even around in the house, I don't want to have to censor that stuff. Before anyone goes off on me about censoring content let me just say that it is my children who I deal with and raise so I *will* censor anything even remotely obscene. Movie houses such as these allow movies to be played without the worry of junior sneaking around when watching such films at night.
Anyway, I fail to see how profanity/sex is an art form in films. Without those scenes, I don't lose any meaning to the film. If I wanted that stuff, I'd rather go get pr0n instead. Furthermore, I can still censor this stuff w/ a fast forward feature. How is hollywood gonna stop me now? Oh wait, some DVDs don't allow you to time advance!
You're either "FOR copyright facism" or "AGAINST censorship." I think I'll choose against censorship.
I think we've had more than enough puritanism. If you don't want your kids to see violence or sex, don't show them the bloody movie. Read them a book or something. Or would that be too much work for parents?
.
Clean Flicks side. They've bought the video each time and no one is forced to buy the cleaned up version are they? What's the difference between this and with people doing their own editing. They are simply providing a service.
No artist wants to see their work changed for public viewing. A true film maker ensures that every image in the piece is important. Editing the content of a film is akin to refurbishing Michaelangelo's David with a leaf covering the genitalia.
If anyone needs an example of how 'clean' editing ruins a film see both versions of Darren Aronofsky's Requiem For A Dream. The edited version lacks the emotional punch that makes the real film excellent.
Here's hoping the directors get what they're after.
Funny how in today's world a fourteen year old can go see heads exploding in slow motion, but he can't see an exposed female breast.
err.. the one with the T&A?
I've always wondered why censorship is needed if proper age limits are set. Perhaps the discussion shouldn't be whether we can see the movie without censoring or not, but if they have the proper age restrictions. I've found it strange that here in Sweden, we have the highest normal restriction at an age of 15 when we are minors until 18. Still, movies with extreme violence are shown without problems to 15 year olds. Heck, I'm sure 14 year olds can watch the movie without too much trouble as well.
When we have the "proper" age restrictions (where it's another story to decide how to set them), I definitely think we should have no censorships. I can decide what to watch and not. If I had bad experiences from an extremely violent movie, I would never think "Oh, why didn't they protect me from that scene by censoring it!?" but instead "Why did the director keep that unnecessarily violent scene".
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
On the one hand, you have the movie companies protesting at their films being hacked about in the name of "decency", and on the other you have the people who claim the right to chop rude bits out of films if they want.
Clean Flicks don't seem to expect us all to watch their films. If it was the BBFC or its American equivalent, stating that *all* prints of these films must be edited, that would be different. However, they seem quite happy to leave others alone and give customers the choice to watch an edited version.
Now, that's fair use, isn't it? It sounds like fair use to me. The company aren't passing off the films as their own, just removing bits their customers may find offensive. I'd say they had the right to do that - as long as, as they say, they have one copy of the complete film for every one copy of the edited film.
I can't see many of the films making much sense afterwards, though. You could watch "9 1/2 Weeks" in about 20 minutes...
I don't remember directors releasing movies under GPL, so why should anyone be able to tamper with their work?
I am the Barber of Seville.
Besides the legal issues when I watch a movie I would like to know if any sort of adaptation was made.
But I fear that no editor would put a "we reedited the movie because we are better than directors and censorship in deciding what you should see" sticker on it.
The studios release differing versions of movies for a number of purposes:
TV
airlines
for release in different regions
They release "unrated" versions of movies like American Pie on DVD.
Yet, somehow when consumer groups ask for versions of videos that are more "family friendly" (say, the same versions they provide for TV or airlines), the studios turn their noses up.
Finally, people get fed up with this and someone begins to profit by providing what people are asking for. The studios realize that someone else is making a profit and turn their lawyers loose.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Seems fair enough to me if scenes are cut and the tape tells you that it has been done so, it is another issue if the company places a digital beard on captian kirk for the hell of it, that is simply confusing the intellectual property of the owners. On a side note, I noticed in the awards section for /. there hasnt been an award for /. in 2 years, could it be these repeating stories?
Even if im against censor this isnt really censorship. You can choose if you want your kids to see blood squirting 3 feet or if you want them to just see a movie without gore that (mostly) hasnt any real connection to the story. I can also see a great demand for this among people from religions where nekkidness is something dirty.
Many religions and groups have stayed where we wore some 50 years ago when it comes to violence and sex. What says that we are right and they are wrong?
Just as i dont want anyone to force censor upon me i dont want anybody to be forced to watch things thy dont want to see.
HTTP/1.1 400
Sorry, I thought this was all about movies in general and not video tapes. Stupid me... >:(
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
btw, I'm almost tempted to buy Pulp Fiction from them. I think the entire movie would be about 5 minutes long -- the scene where honey bunny is talking about blueberry pankakes.
Nah, scratch that, they aren't married and are in a hotel together. OK, the boring cab scene.
"I'm American, our names don't mean bleeep"
People are in a huff about Clean Flicks because what's being edited is sex and violence, which gets one side yelling "smut!" and the other side "censorship!". But really, if it's what the viewer wants to watch, cutting the sex scenes out of doesn't seem worse than cutting Jar Jar Binks out of Star Wars 1. Best of all (but probably not feasible) would be if the edited movie was delivered as an edit list on the same media (e.g. DVD) as the unedited original, so the viewer would always be able to choose which version s/he wanted to watch. The edit list would just tell the player to automatically skip parts of the movie, if the user enables it.
If you really feel that watching a movie the way you perfer it even though it differs from the original presentation is wrong, well, listening to a CD outside of it's original presentation on the CD is wrong, too.
For all the babbling that goes on here at Slashdot about fair use, for someone to even question what ClearFlicks is doing is "right" really blows my mind (Well, it would if this weren't Slashdot).
Do I like what they're doing? No.
Do I have plans on buying movies from them? No.
Is it wrong for people to do what they want with their PROPERTY for their own private use? NO.
I'm sorry, but you can't have it both ways people - either you agree that we have our fair use rights, or we don't. So what if someone is doing something that you feel is Bad(tm) on artistic grounds? It's their choice to make - let them waste their money how they see fit, just as I should be allowed to waste mine as I see fit.
No one's forcing me to watch their bastardized verion of a movie - I see no reason someone should be forced to watch the original.
Who does it hurt if people want to purchase (rent) a mutilated copy of a movie to watch? While I think most would agree they are short-changing themselves, I hardly see how this could be hurting anyone else. A legitimate copy of the movie has been purchased, so Royalties have been paid. A disclaimer is shown so people don't blame the inevitable crappiness of the movie on the directory. Honestly, I ask, what is wrong with this?
I frankly don't see any victims(other than the suckers renting this watered-down crap). And if you do see a problem with this, What about other movie edittings (I recall a certain edit of Star Wars Episode 1 that was rather popular involving, or should I say lacking, in a certain Mr. Binks)?
Anyone remember Woody Allen's _What's Up, Tiger Lily_ film?
He took a terrible Japanese film and redubbed it with his own words to make the film considerably more enjoyable. Pretty heavy editing, that could have gotten him in some kind of trouble if Hollywood manages to succeed in their bid to keep people from editing movies.
Then there's Mystery Science Theater 3000...
And so it goes.
I wouldn't be surprised if an infants first words were "sex"
I hope you are joking because you sound really delusional. Is the act that created your child so frighteningly ugly that it would scar her forever to see it? Would she even care? Children don't have the twisted thoughts or sense of shame that so many adults seem to have. I remember seeing sex scenes in films (and accidentally seeing people having sex in real life, just covered by sheets) as a young one and was simply slightly puzzled. I was not "traumatized". No, commercials on TV for Friday the 13th the movie were the first "media" trauma for me as a child.
That's why in Britain they have their heads on straight: sex is on broadcast TV and violent scenes are controlled. I don't care if people want to play violent games or watch violent films, it is sick to advertise a movie about an axe murdering psychopath at four in the afternoon, right after I got home from elementary school.
Clean Flicks is presumably copying the original film in the course of making its edit. If they win this case, it shows that such temporary copies aren't infringement after all. That could get rid of the MAI ruling, which would in turn make a lot of awful EULA's unenforceable.
I am supporting Clean Flicks on this one.
Pornogrifiers for Evil Deeds and Violent Acts? This is the same zt, pc crap that's been peddled around school boards in the last decade. In the words of the Great George Carlin: "Life didn't come with a warranty, you are all guilty."
I am the Barber of Seville.
No, this is a clear misstatement of what's going on here. Clean Films, etc, are not removing anything from "the popular media". They're producing an alternative version of the popular media, for consumption by their customers.
In the past, the US-based religious right has launched verbal attacks on Hollywood. The response of many people to the religious right's arguments has been that if you don't like it, don't go and see it. Now, Clean Films are providing a third way: you can now see a version without the bits you don't like (a bit like the "Phantom Edit" does for Jar Jar Binks haters).
What Clean Films is doing is in fact an example of the classic liberal remedy for "bad speech": more speech. For myself, Clean Films' products, like "Christian Rock", will no doubt be aesthetically unpleasant. But I applaud their creativity in finding another way forward besides the bigoted "Clean Up Hollywood" crusades of the past.
The Director's Guild's actions here are plain and simple attempts at control, in an era when the technology has opened up new avenues for participation in popular culture. They're trying to maintain a simple "push" model of production, and a extremely simplistic and philosophically untenable notion of the director as solitary "creative genius". I REALLY hope they lose this one.
P
WTF moderated this as insightful? Funny - yes, Insightful - no way. Lay off the weed guys. Christ there are some dumbasses out there.
This discussion has nothing to do with 'artistic control'. It is about money.
The studios do not like a third party assuming any kind of editorial control over their content.
Someone has discovered a good market and is making money from it.
The studios are suing to try to regain control. As usual, Hollywood is reacting to events instead of leading them.
It is hard to sympathise with either party here: the studios are using lawyers instead of their imagination.
Clean Flicks are acting like mullahs. But no-one is being forced to chose their versions. Maybe a better comparison would be DJs who remix other's music.
The obvious solution is for the studios to give consumers the choices they want and are willing to pay for.
Knowing Hollywood, this is unlikely to happen fast.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
i agree.
and besides, the films that parents would like to be edited would end up with ~20-30mins of film after editing out all the violence and sex.
you can't really say that you've read LOTR+silmarillion if you've just browsed through some 2page long magazine article giving away some details..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
So let's get this straight: the directors want you to watch every part of the movie, just because they made it?
;-)
So when I watch pr0n I can't fast-forward the 'dialogs'?
Better start stocking up on good books...
PageTurner Reader: open-source e-reader for Android with cloudsync. http://pageturner-reader.org
What Clean Flicks are doing is really just about expanding the choices consumers have.
Directors do not really get the final say on the cut of films anyway, the studios do, thats why there are so many 'directors cut' editions released when a film becomes 'big'.
They are marketing the films in a completly upfront way and they are not selling via 'normal' outlets. People are not going to confuse these films with the 'real thing'(tm) so its a non-problem.
Whats next, fast forwarding and leaving the room being made illegal as you may not get the directors true 'vision'?
c.
I honestly hate both. They are both treating customers as clueless children, that must be beaten into submission.
Also, I am not surprised the Clean Flicks company is based in Utah.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
In practice, however, I get a sinking feeling in my belly at the idea that censored versions of "cultural works" (movies, books, whatever) will be going into wide distribution (not sure how wide, but certainly wider than it currently is should this be judged a legal practice). this uneasiness is compounded by the realization that community pressure will push people towards only renting from the "nice store" that doesn't push "dirty movies" (yes I'm caricaturing, but social pressures _do_ work this way).
I would much prefer that the original version of the movie be distributed on DVD, along with a DVD playlist that can be used to playback a "niche audience" version (similar to "play widescreen/fullscreen").
I see this as actually being a significant enough market that some sort of modified DVD player that accepts a separate CD (containing one or many "alternate cut" playlists for a film) could be a strong seller, with several bonuses:
As far as this case goes (IANAL etc. etc.), I see the achilles heel as being the cooperative ownership aspect. That seems to fall right in the zone of judicial judgment (please correct me if I'm off), and the entertainment industry has all those scary lawyers who know exactly which judges to push the case in front of, not to mention plenty of other dirty tricks.
(In short, both sides suck, and everyone should listen to me.)
The slashdot blurb is misleading - the DGA represents the directors, not the corporations - hence the crap about robbing consumers of their rights by pushing DRM is complete hogwash. What we have here is a bunch of people who want to watch the latest movies, but who are unwilling to watch the whole thing (due to hang-ups about sex, violence, etc.) They want to live nice "clean" lives, and don't want to see the movie as the director intended.
:P
Lacking the know-how to do it themselves, they happily employ the services of this company, which has made big inroads among certain communities, and is making this business of chopping films for consumption very profitable. It's getting to the point where the movies the directors make are not getting to the end audience they way they intended.
Traditionally, the way the directors handled these cases was pretty much - tough, that's my film, if you don't like some of the material, you're welcome not to watch. It was up to the individual. Here, you have what arguably is a distributor (the "co-ownership" agreement aside, which I would argue is purely a legal device), dictating what the audience sees.
"So what?", you say? "The audience wants them to edit the films for them!" Well, there are several different takes on this issue, so let me re-frame the situation. People want web-filters to block "unsuitable" sites as well. Does that mean we should support web-blocking, since the blocking only happens by request of the end-user? Perhaps.
What about a bookstore with "sanitized" versions of popular works? Would you support that, even though it violates the writer's moral rights (after all, you have changed their work WITHOUT their permission.) Some of you would probably find that distasteful, or even disingenuous.
Personally, I find the practice disturbing. It's bad enough people choose to ignore history and reality, without enabling a practice that effectively filters out ideas and images, on popular media. What's next? Editing out minority populations (language and violent situations are already a casualty on movies and cartoons screened on network and even cable TV), replacing dialogue, or even characters?
Yes, much of this already happens with the blessing of the media companies (partially because they want to cater to this restrictive audience.) The directors gripe and grumble, but in the end, they can try and deliver DVDs and Videos that capture the vision of what they wanted to deliver. This service takes that control away, and puts it in the hands of a third party censor, who then effectively controls the vision of what is seen by this particular population.
In the end though, I guess what really bothers me is the attitude that these people have. It's the kind of attitude, I want to consume all I want, but I don't want to deal with the consequences of my consumption. Or, to rephrase it for these folks, they hate Hollywood and everything that it stands for, but they want to be entertained anyways. Arguably a good business opportunity, but not one that I would personally support.
I don't mean to sound like a troll, but I h-a-t-e Utah. Visiting Utah is like visiting a state governed by the senior management of Walmart Inc. It's a big Wonder Bread eating, media censoring, money hungry slab of land that has produced one too many Osmond kids.
I hope those directors win. I don't care how crappy or violent modern movies are... film is an art, and censoring art is ridiculous. People need to learn how to interpret art properly. Moreover, people need to teach their kids how to interpret art properly.
Let me put it this way. Pulp Fiction needs Sam Jackson saying "freak'n" and "heck" no more then the statute of David needs a pair of boxer briefs.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Anything that would make it legal to edit away Jar-Jar would be welcome... Or?
Ok, let's turn the whole thing upside down/ around then... ;^)
:) films and inserts more smutty & violent & offensive scenes.
:)
(*Sometimes* this can give you a better view of the problem/situation
Let's say there _is_ a video rental company called
eh...'Dirty Flicks',
which buys (crappy
(Hmm...that might actually work - quick! patent it!
Obviously the directors would sue the company and
the company would sue the director...for exactly the same reasons...
NOW which side do you take?
"By next week Friday...I could have my own Pr0n video empire!"
Note: I haven't seen a cleanflicks film but have heard about them from others who have. Please read the following accordingly.
Clean Flicks takes a video owned by their customer, cuts a few specific chunks out of it, splices it back together (minus the chunks) and gives it back to the customer.
There has been no duplication of the video. In fact, the video has been legally purchased from a legal source. The only modification was the removal of the material, and perhaps a sticker stuck on the front of the tape to say "hey this isn't the full version, we've removed some stuff from it".
I can understand why a director might not like people messing with the content of their movies. What I don't understand is what leg the copyright holders think they have to stand on. If I buy a video and decide to cut chunks out of it before I watch it what business is it of the directors? Similarly, if I want to pay someone else to cut chunks out of it, again, what business is it of the directors?
I could possibly understand the complaint if CleanFlicks were marketing these as the uncut, unedited versions, but they aren't. In fact, they are being very up front about what they are doing. The cutting service is what they are in fact selling, not the videos themselves.
Personally, I think the studios/directors/etc. have brought this on themselves. Back when DVD's first were coming out, part of the selling points was that movie studios could release multiple copies of a movie on a DVD, say a edited-for-tv version and a regular version.
Where are the edited-for-tv versions? There are a LOT of movies I would buy if I could purchase a copy on DVD which was somewhat cleaned up. I'm sorry, I just don't need to see or hear some of the images and/or language which hollywood seems to feel they need to put in movies (I get enough of that reading slashdot).
Technically, providing a cleaned up version alongside the full version on a DVD shouldn't be a big issue. Putting a edited-for-tv soundtrack on a disk as an additional language track alongside the commentaries and the half-dozen languages wouldn't be a big thing space-wise. Likewise, I suspect that setting up some sort of automatic "play only these scenes" when in "edited" mode should be doable, although I'm not a DVD mastering expert.
Note that I'm not trying to say that noone should watch these things. What I am saying is that I would like to have a choice over whether I watch a complete, unedited version, or say a complete version but without every other word being something you wouldn't say in mixed company, or even a "hacked up for TV" version that I might dare recommend a family watch with their kids.
The only two options the studios have provided for me today is to watch the movie or to not watch the movie. Cleanflicks is trying to provide a third option for those who want it. If the studios would have provided this option via DVD or some other technology, CleanFlicks probably wouldn't even exist.
I also would submit that a lot of the people that buy movies from CleanFlicks probably wouldn't buy the same movies if they weren't edited for content. As a result, I suspect that CleanFlicks is probably *improving* the bottom line cash-wise for the directors and for the studios. How can this be a bad thing?
Whose side? I'd take the side of Clean Flicks any day, and not necessarily because I advocate censorship. If Clean Flicks offer an alternative 'version' of the film, then I have the choice of which to purchase (or hire?). If I prefer not to see certain content, then I may choose to purchase it from Clean Flicks, or I could still buy it from the usual channels if I want the original in all it's glory.
Heck, it's not as though you have no choice people! This is not censorship, it is choice.
By the way, censorship is evil.
There are 10 kinds of people; those who know ternary, those who don't, and those now hunting for a dictionary.
I doubt that "...the DGA is defending the desecration..."
Perhaps you meant "The DGA is protesting the desecration..." or "The DGA is defending films against desecration..."?
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Then all Clean Flicks can do is to sell the edit instructions, and not touch the DVD at all.
Clearly the player should be set up that a movie without edits could not be played, unless you knew sme password...etc. Then we could all see the alternate edit of "Phantom Menace"...
I wonder how this would be made illegal? :-)
...richie - It is a good day to code.
The problem is not really copyright infringement, it's misrepresentation. So I think the company should be allowed to rent or sell edited versions of the films, but they should be forced to change the titles, the name of the producer, the names of the actors, etc. if any of those people insist on it.
If I wrote a novel and someone bowdlerized it and then published the result under my name, I'd be pretty peeved.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Oh, and to those of you with little kids to whom you want to show "Saving Private Ryan" - do the smart thing and JUST WAIT UNTIL THEY'RE OLDER.
After all, it isn't like there's a shortage of G-rated fare you can show them. I'm sure the director would thank you also, for respecting his/her work, and allowing your kids the full experience of seeing the films as you probably saw them. Those of you adults who would rather edit all the gore out for yourselves, please read my previous post.
In the 80s, before mainstream net, and definitely before mp3 and streaming radio, I and my friends would buy lots of CDs.
We all know at, at most, only half of the songs on each CD were worth listening to. What we did was make compilation tapes from various CDs.
You would not believe the care and consideration that went into the making of hese tapes. Each tape had a theme. Each tape was designed for a specific experience.
We would borrow each other's CDs to get the right songs -- and in the right order. The tapes ended up being quite personal in nature, so we usually didn't end up sharing the tapes -- unless the tape was made specifically for that other person (usually of the opposite sex).
But, everyone once in a while, usually while riding in a car, someone would ask, "Hey, that's a good tape! Can you make me a copy?"
I even had a mixer and two CD players so I didn't have to pause between tracks. I just time it right and the tape was one continous muscial experience.
What Clean Flicks is doing is not at all fundamentally different from what I did in junior and high schoool. They have my support.
Software Wars
Anime fandom has the well-known process of fansubbing -- making home-made subtitled versions of Japanese videos. This involves changing what is put up on the screen (by overlaying subtitles) and then distributing the output to the end consumer.
If CleanFlix can't sell paid-for copies of movies that have been altered, regardless of poor taste, then where does that put fansubbers?
I agree that CleanFlix have used their legal powers for evil, but these powers are ones to which they should be entitled, regardless of intent.
I'd have to side with Clean Flicks on this, its not as if they are copying the films, and its not as if they are forcing people to watch the edited versions, they are simply making them available. If you want to cut out the last 30 pages of a book or the last 30 minutes of a movie. Or maybe you just ask your kids to close their eyes during a part of a movie. Is this really a bad thing? Do we no longer have the right to edit the the things we purchase?
Similarly, whether you think it should be ok to do anything to films, surely it's not ok to take Citizen Kane, cut arbitrary portions of it out, and then redistribute the result as Orson Welles' Citizen Kane...
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
Though I'm not exactly enthusiastic about what these Clean Flicks people are doing, it can hardly be called censorship. It would be 100%legal for someone to rent the original video and fast forward through the offensive parts, which would produce the exact same effect. The Clean Flicks people are simply making it less of a hassle. Since the full version of the video is on 99% of the other DVDs/cassettes available for rental, the directors are not being censored in any meaningful sense of the word. If they don't want their names associated with the edited versions, then they could be blanked out of the credits...
I'm a writer myself, and if someone would do that to my stories I'd go tell them to go and read something else. It's my brain child, and if I put scene thus and so in it, I did it for a reason, and if you don't like it, bad luck. Write something yourself, but don't rape my story.
However, a screenplay/ scenario-writer is making a half-product. He knows it's going to be altered in many ways before anybody ever sees the film based on his work. In this case I'm not sure where the artistic responsibility lies, but I guess in Hollywood, this would be with the producer and/or director. They have last say, and if they're all right with people changing things in their stories which might alter the gist and meaning of a film, well, so be it. It does say something I guess about which way of the balance you're on: artistical integrity don't touch my baby or fork over the money please are the two extremities of this balance.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
It's the law: If you own a copy, you, or anyone, can do anything you like with that copy. You could edit Sylvester Stallone from a movie and put in yourself. You cannot do a public performance of an altered work without permission, but you can do anything you like that does not involve a performance.
Robert Redford and Steven Spielberg complain. However, if they didn't make such poor quality films, this would not be an issue. I don't think that cutting something from their films will improve them much, but if people want that, I'm sympathetic to their wanting something that, while it is still not good, is less objectionable.
This is a fact: Many older people are so annoyed by the fake sentiments and foolish thinking of movies that they don't watch them. Most movie goers are young.
Most films made in the U.S. show losers. Since I'm (mostly) successful, I don't identify with the characters in the films.
This is what copyright was created for: To stop people from desecrating and misrepresenting the works of others; not to make money.
Yes, there should have strong fair use.
But this ISN'T FAIR USE.
Fair use is:
Me burning a mix cd from my CD collection for my car
Me making MP3:s of my CD collection, so I can play them on my computer or MP3 player.
Use of quotations in texts
et c , I hope the difference is clear.
If you want an edited movie. You'll just have to buy the tape and do it yourself.
I remember when communist censors edited a movie called Silkwood. The problem was sex (better traces of sex), and the movie lost a lot of its plot and became really stupid.
I understand DGA problem: what if the movie looses an important point in plot or just the feeling of the movie? I think good example of this is Blade Runner, where we have a release made by producer of the movie and a release made by Ridley Scott , which is IMHO much more better.
As of the copyright law, I think that from the "money paid" point of view, it is ok. The question is: can they (Clean Flicks) sue me for starting a company called Dirty Flicks, which will buy Clean Flick version of the movie, add twice ammount of violence and sex and resell it? WOW, I am going to be millionare - imagine this movie full of porn, betiality, blood and shooting
I thought you couldn't do that, because the splice would mess up the spinning head. So I figured the editing involved temporary copying.
This has modified the "Clean Slashdot Flick" in to any they not . mod down .
Just checked the 'mycleanflicks' site...
:)
There's a list of movies that they will NOT edit
nor offer as E-Rentals.
(In the FAQ at the top)
Most of titles on the list are pretty obvious,
editing those would leave at most 5 minutes of filem (if that
but...'Liar liar'???
(Mind you, I haven't seen that film, but I was under the impression it's just a comedy???)
This is not censorship at all. This is a company (Clean Flicks) providing a service that is obviously In Demand. They wouldn't survive as a company or rental chain if people did not want these edited movies.
I mean c'mon, they're based in Utah, obviously their customers are God Fearing Mormons and Latter Day Saints. These Mormons want their movies sterile and devoid of anything offensive. They are making a concious decision.
I am sure there is at least one Blockbuster in all of Utah where Mormons who don't want this service can rent unedited videos.
But don't call it censorship, a company is simply meeting the demands of its customers.
Business Plan:
1. Cater to Mormons/Move to Utah
2. Edit movies to the point of Sterility
3. ????
4. Profit!!
I have to take the side of Clean Flicks on this one - there's no reason anyone should be restricted from buying bits, modifying them, and selling them. However, it makes me wonder why the directors even care. They can't be worried about their "vision being corrupted" as they don't complain about the TV versions of movies. The issue can't be money either - Clean Flicks buys a copy of the movie for every edited copy they sell. The directors, not to mention the MPAA, are making more money because the market for their products is broadened by Clean Flicks. I'm rather bewildered as to why they're so upset.
.ifo and .bup files on the DVD, the copyright gestapo wouldn't have a leg to stand on - Clean Flicks wouldn't be distributing copyrighted content, and they wouldn't have to buy a copy of the movie for every mod they sold. The directors and the MPAA would make just as much money as consumers would need to buy a copy of the original DVD for the mod roms to patch against.
This story makes me think about that DVDSynth article slashdot had a few days ago. While the software is currently for geeks only, it doesn't seem like all that much effort would be required to implement a similar capability in set-top DVD players. If Clean Flicks were to distribute "mod cards" containing rom chips with info to patch the
How can anyone call that any kind of infringement? Is it infringement to close your eyes during parts of a movie you don't like? Editing stuff on the tape is just an easier way to do that.
No, see, the bizarro version of Clean Flicks would obviously be a company that splices frames from pornography into "family" films.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Now, I have no problem with people doing their own editing.
What Clean Flicks do is nothing more than provide a service editing movies that their customers own. Really, buying from Clean Flicks is no different from renting time in an editing suite and hiring someone to show you how to operate it.
The main issue, as I see it, is that all these little companies are making money off of the destruction of someone else's creative vision
By that argument, so is any company that makes equipment allowing someone to edit any tape. All Clean Flicks do is facilitate; it's not as if they are editing, then reproducing the edited movie without the studio getting paid. Every copy they sell is owned.
And that... just sits very badly with me.
The question is: do you own the movie, or just the right to watch the movie? If the studio retains control of the media, then that means you only have an license to watch the movie, you don't own it. Clearly that is an indefensible position: if it were true, and you damaged your copy, the studio would replace it for no more than the cost of duplication. That doesn't happen, which suggests that there is plenty of precedent for the movie being owned by whoever buys it, and thus they are free to do with it as they please.
Well, its the Directors Guild going after this company..Not the studios. Many times movies are a way for a director to try and make some statement to the masses. Its like their way of communicating with the world. So this company is taking their idea, their message, their work, and changing it from what it was. Also I'm all for fair use, but I've always thought of fair use as something you did yourself... When another company is profiting through the modification of someone elses creation it doesn't seem right. Thats just my point of view. If these loser groups want to show rambo without the violence, let them edit themselves. I do not think this company should be profiting from it. Its a fine line, but I lean towards the directors on this one. They are trying to protect their art. If I made a movie, I would want people to watch it the way I created it or not watch it at all. You have to look at it from that perspective before jumping on the bash the guild/association/group campaign.
I have to wonder how long these films are after processing on average?
So long as this company doesn't affect the whole industry, that's no worse than someone buying into one of those "protect your children" censorship companies. (The parallel stops when legitimate sites become censored without the consumer's knowledge...but then again, what other things ARE being blocked besides sex and violence? Product placement too? The consumer may never know...)
But back to the original question: How long are these videos after editing? I think it would be interesting to see what happens to the story when you remove the violence from, say a Steven Segal movie. I have this eerie feeling there are a lot of 'trailer' sized movies with really bad acting as a result.
Ok, for those defending Clean Flicks 'right' to market an edited version of a movie, how would you like this situation:
Let us postulate a company: Clean Books. They buy a copy of a book, epoxy it sealed, and attach an 'edited' copy of the book with the offending content taken out. Would you be supporting the publishing house going after the company, or would you support the company editing the book?
Or somone going through the Linux kernel source and removing all the 'colorful' comments. Does not the creator of content have the sole right to determine how their content is presented? Is this precept not intrinsic to the idea of software licenses, the subject of which tends to be of most discussion here? (Discounting First post and the trolls, of course)
I am usually proud of being a geek, and I've worked quite a bit at trying to fight geek stereotypes throughout my life, but for God's sake it is exactly this kind of story that makes me embarassed to be part of this community.
How can anyone here seriously take the position that the consumer is wrong here? After all our fights against the DMCA and DeCSS and GPL code that supposedly empowers us, why is this community suddenly getting cold feet when someone decides to use those rights to produce a product that we happened to find silly?
I mean, really, isn't this the kind of behavior that we should be encouraging? The religious right sees a bunch of movies that they don't like. And for once, their reaction is to simply fix what they find wrong for viewing within their own community of interested viewers. They aren't trying to get movies banned; they aren't trying to get YOU to stop going to the movies. They aren't even asking you to watch their edited version of the movies! (Though, of course, you are free to do so if you wish.) Isn't this exactly the kind of consumer-centered decsion making that we are supposedly fighting for? Wouldn't you prefer this solution, rather than this group trying to somehow force their edited-down versions to be official?
Besides, where was all this sudden concern over the sanctity of movies when geeks were making spoofs like TIE-tanic, or recutting the Star Wars trilogy, or making any of the thousand Star Trek "lost episodes" by putting new dialog to old footage? Oh, but someone uses this same technology and allowance of law to recut a movie in a way that you happen to not care for, and suddenly you're on the side of the RIAA?
Please.
By logic of Redford and others Cliffnotes are illegal. They are obsessed with the slippery slope of censureship. But by that argument you can't turn a movie off in the middle either. The whole thing is just silly. As long as the modified product is clearly marked 'modified', it is up to the consumer to decide the content that comes into his livingroom. Why can't hollywood distinguish between their medium and others? You shouldn't modify a portrait, because there is only 1.You always modifiy games because that's the nature of the play and the medium. Movies are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. It's true that one can radically change the message of a movie by a deletion here and a deletion there. It's probably a bad idea to deliberately modify the main message. But poor modification practise will probably not sell anyway. Battles between directors and studios are already a kind of mortal combat. I think the directors just cant figure out when to stop fighting.
C372 4AB5 1E89 36DD FF72 E0C3 2BE6 22E9 ED0F A822
I just want to nuke America and get rid of all this shit once and for all.
A director or producer or whatever develops a movie and in good faith means it to be shown to a public in the mannor in which they made it. This company is altering the films and reselling them WITHOUT rights.
Wait a minute? What about fair use and all that? That applies to an end user, the final purchaser, not to a middle man.
A copyright is a device that allows the original holder of a copyright to actually control the fate of his/her material.
I hold the copyright of my story. I never gave that particular magazine the right to publish it. And I certainly never gave that christian magazine the right to take words out and republish it. And if you go out an purchase a magazine that has my story in it, it does not give you the automatic right to cut up my story and republish it for sale or any other way other way.
But what about rebroadcasts of the old superman movie on ABC "edited for content"? ABC purchased the rights to show that crappy movie and were allowed to edit for content as terms of that purchase.
Clean Flicks or whatever, have not purchased the rights to edit these movies and return them for rental or purchase from the copyright holders. Too bad, they have infringed on the rights of the holders of the copyrights.
feh
"Speech, not speach, you pitiful excuse for a native-born English English speaker!"
..." or "You could do that in 2 lines of Perl" aren't the funniest thing you have ever heard and worth a "+5 Funny" moderation very time they are posted in a discussion.
What's this, an appeal for correct spelling on Slashdot of all places, surely that goes against everything the Slashdot community holds most dear.
Next you'll be telling me that "Imagine a Baowolf cluster of those
English is a continuously evolving language, surely we should have the freedom to have spelling which reflect regional accents and personal preference. Speach is mearly an incorrect spelling of speech, lose and loose have two very different meanings so the comparison is not 100% fair.
You can bet whatever will degrade and demoralize society the most will win. Ahh, no one really learned from the Greeks, Romans and many great Civilizations before us. Alas, we poke fun at which will destroy us.
kbye,
I happen to be a sometimes-writer, and I have good friends who're far more serious about it than I am.
By your token, because I buy a book, I should therefore own all the contents of the book. This is the reason that copyright law exists--to protect the people who create things.
Cleanflicks obviously has to be making a profit off of this, or else they wouldn't be in business. (Well, one assumes, though you can never tell anymore.) If they're making a profit, they're making that profit because of the work of the people who created the movies... while not respecting that those people created a specific vision. Yes, sometimes that vision includes violence. You have plenty right to go see something else.
Ooh, I know. I'm going to go buy a bunch of big long books and cut out all the violence and sex and maybe the boring passages, too, and re-sell them. Of course, I'm not going to stop to ask the author what they think of this; it's my right to free speech, right? Forget the rights of the original creator. Forget, for that matter, their feelings, or that they're even human beings at all, because it's so much easier to think of them as the Evil Movie Industry whose sex and violence are so damaging to our precious little children.
In personal use, you're not making money for doing it. You do it for yourself, your family, sure. When you start doing it to make a buck, then you're doing the very thing that copyright law is designed to prevent.
"At the extreme you have folks who want to eliminate all traces of sex and violence from the popular media against the movie industry who wants to eliminate all property rights of the consumer. Whose side would you take?"
Step back and look at it carefully. These are TWO DIFFERENT ISSUES.
The first one is simple. It's censorship.
And while you're right that we need to support free speech, you've got exactly backwards who we need to support. Here, in order to protect free speech, we have to support the directors.
Editing the films against the express wishes of the directors and copyright holders is simultaneously a violation of copyright law AND censoring their creative works.
Censoring someone else is NOT an exercise of free speech, but an infringement of it. You have every right not to watch a film if you don't like it's content, but that does NOT mean you can chop out what you don't like and then redistribute it.
In order to protect the fundamental principle, which you are correct must be the priority, the only choice is to side with the creator, not with the censor.
The SECOND issue here is what constitutes fair use.
Under fair use, it might be argued that as long as you paid for a copy of the film for your use that you might be able to edit a copy of that copy and watch it yourself without what you didn't want to see, but that's still not at all clear.
But fair use doesn't ever permit you to redistribute any copy of the film to anyone else, regardless of whether there is any profit at all, because it's NOT YOUR FILM. It's only your COPY of the film. Possesion of the copy doesn't give you the right to edit the original work.
That's why copyright is called copyright to begin with. It spells out who has the right to control both the distribution AND THE CONTENT of a work.
The only reason TV stations are permitted to alter content without express consent of the director is because there are statues that dictate what content may be shown on broadcast television, and it is understood that when a network pays for the right to broadcast the film that a certain amount of editing may be required in order to meet the statutory guidelines. Within that context they are granted a certain amount of leaway that they sometimes take advantage of in ways that also leave directors unhappy, but that they usually tolerate.
This is an entirely different scenario than the one under debate related to rental distribution. Since there is no overriding legislation regarding content with rental distribution, there is no legal basis under which to alter content without express consent of the copyright holder.
This doesn't mean that we should by any means support the Directors' Guild uniformly in all of their arguments about fair use. Some of the restrictions they want preventing users from making any copies whatsoever for their own use DO violate fair use, but this particular issue is not one of those.
Fight for whichever side allows you to ADD more sex, violence, drugs, CGI, pr0n, etc. to any movie you want.
Way too easy. Now, which side would that be?
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
IANAL, but how can you see someone for violating Copyright, when you do not own the Copyright. Last I checked, Directors were hired by studios and the studio or the studio's parent company owned the Copyright,
This case doesn't even sound valid, since the DAG owns nothing in this case. Additionally, as long as clean flicks clearly states that the film content has been modified, personally I welcome movies with less "F" words. I hope they win.
Let's say a company spliced books for their customers with all of the unwanted pages ripped out? How would you feel?
How about a library that carried Playboy bacause they felt the articles were worthwhile, but removed the racy photos?
I'm not asking about taste, but the act itself. Is what this company is doing any different than taking a felt-tip to your own copy of a book/magazine?
IMNSHO, the company isn't any differnt. They aren't selling copyrighted works as their art, but performing a service on privately owned media containing that art.
I think the best compromise it to allow recutting like this but also allow writers/directors to sue for misrepresentation if they think its gone too far.
I have a copy of 2001 which I cut 5 minutes off the boring sequence where Dave's flying over the blue Scotish moorland and I can tell you, it makes the film better no matter what Kubrick might have said about cutting his vision.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
The artistic vision of films should be pure and untouched by human hands.
That having been said, the copyright system was set up to ensure the original authors of works were justly compensated for their effort in an effort to generate more works. I fail to see a part of copyright law that explicitly covers artistic vision. Of course, if I remember my legal course correctly there does remain untransferrable works for hire rights, such as the right to have their works represented in a way that doesn't defame the author or oppose the author's original intent. This appears to do neither.
And as hollywood releases thousands of edited-for-TV movies every year, apparently they aren't opposed either.
Would I personally use such a service? Not a chance. But then again, I don't have kids, and I do have enough time to research the movies I plan on watching. I would be deeply annoyed if I accidently rented such a movie: I just finished watching a broadcast version of "Coming to America," and the edited New Yorker's language just didn't seem realistic.
The companies that do this aren't reselling movies. They are editing original copies and renting the cuts, keeping the originals as backups. The argument is not whether tiny, 5 person companies have the right to profit off of giant companie's profit engines, but rather whether the consumer has the right to decide what they want to see even if that disagrees with the original author's stated position.
In this case, the consumer should be given the right. If the violence, sex, and language are pivotal to the plot (such as in Memento), then the meaning of the scenes will continue. If it is integral (such as Boogie Nights), then the movie won't be rented anyway. Either way, this is not an FCC mandate doing this, but what the people want. I personally want the option to turn off the cheezy patriotism in Spiderman, and Jar-Jar in episode one. To me, both of these movies would be better without them. To others, that one movie would be better without that unnecessary sex scene between the main character guy and the spunky girl just before she gets captured. If they have the right to fast forward through them (and yes, Valenti, they have the right to fast forward through them) doesn't that mean they have the right to not see them at all? Can't they transfer that right to a trusted 3rd party?
Censorship is about taking away control. Editing movies in the way that a select group of people want for the benefit of that select group of people is about giving control. We may not agree with their choice of cuts but that just means we should start our own editing services.
Don't fool yourself into thinking most directors have final rights over editing... Sony, AOL Time Warner, and Disney get the final call. Sometimes they are good calls, like the addition of the "Singing in the rain" sequence to the above titled movie. And sometimes they are horrible, such as the narration added to Blade Runner or the missing 6 hours of Dune. It isn't a precise science: they are put together by people, for people. Shouldn't people be the ones with the rights?
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
If they sell cut versions to theatres without authorization, copyright infringement.
If they rent editted movies out to customers without authorization, copyright infringement.
If it only works on the basis of a customer taking in a VHS cassette or a DVD, and then having an editted version given to them, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. (Provided the customer isn't violating other terms of use - such as public display/etc.)
Though, this being Slashdot, I shall probably be damned for saying this, but the copyright holders, no matter who they are, should have absolute power as to how their creations are distributed.
This is not the same as what happens after distribution - for example, should I wish it, I could hold a burning of Harry Potter memorabilia, and there's not a thing that anyone can do to stop me.
This editting is not the same. By 'renting out' altered films, they are manipulating the content and thereby infringing. It would be as if I replaced paragraphs within a Harry Potter book, and sold it as my own original creation.
...they print in big red letter what they editted in the back of the box, and what percentage of the movie it was. :)
And as long as there are other movie retailers where i can get the whole thing right, im ok with it.
But imagine this, ET ripped of the new scenes
If someone went there to see the new scenes of ET and found out they have been cut off after getting it, he has some right to be angry, and get back his money if there was no mark as to what was cut off.
Also, if this editing thing is cut off scenes only.
errera hunamum ets
All Clean Flicks is doing is adding a value to the original product and then selling the original version along with thier value added version. If they can make more money from this more power to them. The original version still gets sold, and the makers of this still make the same amount of money they original would of.
Thier are whole segments of the computer industry that are based on taking software modifing it and then reselling the value added version.
Unfortunately, these days I wouldn't be surprised. Why? Most media has gone way too overboard. Sure, when I'm with the guys its fine but if there are little kids even around in the house, I don't want to. Movie houses such as these allow movies to be played without the worry of junior sneaking around when watching such films at night.
Anyway, I fail to see. How is hollywood gonna stop me now? Oh wait, some DVDs don't allow you to time advance!
Reality or nothing.
Obviously this isn't about greedy Hollywood companies that wan't to earn more money than they allready do.
This is about having your name linked to work you didn't do.
They're mutilating peoples work and selling it with the original names on it...
I know that I would be pissed if someone republished one of my scientific articles but removed an essential part of the argumentation without my consent.
If someone introduced errors into my code and still told people that it was my program... I would probably get pretty mad, but judging from these comments I'm probably the only one.
Nothing wrong with making censored versions of movies, but it should be the artists own choice...
If they don't think that the movie can survive censorship then maybe it's just pointless to show it to kids anyway.
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." -George H.W. Bush
He should shut the hell up about this...didn't he change all the guns in ET to walkie talkies? And Drew Barrymore's bottle of Jack into milk or something?
next thing you know...the TV networks are gonna get upset about people recording programs and editing out the commercials....oh wait...
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
I'm opening a new website with DVDs and Videos for hire, but will all over-nationalistic, annoyingly patriotic and unbelieveably pro-American sentimentality removed. Now you can watch Rambo II and III in under 25 minutes, and Colateral Damage consists only of the intro and outro credits.
How does that differ from cutting out sex and violence? How about if I decided to make a version of a movie with all non-white characters removed? Is that acceptable?
"The DGA is defending the desecration of many of our favorite films, while Clean Flicks is strongly advocating for the copyright rights of the consumer to edit and/or alter the media that they purchase. At the extreme you have folks who want to eliminate all traces of sex and violence from the popular media against the movie industry who wants to eliminate all property rights of the consumer."
First, where does Clean Flick's plan suggest that they want to eliminate all traces of sex and violence from the popular media? You are assuming too much simply beause you don't agree with what Clean Flicks is doing (how open minded of you).
Second, you claim that Clean Flicks is "desecrating" these films. I call bullshit. The directors themselves will edit their own films to be shown on commercial airplanes all in the name of making a buck. The reminds me of Metallica's insistence that Napster commoditizes their "art" while they are allowing people to press plastic discs with their "art" and *gasp* selling them.
I've never understood how come when people exercise a modicum of their constitutional right and there is a hint of religion, that such a large population feels threatened. If you people are truly believed in the Constitution, you would be loudly praising Clean Flicks use of their Constitutional rights.
-bk
I have two arguments in favor of clean flicks:
1. As a parent with small children, I desperately need help finding things suitable for them to watch. If I can not show them a 'clean' film then they will not see it at all - this is my perogative as a parent in the fine US of A. In fact, I prefer not having to watch garbage in a film that would otherwise be pleasant to see. This has NO EFFECT on those of you that prefer the original content. Me and my family would be able to see what we want , other could see what they want - everyone is happy. What is the real reason they (Hollywood) don't want us editing the films (artistic expression...riiiight).
2. If I buy a film and edit it myself, am I going to have to answer to the govt? If I change/replace a few DLLs in Windows on my PC, can Microsoft come after me. If I sell some software that changes the way Windows works - will I be sued? Clean Flicks is not claiming to have produced the films, they are not claiming credi for any of the films content. How is this really violating Copyright? If you think that it is a stretch to make the analogy from film to software - think again, remember that our legal system is based on precedent. Future cases will be decided based on previous decisions that are even marginally related!
KK4SFV
so i could buy XP and edit out the IE and loads of stuff and then resell it?? and this happens all the time??
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
surely we should have the freedom to have spelling which reflect regional accents and personal preference
No. Without a common language there can be no effective communication. What you are doing is the beginning of a dialect, not spelling things your own way. You either read and write English, or you don't. You can't bend it to your will.
i wonder if you have read the grimm brothers fairytales lately, if one would do a movie from them it would get k-85years or something rating, heads being chopped off, crows picking on eyes and generally good stuff like that.
violence in entertainment is nothing new..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I think this is a case of cutting off the nose to spite the face. It makes absolutely no business sense whatsoever, and if the egos of these directors interferes with their cash flow, who are we to save them from themselves?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
There isn't far from cutting down a movie in length to remove obnoxious scenes, to altering the message of the movie.
How about a racist, fascist or religious version of popular movies, books, songs? Then you would in fact be able to make anybody say what pleases you by editing their artwork.
Is that fair use?
Max M - IT's Mad Science
You have to side with the consumer on this one. What the consumer is doing is modifying something they bought for their own personal benefit (if you will). It harms no one. I am able to watch the movies as the director intended. I am not obligated or forced to watch the movie they edited.
Whereas, the studios want to regulate and dictate what I can or cannot do with something I own.
They seem to be skirting the law since they claim that then edit the customers purchased movies, which falls under fair use. But this doesn't seem to be the case. Sure they buy a "license" that they pass on to the customer, but it definately isn't as if they are coming over to my place, and editing my existing DVD for me.
I think this is VERY interesting indeed. A lot of me wants to side with cleanflicks due to fair use laws. but the problem is, that this company is really pushing the legal limits. First of all, the DVD is not licensed for reproduction, which they are clearly doing.
I'm sure a lawyer familiar with the laws will be quick to sort this one out though. This is the sort of case I'd love to see on CourtTV.
Hmm... not sure what to make of what I would *like* to see happen, but technically, I can certainly accept that this is currently an illegal practise - they are making an unauthorised derivative work, which breaks copyright law...
My problem with deciding what I would like to happen, is that to a large extent, I agree with Hollywood - I'm against censorship in general... but siding with Hollywood could set a dangerous precedent for other cases that could be considered broadly similar...
However, there is one thing we should all consider - who says that cutting out the sexual / violent material to create a sanitised 'family friendly' version makes a film that is 'better for us'... context is a *very* important thing to consider... removing a violent scene can completely change the morality of a film... what would you rather have your kids see - a film that makes a bank robbery seem like a fun day out, or one that shows how truly horrific war can be?
This was covered on fark yesterday. As are most things that aren't about some gadget or a linux kernel, but that are actual things in the news.
sig?
About Us
CleanFlicks is a family-oriented company based
in Pleasant Grove, Utah. We love movies, but
prefer to watch them without the sex, nudity,
profanity or extreme violence.
Um, excuse me, but what the hell does that leave? Heh, seriously though, if
you want that, watch a fricken DISNEY movie. But please, *please*,
LEAVE Saving Private Ryan ALONE!
When 2 parties fight, there is still the possibility that both are wrong....
Or right of course...
Read more about Clean Flicks' covereage here on Slashdot.
or you can buy a porn movie with all the juicy scenes cut out... so you pay them only for seeing the credits
I have been involved in art scene since I was 4y old, have my credits in few records, many theatrical productions, and many other mystical productions. Currently I am involved in production of one music video and working as lighting designer as my secondary profession. (I'm also working as administrator in our university)
I have a strong opinion against altering the work of others. When creating some art, even little details are of importance. In video this might be something flashing in the screen for only few frames, but might be something director or DP have been thinking and working on for few weeks! And by omitting such detail, one might alter the whole meening of the work. And no one except those who are the producers(*) of the work can know the true meaning...
For example consider Orson Welles Citizen Kane. If someone should remove the last scene from that movie, where the 'Rosebud' is burned, meaning of the movie! And even more dangerous example: Kubricks Full Metal Jacket. Who could say what is the important thing in this movie, which makes it one of the best anti-war movies? By removing something, it might be able to transform this into pro-war movie... (That is at least what I think...)
And for those things I have created (or have been in artistic position of production), I dont have problem if someone alters those somehow, but if they want to distribute it, I definitely want to check the altered version before distribution! And at least in Finland this is also what copyright law says...
(*) By producer I dont mean that 'big corporation behind everything'. I mean those persons, who are actively working on the production in artistic positions. This means depending on the type of production f.e. Director, Director of Photography, Editor, Lighting designers, Composers, Musicians, Actors and many others...
--Saval
If the director's case is uphelpd, then wouldn't it also be a breach of copyright to sell any book that didn't contain each and every letter it originally contained?
What you describe is exactly what copyright is designed to prevent. Modifieing a copyrighted work for profit. "Adding value" to an original copyright work is not covered under fair use.
Regarding value added software: In such cases the value added reseller has permission from the copyright owner to resell the value added version. Obviously this is the opposite of the Clean Flicks case.
Wow, unable to rip pages out of a book, the bowlderize syndrome? There is a 12 step program for folks like you...
By your token, because I buy a book, I should therefore own all the contents of the book.
Yes, that's right. If I buy a book and I want to tear out pages or cross through the boring bits or color in the pictures or fold over the corners where the dirty bits are, or write in the margin why the author was wrong... yes, I can do all that because it's my book.
This is the reason that copyright law exists--to protect the people who create things.
Copyright law prevents me from copying your works, it doesn't (or shouldn't) stop me tearing out the pages in copies made with your permission and purchased by me.
Cleanflicks obviously has to be making a profit off of this, or else they wouldn't be in business. (Well, one assumes, though you can never tell anymore.) If they're making a profit, they're making that profit because of the work of the people who created the movies... while not respecting that those people created a specific vision.
That's right, just like I can buy a car, respray it, replace the seats and resell it. Oh no, profiting without respecting a 'specific vision' how terrible. If you don't want me to modify a car don't sell it to me, clear?
Yes, sometimes that vision includes violence. You have plenty right to go see something else.
Yes, including the right to watch the bits of this I like and not the bits I don't.
Ooh, I know. I'm going to go buy a bunch of big long books and cut out all the violence and sex and maybe the boring passages, too, and re-sell them. Of course, I'm not going to stop to ask the author what they think of this; it's my right to free speech, right?
Yes, go ahead.
Forget the rights of the original creator
No, they keep all their rights intact. What's that got to do with you mutilating the books you own?
Forget, for that matter, their feelings, or that they're even human beings at all, because it's so much easier to think of them as the Evil Movie Industry whose sex and violence are so damaging to our precious little children.
What are you on? This has got nothing to do with them being evil. By all means respect their feelings BUT people really really are entitled to buy books and burn them specifically to hurt the feelings of the author if they want to. No, not pleasant, but hard to believe though it may be hurting people's feelings isn't a crime and I hope it never will be.
In personal use, you're not making money for doing it. You do it for yourself, your family, sure. When you start doing it to make a buck, then you're doing the very thing that copyright law is designed to prevent.
Rubbish. Copyright law was about protecting an income stream in order to encourage the creation of works. It was never about protecting people's feelings from people who were making money without
"respecting their vision". The idea is completely without foundation.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
if TV networks can insert ads in a movie (I highly doubt the director meant for those tampon commercials to be in there), then cleanflicks can remove offensive content. both change the content. I fail to see the difference.
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
I don't think of this companies product as something protectable by end-user fair use... they are not an end-user. They have purchased copies of movies for the sole purpose of getting them from the hands of the supplier to the hands of the consumer - before this transaction they are removing words, altering scenes, much like as if they were crossing out words or tearing out pages. This is censoring the product before it gets to the audience. In a sense, they have broken the terms of their deal with the supplier, and by that, the creator of the artistic piece.
In the UK, the BBFC (British Board of Film Censor^H^H^H^H^H Classification) have performed reshooting of a film to downplay a harrowing scene in "Henry: portrait of a serial killer". While the BBFCs powers have been cut down (and are far more liberal) this indicates it is not a new problem. Just be thankful that this rental company does not have the legal power to ensure that the only film available at Blockbuster is their version. By the way, the scene modified was a murder/rape scene that was refilmed/edited to show it as the two killers watching a video of themselves doing the killing. This was a complete change to the film, and to my amazement the production company went along with it to get a release (18 certificate).
"I love deadlines. I love the wooshing sound they make as they fly past" Douglas N Adams
What if people want to purchase (rent) a copy of a movie to watch? While I think most would agree, I hardly see how. A legitimate copy of the movie has been purchased. A disclaimer is shown so people don't blame the movie on the directory. Honestly, I ask, what is wrong with this?
I frankly don't see any winners. And if you do see a problem with this. What about other movie edittings?
Reality or nothing.
Don't hate the state of Utah. Utah is an awesome wonderful state. Now, the Church of Latter Day Saints isn't exactly my favorite religious organization and the fact that it pretty much runs the state govenrment does bite.
But, Utah has nothing to do with that.
Yep, just include the original version. Dell, Gateway and other do this all the time, just not to the extent you want to do.
Where microsoft got in trouble with this is that they had language that specificly forbit them from doing this.
Lots of other companies do this all the time to computer software. Companies are hired to come in install the software, lots of times features are not installed or removed because the customer does not want them, and then new interfaces are placed on them. When done they provide the original software and the additions.
So what's the big deal here anyway?
They should absolutely be able to do this if they want to. They probably started this just to be able to show it to their kids or something.
Are people out there going to honest say that there IS NOT too much sex, violence, profanity in movies nowadays?
Besides, any time any one of these movies were to be aired on some general broadcast company (ABC, NBC, CBS..etc) it'd be the same thing.
Profanity, nudity, violence... they'd all be cut for the TV version of it. and hey, it's not like they're hiding the fact that these are editted versions...
Apparently, those against this - don't have kids. If you had, you'd realize how difficult it is to find new movies for them that aren't full of profanity, nudity, and violence.
I've been saying for a while now, that I can't believe someone hasn't put this ability into DVDs already. It'd be great if I could show my 4 year old Lord the the Rings by simply enabling "G-mode" on the DVD (that is... if that option existed).
Mulholland Drive Synopsis: (2001) This sexy thriller has been acclaimed as one of the year's best films. Two beautiful women are caught up in a lethally twisted mystery - and ensnared in an equally dangerous web of erotic passion. "There's nothing like this baby anywhere! This sinful pleasure is a fresh triumph for Lynch, and one of the best films of the year. Visionary daring, swooning eroticism and colors that pop like a whore's lip gloss!" says Rolling Stone's Peter Travers. "See it... then see it again!" (Time Out New York) Runtime: 147 mins
No, but theres this mock company.
Leave it to Slashdot to reduce any complicated issue into a "whose side do you take???!!! " bar fight.
Anyone here who mentions "censorship" either hasn't taken the time to read the articles and understand what is going on, or doesn't understand what censorship is.
Lasers Controlled Games!
NTK article
DVDSynth
As a teenager in the 80s, I witnessed the trailing edge of the sexual revolution, or the cultural overhaul, or whatever you want to call it. To me, I see cliches when I watch the movies -- over and over and over ... ad infinitum, yes I'm hammering on the definition of cliche here.
/.'ers!). They like a good flick just like the next guy. But they literally wince at every f-word, and cringe when the lady's bra straps fall off her shoulder. What recourse do they have when the secular humanists own the pulpit in Hollywood? Personally, I'd rather see them boycott the machine, but I applaud their efforts nonetheless.
So now that I live in a post-modern, post-Christian America, I guess I have a jaded perspective. If you preach "Jesus saves!" you're branded as some kind of fanatic/loser, hey don't push that propaganda on me.
What if you preach some other religion? Like, "free love, man!" Or, "It's not an alternate lifestyle, I was BORN this way!" You have the silver bullet, and no one gets to call you a fanatical propagandist. Seems a bit lopsided to me.
So you have some legitimate, concerned citizens, who are sincere in their faith (try not to put labels on them,
See you in mod hell
I actually side with Clean Flicks on this one, and only for one reason, they arent hiding what they are doing whatsoever. Blockbuster does the same thing almost exactly, however they cover up the fact. You go to rent a movie at blockbuster and you get the "blockbuster rendition" with rape/bloody gore removed or edited out. Do you hear the movie industry bitching about blockbuster? nope. I bitch about it though, the bitches dont tell you that they are censoring thier shit. Place like "cleanflicks" with warning lables its obvious what they are doing, i sure as hell wouldnt rent a movie there, but i support thier right to edit "thier bought item" and rent changed version to informed user base. Frickin blockbuster can burn.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise. -Fight Club
Editing a movie you own is not copyright violation. Period.
Next I suppose you'd send the police after people who rip a page out of a book they own. Sheesh...
Let's imagine that you've just made a small film on a shoestring budget. For the sake of argument, let's say that it's a biting socio-political expose of the corruption in industry and goverment.
Now here comes Microsoft. They buy copies of your film, redact the parts that they don't like, and release them with your name on it, and slap on little "Edited to remove adult themes" stickers.
If they have the marketing muscle to make their version more readily available than yours (and they do), then they can de facto change what you said. Sure, if they're buying a copy of your original every time they sell a redacted version then you make money, but perhaps that wasn't your intention. By bringing money into it - whether you ask for it or not - they also paint you as a whore ("We've already established what you are, now we're just discussing price"). They can simply buy your rights away from you, even if you don't want to sell.
That's perhaps an extreme example, although you can take it further (what if they start adding scenes?). But it illustrates the limits of fair use rather nicely. While I'm fiercely in favour of individual fair use, I do not believe that fair use covers commercial editing and duplication, simply because allowing it for arguably good intentions opens it up to abuse for rather henious ones as well.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
If they cut the violence, sex, and profanity out of movies, there won't be any reason left to watch them. I don't know whether it's the writers just being too stupid to live, the Studio producers who don't have a clue as to what might make a good movie, or something else, but there just doesn't seem to be any talent at all left.
Whatever the directors think, their labours of love are really just lobotomized money making machines for the studios. As for the occasional watchable movie; a broken clock is right twice a day, I don't see why a broken process like the making of a movie can't be right once in a year.
The movie industry already edits out scenes to get the rating down for television. They add cut scenes back into the VHS/DVD uncensored release. What they are ticked off about was that they didn't see a market for "the television editon on DVD" first. If they shut down Clean Flicks, you can bet your @ they'll start put the TV version on Blockbusters family shelves. When it comes to the money scene, it's all about cutting out the middle man! :-)
Seriously, who would? Even Disney flicks have some violence or implied violence at times, and the hero isn't rescuing the heroine just to serve her tea and crumpets at his castle. It seems that the Uptight Christians' Brigade can't figure that out. Never mind the "Moral Majority" -- be wary of the Moron Majority.
if it's for private viewing. But if, say, network television were to decide it needed to launch a moral crusade to clean up the airwaves, and started showing heavily edited movies like this, it'd be a very clear-cut case of censorship, and that is wrong.
And the thing is, it's been done in the past, and probably still does go on to some extent (I don't know since I no longer watch TV).
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Then what's your opinion of people who release mods for games? Or hacks for software?
It's the same thing - do people own the right to modify media once they buy it, to better suit their needs?
While there are people who truly feel that way, that's not what this case is about at all. No one is "eliminating the traces" of anything here, a company is simply making these additional versions available. I'm sure they would love it if the movies came from Hollywood pre-censored, but I don't think anyone seriously expects this to happen any time soon. Sure, there's always a push-and-tug, a "couldja tone it down a bit" going on, but that has nothing to do with this case. The outcome of this case is not going to have an effect on the amount of sex and violence in Hollywood. They're orthogonal issues.
As much as I really sympathize with the feelings of the directors, producers, and actors, I can't see how they are legally in the right. Does the DGA get upset when consumers fast forward portions of movies? Does the DGA intend to sue every individual who stops a movie in the middle and returns it to Blockbuster, since they've violated the director's vision? If an individual mutes a movie while they talk on the phone with someone, does that violate a director's rights? It just doesn't hold up.
And there's nothing to a financial argument either. The studios are making exactly the same amount of money from a sale to Clean Flicks as a sale to Best Buy. In fact, they are making slightly more, since they are now selling their product to an audience that would have spent less or even no money previously.
Everybody denies I am a genius--but nobody ever called me one!
If the copyright holder really had exclusive rights to distribute content, then there would be no used book or CD stores. (Note that the RIAA is trying to make it that way).
What the copyright holder has is an exclusive right to make copies. What Clean Films is doing is no different from a book store selling, say, used books that have some pages torn out.
Books are commonly abridged. Nobody is going after publishers that abridge a book. You can even get books on tape that are abrigded. As long as the product has no added material and clearly states that it is abridged I have no problem with it.
A lot of people are posting, "ra ra consumer rights" etc, but look at this from the perspective of a film maker. Imagine that somebody paid Clean Flicks to produce an edited version of my favourite film, The Godfather, minus the violence. Understandably, Francis Ford Coppola could get pissed off by this. After all, part of it's value as a film is the way it masterfully handles and presents violence; by removing violence, it's no longer the Academy Award-winning movie it once was. It would just be a bunch of scenes with people yelling at each other. Clean Flicks therefore has no right to resell this work as "The Godfather", as it is not at all representative of the original film and its creative vision.
How is this different then when Die Hard is on NBC and they edit the hell out of that? Everyone seems to be happy when that happens, so why can a private company not do it?
Just curious.
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
Clean Flicks sells a service. A service like a CPA firm, a Lawyer's office and a computer repair shop. What Clean Flicks does is sell video editing services.
A client comes to them with a video that they bought at the local Wal-Mart. The video is rated 'R', but has a nice story behind some of the lewd content. Now, this 'god-fearin' buyer would like to see the movie for the story it portrays, but they have no wish to subject themselves or their family to this lewd content.
So, they ask Clean Flicks to edit out the portions of the movie that are considered lewd in order to give that client something that might have received a PG or PG-13 rating. The client then pays for the time that it took Clean Flicks to edit their Wal-Mart purchased movie.
Now, if Clean Flicks gives that person two tapes, or keeps the original and attempts to sell that. Then they are breaking copyrite law. However, by taking something that was bought by someone, owned by someone and altering it at their wishes. It is perfectly legal.
Personally, I don't agree with editing any film away from its original release. I believe that it can harm the artistic integrity of the film. However, it is perfectly within the rights of the person that bought that video.
To say otherwise would be like saying GM/Ford/Chrysler and all other car makers can tell you what you can and cannot do to the automobile that you have bought outright. The things some people do to cars are just plain silly. I mean, why have hydraulics? Why pay $10,000 for a paintjob on a depreciating asset? Why install an $8,000 stereo system? Why put 200 to 300 pounds of plastic on a car to make it look faster? None of that really adds to the car, in five years most of those cars are worth less then half of their original purchase price. (Even with all that garbage on it.)
However, that is the right of the person that owns that car, just like it is the right of the person that owns that video to have it edited. Just like it is the right of someone who bought a book to tear out and black-out whatever lines/words/pages that they wish.
However, it is not their right to make copies of that edited book/movie and start handing it out to everyone that they know.
I say get off your high horse and think about what you are saying. You are saying that when you buy something outright, you don't own it. You are saying that when you transfered ownership of some tangible good that good is still owned by the person that sold it to you. That would be like me 'selling' you my house and then saying what you could do with the house, whether or not you can remodel anything, whether or not you can clean it up.
-.-
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Today, a guild of hollywood directors sued the authors of a utility knows as "DeCSS", claiming it violates copyright law by modifiying movies. DeCSS authors argue that it doesn't violate copyright law, because the user owns the video, computer, and software....
Today, a guild of hollywood directors sued the authors of a utility knows as "DVDsynth", claiming it violates copyright law by modifiying movies. DVDsynth authors argue that it doesn't violate copyright law, because the user owns the video, computer, and software....
Today, a guild of hollywood directors sued Clean Flicks, claiming they violate copyright law by modifiying movies. Clean Flicks aruged that they don't violate copyright law, because the company buys each video and owns its own editing hardware.
I can't believe Whose side would you take? is even a question.
"DGA is defending the desecration of many of our favorite films",
No it isn't. It's defending against the desecration of many or our favorite films.
"while Clean Flicks is strongly advocating for the copyright rights of the consumer to edit"
Clean Flicks may be advocating for consumers but not for their "copyright" rights. Only a copyright holder has copyright rights. Clean flicks is advocating for consumers' property rights.
Insert witty sig here.
I don't see why the director's are having a problem with this. When "blockbuster" movies are shown 1-2 years later on cable networks such as USA, or even NBC...they have edited versions. They even go as far as to dub over the other actor's voices when swearing is involved..."fuck you" magically turns into "forget you" (in a badly dubbed voice). Forget trying to watch Goodfellas on FX :)
Rental and sales of already edited movies is another thing entirely. Just as I should not be able to edit The Lord of the Rings, then sell it, and just as I should not be able to change Perl to no longer have regexes and still distribute it as "Perl", I shouldn't be able to edit out the good bits of a movie and distribute the movie. Unless, of course, I got the permission of the copyright holder.
Fair use is good. Further, Cleanflicks could still stay in business, albeit with a change of focus to the editing business. Further, with appropriate automation, they should be able to turn things around nearly as fast as if they just stocked edited movies. I think preserving the distinction between stocking edited movies and actually producing an edited version of the owner's copy is important.
because the GPL give them EXTRA rights beyond what copyright allows. If they don't agree to all the terms of the GPL, then they are bound by standard copyright law, which prohibits their ability to redistribute.
Come on, people, why is this so hard? CleanFlicks isn't forcing their censored products down anyone's throats. People are paying and requesting these products from CleanFlicks. It's not forced censorship. Why do I care if CleanFlicks is doing this if I can easily and legally go out and buy an original version? So, in the end, because of the people's rights that CleanFlicks is defending, I am going to side with CleanFlicks. As a member of the opensource community, I'm very open to someone taking my source and modifying it for whatever they need. The movie industry has never been open to this and wants to remain in control of their content. I see nothing wrong with what CleanFlicks is doing if they purchase a new copy of the video for every edited one they sell, and if they aren't forcing their version and removing the choice for the original in the marketplace. I have a right to modify videos I own for my own personal use, and I don't want that taken away from me.
It's not the "Movie Companies" doing the protesting, it's the Directors Guild, the guys who actually create the work.
FIrst of all... CleanFlicks is right on this one. They bought the tape they should be able to do what they want as long as the consumer knows/agrees (which they do since they are buying from them for a reason)
Steven Spielberg did *this exact* thing with ET. YES I KNOW HE OWNS THE FILM *BUT* he did this saying that guns weren't integral to the story. He himself just admitted than you can remove something and not harm the story.
FYI, I think what he did to ET was stupid, kids are going to be scared of the government simply because are coming to take ET, not because they have guns. I don't really know what Spielberg thinks he was achieving...
Ever feel like you are driving the getaway car?
The company is a cooperative. People buy memberships in the company, the company edits films (as people point out, you can't very well do this yourself without seeing the parts you don't want to.) Then the company sends the film to the person who bought it and paid to have it edited.
No one is unwittingly getting an edited film the didn't want. This is not censorship. In fact, stopping it would be.
I happen to disagree with what they are doing on artistic grounds. I think people who buy these kinds of films are probably stodgy, moralizing bozos I would not like very much.
So what? I don't like Nazis either. Nor do I have any fondness for the people who mugged me and left me blind in one eye. But I don't think Nazis should be banned from speaking and marching. And I don't think that everyone of the same skin tone as my mugger's should be pulled over and searched.
Why do I support the rights of people I don't personally like or approve of? Because rights, to be rights, need to apply to everyone equally.
Too many people have a hypocritical way of thinking. It lets them think that rights should only apply to themselves or people they agree with. People don't always agree, but basic rights are the things that we all agree on.
Don't ever compromise on the things we all agree on, like freedom of expression, the right to do what you want with your posessions, the right to life, liberty, and so on. If you do, it opens the door for others to deny you those rights as well.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
to rent a 30 minute movie. Because that's how long most two hour Hollywood flicks would be if you cut out the sex, violence, and profanity. Hey, while we're at it, can we cut out the product placement advertising as well? Then I could watch Minority Report in like 10 minutes.
One idea that might be an interesting compromise:
A lot of DVDs come with the viewer option to include deleted footage into the presentation of the film. Why couldn't this work in reverse? Flag scenes with ratings, and give the viewer the option of viewing the 'R' rated version (the original), the 'PG-13' version (slight edit), the 'PG' version (bigger edit), or the 'G' version (running time: 23 minutes). The DVD player would simply skip scenes that were rated higher than the chosen threshold. Then video rental companies could carry the standard DVD, but the viewer could choose their own level of "cleanliness".
There's a way we could satisfy both sides. No one would object--I hope-- to the consumer fast-forwarding over the naughty-bits if they chose to. So if clean flicks, instead of editing, simply gave you a programmable remote (perhpas it could "watch" the screen for an embedded signal invisble to humans, or better yet use the close captioning track). then it could fast forward for you. No actual deletion of media.
Anyhow that's hypothetical. Just to make the point that there's nothing wrong with editing a film--the viewer has this right.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
"At the extreme you have folks who want to eliminate all traces of sex and violence from the popular media against the movie industry who wants to eliminate all property rights of the consumer"
I believe these people aren't attempting to remove the sex, language and violence that the mainstream sees. Rather these people are creating movies for a particular market that would like to see the movie or have the storyline without the "vulgarity".
I believe this is a good thing for them to do this. If these people don't have the option to buy a film edited the way they would prefer to see it then they may take their free time and use it to Lobby that ALL films be made that way to begin with.
I say let them buy edited versions.
As pointed out -- its not censorship if the original work is still available (and it would be cheaper to purchase, as well).
I wonder if anyone has pointed out that providing a "clean" version of a movie might help increase sales? Seems to me there are a number of people that don't really go to movies because they don't need to see the "artistic vision" that results in a R rating. If there are alternate versions it would increase sales. While the director may not like it, I would think the studios would.
Anyway, how different is this from the editing that is done to get a movie onto television?
Sleep is for the Weak
Please re-read the articles. They are a cooperative. They are marketting their services as editors.
Apply the "would I care if it happened to me" test: You just bought some porn and want to edit out the boring bits. But you don't know how to edit, and you don't really want to watch the boring bits, so you hire someone to do it for you.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
They are providing an editing service for the legal owner of the actual movie. Nothing more, nothing less. If someone wants to avoid being exposed to the real world full of sex and violence, they should have that right. They should also have the right to hire someone to edit that content out for them. While I am sure directors and their artistic comrades are eager to see this not happen, this really is no different than you or I buying a DVD and then subtitling it with our own subtitles or the fellow who did the Phantom edit.
I really do not agree with either sides beliefs, but I do think that people should be entitled to edit out content of their own copy of a movie. Since most individuals do not have full scale video editing software in their home, I think the people performing the editing are entitled to profit from offering this service to others.
Later.
If the GPL can (in essence) say "you can have a copy, and modify it, but if you distribute modified code, you must provide the source", then it must also be ok to have a license which says you can't distribute a modified copy. (in fact almost all licenses, and the "default license" in the absense of a stated license on any copyrighted work say you can't distribute any copy at all.)
./ tradition, I didn't actually read the article. :-)
If the directors are the copyright holders (unlikely), then they have final say as to who has a right to distribute copies, modified or not. Most likely, it's AOL/Time Warner, or the like. In any case, I don't think Clean Flicks has much of a leg to stand on, essentially demanding the rights to distribute a copyrighted work under guise of some kind of cooperative ownership, (at least that's what the slashdot blurb leads us to believe. In the time-honored
BTW, IANAL.
How does cleanflix hurt the Directors Guild of America? It seems to me that movies are being sold, which would not have been sold otherwise, so where is the harm?
Television does this to movies all the time.
I cant believe this would even be a question. Of course, CleanFlicks and the like are going to be out of business, thanks to the millions in legal bills they will rack up from the trial, etc.
That's interesting. The way you've described it, it sounds more like distributing a derivative work than an exercise of fair use.
It brings up lots of questions, like: Should be allowed to hire a 3rd party to edit my legitimite copy of copyrighted material? Presumably I am allowed to use tools to edit my copy, even tools that a 3rd party made. What about "smart" tools that automatically redact certain things? We couldn't build an automatic tool to reliably remove objectionable material today, but someday we probably will be able to. Should that be allowed?
The thing is - you gotta consider what the law is, not what you want it to be. Movies are not released under the GPL - as much as perhaps we want them to be. Thus, the DGA memebers retain the copyright to their movies, and are well within their rights to limit changed works. By altering these movies, even at customers requests, Clean Flicks are infringing on the DGAs rights. In addition, I doubt Clean Flicks is doin this for free. So they are getting a fee from a licensed product that they don't have a license for. Not good, IMHO. Now before I get flamed, understand that I am for customer rights - but right now the laws don't support Clean Flicks (IMHO - IANAL).
Boycott both.
This space for rent.
Let's imagine that you've just made a small film on a shoestring budget. For the sake of argument, let's say that it's a biting socio-political expose of the corruption in industry and goverment.
Now here comes Microsoft. They buy copies of your film, redact the parts that they don't like, and release them with your name on it, and slap on little "Edited to remove adult themes" stickers.
I can't think of a way to drive up demand more for the redacted parts than telling people The Man doesn't want them to see it. The publicity would probably drive up demand for the original more than if M$ did nothing at all.
Best,
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
Oh yeah, because you know, English is such a static thing. Why don't you go and read Canterbury Tales and shut up.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
A lot of material that I might find objectionable is gratuitous. Sometimes it is a good movie, but I don't want my kids to see people getting it on or enjoying violence.
I guess fast-forwarding through objectionable parts is out too. Except for commercials, though, right? Oh wait, they want you to have to watch those too.
Hmmmm....
What do you have against the LDS Church? Oh, you said Moron, not Mormon. Sorry.
Broadcast TV gets permission to do this, therein lies the difference.
What I'd really like to see is Clean Flicks version of The Fountainhead. Would they remove the scene where Roark destroys the buildings he designed because someone else altered his design?
I wish these people would edit the sex out of their own lives, it would do wonders for the gene pool!
My other sig is extremely clever...
If the films are distributed under a GPL style license, everbody has the right to edit them and re-distribute. But I dont think they are.
What this people is doing has nothing to to with copyright, but with censorship. Have any of you lived in a country where there is censorship? Like Cuba or former Soviets Republics?
Imagine that you were in Moscow and were assisting Rambo III edited to suit the Soviet ideals, would you like it?
When someone censors parts of an artistic work, its changing the meaning of what the artist tried to express.
PENAROL: Seras eterno como el tiempo y floreceras en cada primavera.
This seems like a kind of stupid thing for CleanFlicks' customers to be doing, as in the long term, it can only make things worse; for every cleaned-up copy that CleanFlicks sells/rents, an original copy is purchased. So, the studio's sales figures reflect every copy that goes through CleanFlicks.
If you are the sort of person that doesn't approve of the type of material they are removing, do you really want to increase sales on those items for the studio? What is happening, in effect, by CleanFlicks existence, is that sales of the very type of movies that their customers are offended by are being increased!
Studios are going to see sales rise on these "offensive" titles as CleanFlicks becomes more popular. And what will they do in response? Make even more "offensive" movies.
If people don't like the content of the movie, don't watch it. In particular, DON'T PAY FOR IT, even through CleanFlicks. When you pay for something, you are casting a vote of approval for that item.
And who wins from this cycle? CleanFlicks! Because as time goes on and movie studios find that they can sell "offensive" movies to a much broader audience than intrisically "clean" films (counting those who buy both the original and the CleanFlicks versions), they will begin to only make "offensive" ones. So CleanFlicks ends up being the only place you can buy a clean movie.
I've watched Blues Brothers hundreds of times... WGN and TBS/TNT would show the living hell out of them. Years ago, we actually switched from one channel to the other, near the end of the movie. It had just started on the other.
So, I bought the DVD when it came out. To my surprise, there were an extra 10+ minutes of footage I hadn't seen, since it was mostly swear words (like the scene with 'Da Penguin'). There was extra footage added as well, so that was cool, but I was amazed that the movie "I knew so well" had a ton of stuff I had forgotten about.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
It's amazing to me that people here who think that buying a CD, ripping the music and then distributing it, should somehow be above the law, but a person can not legally *purchase* a movie, alter it, lable it as altered and then charge a rental fee.
This is a market solution to the problem of objectionable speech. The Supreme Court has observed that community standards vary. With censored and uncensored versions of the same films, clearly marked, the market can choose freely.
Nobody wants to subject the filmmakers to prior restraint on what they can say. However, if i want freedom FROM objectionable speech and i'm denied a bowlderized version, I'll apply pressure and more readily accept censorship to start getting "clean" films again.
There is a fear that religious types will impose their moral standards on everyone else. In this case, the religious types are trying to get "clean" movies without bugging everyone else.
Disclaimer: I'm a Fundamentalist Baptist Deacon. I have no desire to mess with how you you live. What I want most is to live peaceably according to my own moral standards. How you live is between you and God--and i'm not God.
The court cases in question may help clarify some legal principles about the meaning of "ownership," but they won't effect the ability of people to purchase professionally third-party editted versions of movies in the long run. The reason, as usual, is technological. My understanding of how Clean Flicks operates is that they purchase VHS copies of of movies and physically remove the "objectionable" segments of videotape from the cassette for their clients (the old-fashioned form of editting). So what they are doing is akin to buying a copy of Playboy magazine for a prude and ripping out the pages that would offend your client before delivering it. The courts will ultimately make some kind of judgement about whether that practice is legal, but it's a moot point. By the time these litigants have exhausted all the inevitable appeals, movies will no longer be distributed on videotape, and I am not aware of any means of physically editting a standard DVD that will allow it to be played again. The question of whether a copy of a DVD can be made, editted, burned and sold (along with the DVD that it was copied from), will also be moot by the time it is adjudicated, because it will be much simpler to develop a playback system that will only allow a DVD to be played when it is accompanied by a third-party set of edit commands (to be downloaded from the censor of your choice). Even if a DVD is somehow setup to prevent jumping forward through objectionable parts, use of a TIVO-like buffer will allow the edit instructions to be followed anyway. After a great deal of turmoil, what is most likely to happen is that the movie producers will come to appreciate that THEY can charge an added premium for DVD's that come originally equipped with alternate edits that can be selectively blocked by the end user. Given a choice between letting other businesses profit off of after-market editting instructions, or selling the service themselves, the producers will inevitably chose to pre-empt the after-market and make a few extra bucks.
What you describe is exactly what copyright is designed to prevent. Modifieing a copyrighted work for profit.
No, it isn't. Copyright is designed to prevent you from making entirely new copies and selling those, not modifying ones that have already been sold.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Besides being sanctioned by the studios, how is this different than movies being "editted for content" before being shown in prime time? A lot of movies shoot alternate scenes with watered-down dialog for just this purpose. The ones that don't wind up with badly dubbed lines that look sillier than 70's kung fu movies. (Yay, Action channel!)
Clean Flicks is not preventing anyone from seeing the original work, it's available right down the street at Blockbuster. They have no monopoly power. And from the sound of it, they do not mis-represent their offerings as being the original work. In fact, it seems that their business model relies on customers knowing what they are getting.
The major studios, OTOH, want to be the sole provider of all digital content for every individual in the new millenium. They want everyone to have a broadband internet pipe into a trusted computing platform that will manage the studios' digital right to draft pay-per-view fees directly from our electronic funds. And the only choice they want to give us is take it or leave it.
Now, which side seems more evil?
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
Copyright was designed to give people an incentive to produce things, not this specifically.
When the revolution comes, your works will be edited, and you will like it
How exactly do you edit a DVD without copying it, and when has it ever been legal to sell copies of a work without the permission of the work's creator? Perhaps CleanFlicks should get into the business of producing their own clean movies, instead of taking a knife to a filmmaker's work.
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
If there's seriously a market for cleaned-up movies, I believe it should be something that Hollywood should WORK WITH rather than attempt to quash. And I think that there IS a market - think of it. Your kids want to see some movie like Terminator 2, but of COURSE you won't rent it for them if they're say, 8 years old - you don't really want your kids watching Arnie ripping his forearm skin off to show the terminator underneath. Wouldn't it be a nice touch for kids to be able to keep the morals & story of the movie intact without subjecting them to the gore ?
I respect director's rights to get their movie out there, but really - they could glean increased sales by making seperate, "cleaner" versions of movies for family viewing, increasing the range of people that can watch it, and Clean Flicks can stay in business, perhaps as a subsidiary or tier in the movie business. Otherwise, people may have to pirate^H^H^H^H^H^H^Htape the movies off network TV, where movies ARE edited (usually for length, but sometimes for content).
i'm amazed that i survived - an airbag saved my life.
Actually you are wrong. Cutting a work up and making something else out of it, even if you own the copy you cut up, is, in law, creating a derivative work, and may violate copyright as much as making a copy does.
One of the canonical examples of derivative works is the collage. There is also a more recent case in which an artist was found liable for buying postcards and modifying them without permission (making an attractive ornament in this case -- I think he embedded it in resin or something). He then sold the ornaments. This was held to be creating a derivative work.
So nice try, but no picture of Queen Victoria.
NO ID: BEING FREE MEANS NOT HAVING TO PROVE IT
This seems to be covered under USC Title 17, Chapter 1, Sec. 106A(a)(2), since that would be prejudicial to your reputation. Under that clause, they couldn't claim you authorized that edited version.
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If I buy a book and I want to tear out pages or cross through the boring bits or color in the pictures or fold over the corners where the dirty bits are, or write in the margin why the author was wrong... yes, I can do all that because it's my book.
Granted. But what if you want to sell that book later? Is it still the same book you bought?
Used college textbooks sell for 1/2 to 2/3 of the price of new texts, even if they're the same edition and only a single semester old, for this reason: by applying your edits to the book, you're decreasing its value to anyone but yourself.
That's right, just like I can buy a car, respray it, replace the seats and resell it. Oh no, profiting without respecting a 'specific vision' how terrible. If you don't want me to modify a car don't sell it to me, clear?
A car is not a copyrighted work. Your analogy is poor and misleading.
This has been going on for years, only on a much larger scale. Ever watch a movie on any of the big networks? Armageddon was on last night and various scenes were cut out. Airlines do this with the movies they show.
Of course, my all time favorite version of an edited movie is Die Hard (not sure what network it was shown on), in which "motherfucker" was replaced with "my friend."
That's classic.
the point is that a bookstore cannot sell you a book that's been altered.
How is this different than allowing a movie to be edited for content when shown on network TV?
This space intentionally left blank.
I live in Utah and rent from Clean Flicks a few times a month. I love it! It gives me a chance to see films I would not see otherwise.
Well, I have to disagree. Cleanflicks and others are making a profit because there is some demand for these movies that are not full of sex and violence. You may think these people sheltered, but the argument that they can always just watch something else just flies in the face of /. logic. On /., do we not bemoan the lack of competition in the OS market. We decry MS for being a monopoly that forces their brand of computing on us despite what the consumer may want. In the case of Cleanflicks, we have Hollywood forcing their vision of how the world should be upon us. If you wish to be entertained by a movie these days, you basically have to either give in to being submitted to that vision or watch very, very few movies, as many are full of gratuitous sex and meaningless violence. In the end, copyright law may go the way of Hollywood. However, remeber this. If it is illegal for a company to provide this service to families who can legally do this in their own homes, how long will it be before the same laws are construed to take away your fair use rights making it illegal for you to modify content in any way? To ensure that ppl are in compliance, the content will be formatted to work only with DRM software, like MS Media Player on an embedded Paladium system. The future just looks more and more bleak. The lifeless entity known as the corporation has more rights than you, a living, breathing citizen.
Clean Flicks are only doing this because there is a sizeable market for their "one of a kind" product. To someone higher up in that company that is a niche market with many dollars to be cornered. Don't think for a second that if the movie companies provided their own clean versions that these clean flick people would not be out selling crack to babies. It's all about trying to dig into the wallets in a unique market.
It's not about giving the "moral majority" the priveledge of viewing this art (even in it's crippled form). It's about identifying a market and driving the hammer home, all the way to the bank. (I lived in Utah most of my life, and you would be queasily surprised at how the rich got rich in that neck of the woods.)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
No, really. What's this bullshit about being ''forced'' to watch something with sex and violence; do you have a goddamned gun to your head when you go rent a movie? No, you don't. If your bloody religion/ethics/morals/pancakes don't allow you to watch certain types of movies, don't watch them. This attitude we fucking allow is downright retarded.. ''BOOHOO, I HEARD A CUSS WORD IN A MOVIE, I'M GONNA GET ALL UP IN A TIFFY AND COMPLAIN ABOUT IT.''
:(
Christ alfuckingmighty. I don't get bent out of shape when I'm sneezing and someone says ''god bless you.'' Aw, hell no.
Shut up, you whiney bitches. Go watch fucking little house on the desert island with no ''evil'' influences to corrupt you.
Recap: If your moral or ethical values don't allow you to watch something with oodles of sex, violence, foul language, et cetera. Don't watch it. Don't be a whiney brat, or watch the movie, and deal with it. Don't whine, complain, and otherwise cause other people problems because you want everything your way. Watch it the original way and DEAL WITH IT or DON'T WATCH IT.
Sigh, I do agree with Clean Flicks on this issues, it's sad though, if you do buy something, you do have the right to mutilate it as you see fit, in my opinion.
goddamn it, now look, you made me talk like an asshat!#@! YOU FORCED ME TO DO IT#@!
boohoo.
Certainly you would allow someone to mark up the book you sold them. Make annotations in the margins. Use highlighter to select passages. Oh wait, if they use BLACK highlighter you are upset, but yellow is ok.
The original unretouched movie is bought. The author got all of his economic benefit out of that copy. Can a marked-up version of a book be sold at a garage sale? Can it be lent to a friend?
The problem is that they are in the business of selling markups, and going beyond a personal use of the book. However, if they do not copy the book, what's wrong?
Forget the rights of the original creator.
You seem to be unaware that when you grant someone a right, you are taking a right away from someone else, or several someone elses.
Giving the original creator the right to have his vison remain untouched means taking away the right from everyone else to touch it. Shall we forget their feelings, or that they're even human beings at all, because it's so much easier to think of them as the Evil Vision Destroyers, whose editing are so damaging to our visionaries.
CVP can be acheived without editing the film... if it's on DVD. Think about it: Someone describes the film in a standard format (say, an XML file). This format does not say "This part is bad", but just describes the content.
The user can then use a DVD player that recognizes this file format to play only the parts they want to see. The media is never modified.
This has uses outside of over-protective parents. Think: Only watch the good parts of a Jackie Chan flick. Or in education, a foreign language teacher could show clips of a foreign film that so the language function they're trying to teach.
Anyway, I hope that people remember that this is bigger than Johnny's mom not wanting him to see the "bad" parts of Titanic.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
There is a point to intellectual property. There is a point to creative or authorial rights, and it's not just about companies making money, and it's not just an us-vs.-them with regard to wanting access to the source or being able to rip pages out of a book or whatever the other standard arguments are. It's not that simple.
You are not just paying someone to do the job of editing a copy of a movie that you have purchased. As much as it might appear possible to twist it around that way, that's not what's being done.
This company has prepared, modified versions of other people's creative work that they are selling (under whatever arrangement) to customers who want to purchase these prepared, modified versions. (In other words, you're not just handing over a copy of the movie and having them go through the tape and remove the bits you don't want to see.)
This is not a physical property issue. There is something else going on here.
I've written software in my life, too, and some of it has been open source and some of it not, and in each case it's been for the better.
But my god, I did not pour every ounce of my being into code the way I have into a film. I can't possibly side with a company that wants to make a profit by changing what I've created. I would much rather prefer that people offended by the content simply not watch it.
I defend (to this degree, at least) intellectual property. I may be alone here.
I felt that I needed to reply to this. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I guess maybe it's because I'm involved in the arts I see this differently, but for me not only is there no question that this is wrong, it is the type of thing that I would fight and die for.
Anyone who thinks this is alright needs to read Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, and this essay. Not all films are made purely for entertainment. Many films are made by large groups of people who care deeply about them, have spent their life perfecting their craft, and have come together to make something they feel is important. They have spent anywhere from six months to several years of their lives. When it is all over, regardless of how great the result is, people involved in such a work often think of it like a child. What these people do is the equivolent of saying "Sure, I'll watch your kid for the afternoon - I'm just going to need to chop off his hand first."
I know to some of the less culturally sophisticated, movies might just mean an afternoon at a Suburban multiplex watching some trashy action flick with millions of dollars in special effects, but to others, art has been instrumental in shaping the world we live in. It can be a powerful force, which is the reason artists are so often oppressed and their work destroyed. Before you so wantonly advocate the destruction of other's work, remember that right now their are people fighting for these rights you wish to discard. Many of these works deal with political, sociological, or philosophical issues and contribute to the way people view the world. Maintaining the right of people to express themselves freely without interlocution is the single most essential building block of a free society.
I heard a local actor/playwright talk about performing in Prague before the fall, and how everyone had met at a spot in the woods, and how he realized as he looked around at the nervous spectators that they had risked their lives to come see him perform. Now mind you, it wasn't that these people couldn't see theatre - they actually had some great theatre there - it was just all 'cleaned up' for them by an authoratarian government.
As Ray Bradbury says, you have a choice to view my work or not to view it. If I make a movie about something that offends you, don't watch it. If you can't find enough movies you really like, make your own. But for the sake of everything good in this world, don't destroy someone elses blood sweat and passion because you have a queasy stomache.
So if the DGA loses this one does that mean they're really going to release the director's cut of Patch Adams?
Granted. But what if you want to sell that book later? Is it still the same book you bought?
Discussion over. You agree with his point.
Used college textbooks sell for 1/2 to 2/3 of the price of new texts, even if they're the same edition and only a single semester old, for this reason: by applying your edits to the book, you're decreasing its value to anyone but yourself.
And to the customers of this service, the edited version has a greater value(or else they would not pay for the service).
All that is necessary for the triumph of good is that evil men do nothing.
While I strongly disagree with the whole concept, I have to say that people should be allowed to do what they want with their property, including having other people edit it for content.
Sigs are awesome huh?
My 6 year old found my Beetlejuice tape and I forgot there was a senseless, out of place F work in the middle of it. What did I do? I rented the dvd, ripped it, edited the soundtrack and remuxed to a cleaner copy, burned it to DVD and gave it to him to watch on the dvd instead of tape. I would have likely paid some company 20 bucks to do it for me but I knew how to do it myself. Either method should be legal, screw hollywood and all it's about.
Karma means nothing to me, so suck it...
It seems like the "cooperative" ownership of copyrighted material could be used to work around the GPL.
Here is the business plan:
Company X gets some GPL programs, makes their own changes to them and keeps them in house. Under the GPL you can make any changes you want without releasing the new source as long as you do not distribute the changed software.
Then, the "customers" of X get charged a "membership" fee to be considered part of company X and then they have access to the "internal" proprietary changes to the GPL. So, the proprietary changes never get "distributed" so they dont have to release the source.
Will someone please tell me I am wrong somehow? I love the GPL and I feel that cooperatively owned business is a much better system than corporations but this seems like a big loophole. How can it be closed?
Although I have no interest in the end product from Clean Flicks, I do believe they should have the right to offer these movies without the gore/nudity/whatever. There is obviously a need/want for these "Clean" films.
Why should a grown adult, who doesn't wish to view sex or violence have the only option be to watch classic Disney videos???
To me, the directors who are bitching sound way too much like the artist(s) who shit in jars and put them in galleries, and then cause a scene when people speak up and say "hey thats digusting".
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
The moderator didn't agree, and used a moderation point to show displeasure. This is a corruption of the moderation system.
So they're decreasing the value of the movie to anyone but themselves. Woo-hoo, big deal. What's that have to do with the legality of it?
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I'm always struck by various entities attempts to edit content to fit a particular purpose.
MTV does this all of the time bleeping words in videos, blurring gang signs and logos, and occasionally just not showing a video.
The problem with this, is that if editing is inconsistent(and it usually is) you find that the messages that get through are worse than the one's that were edited out.
Classic example, Tom Petty's video for "You Don't Know How it Feels." This song featured the lyric "Let's get to the point lets roll another joint" MTV replaced the word "joint" with some mumbling. Contrast that with the video for "Gin and Juice" by Snoop Dogg. This song features lyrics(I don't remember them exactly)which described driving while sipping on Gin and Juice. I'm not trying to start a drug debate here, but I think we can all agree that drinking and driving is more dangerous than smoking pot. MTV sends the message, drive with your Gin and Juice, just don't sit at home and smoke pot!
Another example of MTV's inconsistent editorial policy is the editing of Sublime's "Santeria", and Coolios "Gangsta's Paradise" In "Santeria" the lyric "Daddy's got a new 45" has the gun reference(45) removed. In "Gangstas Paradise" the gun reference is not removed from the line "Got a 10 in my hand and a gleam in my eye." Message, it's ok for Coolio to brandish a Mac-10, but the guy from Sublime can't have a '45!
The more subversive message is that videos marketed to white kids will have "dangerous" content removed, videos marketed to black kids will not have "dangerous" content removed.
My other sig is extremely clever...
This sounds like a great company. Personally, I wonder what they'd do if I started an account there, and made copies of their work and started to resell what they made?
I mean technically, I own what they distributed to me since I'm part of the Co-Op. It's no longer the product that the director or studio made, so does it belong to either one?
I actually endorse CleanFlicks on this one. I still would like to see them go out of business though (can't stand those holier than thou morals).
I wonder if their movies are still encrypted with CSS controls? Or should these guys get nailed by the DMCA? I'd think this would be the way the acronyms of America (MPAA/RIAA/DGA) would go to sue these guys. They must be circumventing Copy Protection to create copies of the videos right?
More power to CleanFlix to sue the fuck out of the acronyms of America. I think we should all send Fucking Profane e-mail to cleanflicks showing our full-fucking-fledged goddamn whoring support.
Nah, they probably have content filters on their e-mail...
This is rather obvious. If they make this illegal then every network will be required, by law, to either show a film completeltely uncut and unedited (no more "edited for TV"), or they can't show it.
Please tell me why networks can edit for content but these people can't. It's not as if they're hiding what they are doing. In fact, many people go them to specifically for the service they provide. It sounds like they're getting paid for each copy. On top of that, if the people renting later decide they want to see the original, they certainly know how then can do that. I fail to see how this can be illegal.
i belive, that if each consumer, the end consumer, were deleteing these scenes then it would be fair use. Too not watch certain parts of a movie because they may be offinsive is certainly fair use.
i dont believe that a person or company may alter a movie and then sell it, essentially makeing profit off of someone elses merchandise. This is not fair use, this is theft.
the only way around that i can see, is selling the end consumer a box that can skip scenes, and then selling them some sort of program or key that skips scenes preselected by the 'clean films' company. then you would certainly be selling them a service and NOT selling them altered versions of a film.
Imagine I design a machine to play movies from a VHS tape.
Now imagine I buffer a certain amount to ram before playing because I am playing through a computer screen.
Now imagine my machine can be programmed to skip certain bits for certain amounts of time under programme control.
Imagine further that my machine will allow me to insert bits of my choosing from an internal hard disk, either during those dropped bits, or during non dropped parts as well.
Using such a machine, I could supply "EDIT PROGRAMMES" which would allow a user to watch a movie edited in any way I choose, or since I would supply my machine (actually the programmes that go along with it) under the GPL, in any way the user chooses. There could even be competeing edit list programmes available for download on the net.
Is it your position that such a machine and such edit list programmes should be illegal?
Going further, should we make it illegal for a child to draw a beard on a picture in a magazine? How about a parent to hire an artist to put beards on every picture in every magazine his children read in order to amuse them? (Don't forget the artist will be making money by latering someone else's creative work.)
A Nony Mouse
(Unchecked, please overlook typos and such.)
~;-)
Here's an example I found on the Web. In the original version of this scene from Titanic (shown on the left...her naked chest is blurred, which rather detracts from the point), Kate Winslet is lying nude on the couch while Leo draws her. In the 'revised' version from MovieMask, she's chastely wearing a blouse.
Now Titanic ain't exactly Citizen Kane, but this is wrong on so many levels. It's called artistic vision, folks, and it's not to be taried with. Artists have very few rights in our culture, but presenting their art the way they intended is one of them.
Because I believe that any unauthorized change to a work of art is unforgivable, I'm reticent to address specific cases, but I can't resist. In this case, this is a critical scene in the film's romantic sub-plot. When Winslet's character, Rose, exposes herself hear to Jack, it is a statement of the changes in her that he has engendered. It is Rose's pronouncement of independence. Now it'sjust a scene about the heroine getting drawn.Furthermore, the historical details of costume and scenography received exacting detail in this film. Which historian picked out Winslet's digital ensemble? Dave, the video editing guy?
MovieMask ('You're gonna love it!' says product endorser Marie Osmond) and its brethren offer sanitized versions of, among others, Fight Club, Saving Private Ryan, Schlinder's List and Training Day. In all of these films, the violence is crucial to the artwork's theme. Not just plot or setting,but theme--the films' central messages. The idea of violence as therapy is at the centre of Fight Club. The first twenty-six minutes of Saving Private Ryan represent one of the most moving and powerful depictions of war in cinematic history. To cleanse them of violence is to strip them of their power. To edit Schlinder's List, deeply disrepects the trials of the Jewish people. Without drugs, violence and foul language, Training Day is Turner & Hooch with goatees.
Much of the market for this product comes from Christians in the United States. Why do I say this? It's espoused on Christian sites like this, CleanFlicks is based in Utah and the Moral Majority has a rich history of censorship. Why do these people want to see these films in the first place, if they're morally dubious? So they can chat about Matt Damon around the water cooler? Tough luck. You either opt in to our culture of violence and sex or you opt out.
But that's not true...if you're only opposed to violence, go see My Big Fat Greek Wedding. If you're opposed to sex and foul lanugage, you're pretty safe watching The Bourne Identity or Panic Room. If you're opposed to both, try The Man Who Wasn't There or Star Wars or Shrek. Unless you're particularly conservative, you've got lots of options. Exercise discretion. I do it, my mother does it and so can you. Alternately, you can suffer alone on your moral high-ground.
But that's not true, either. There's a massive multi-million dollar industry in Christian music, films and books. You can consume art for a lifetime and not hear a secular note, view a Hollywood frame or read an aetheist page. In fact, from what I can tell, the per-capita expenditure on Christian art among Christians is way above the secular average. All the more power to them.
Ultimately, this type of censorship is worse than banning art outright. This way, people have the impression that they've seen a film (why stop there? Shall we cover up Michaelangelo's David's naughty bits?) when they've seen a toothless abberation, a mere shadow of the actual artwork. To the users of MovieMask's and CleanFlicks's and a dozen others' services, do everybody a favour: either watch original films that you're comfortable with or, better yet, just throw out your TV.
I think there's a fundamental flaw with generalising from what is essentially the second hand market into a commercial enterprise.
Sure, you can buy a book, rip pages out write things in it and sell it to someone who knows and understands what you've done. But what if you made a business out of it? You bought the books in bulk, had automated page ripper outers and printers that put your comments in, then wanted to resell them? Do you see anything wrong with that?
What if there was a book and you ripped out the pages to make sections of it appear completely out of context, and then resold it to the masses? That's what it gets down with, you're screwing with someone's creative vision, you're messing with their fundamental right to have their work expressed in the way they want to it be expressed.
What if there was a movie that was trying to deal with a sensitive and delicate subject, and you decide to omit some key lines? How about just dubbing over some parts? Is subtracting elements any different from adding? Could someone make a business where they splice some copyright free porn into a Disney film and sell them? Can anyone see why Disney would be legitimately concerned by this?
What right does a commercial venture have to modify someone else's work and re-release it? They want to build a business model on maiming films.
I know most of you guys here are probably more familiar with coding, which is a lot more practical, functional, and so resists analogies to 'artistic integrity', but movies, books or artwork aren't a loose collection of discreet objects, the whole is worth more than the sum of its parts, and the thought of some company butchering films to appease the morally righteous, is disturbing.
I consider there to be an important difference between someone's right to choose how they experience a product, and someone's right to make a business out of altering someone else's copyrighted material and reselling it. If they want to sell altered films, get the film makers authorisation. Otherwise they should be telling their customers to go watch something G rated in the first place.
Forget the rights of the original creator.
I think what you're describing are refered to as 'moral rights', and apparently they exist in law in many countries, but not the US. Although, as the Findlaw article brings up, there are laws that prevent someone's name being attached to a work they did not create, and Clean Flicks might be crossing the line there.
--
Benjamin Coates
I don't understand why they would fight this so much. They aren't losing creativity here, they are gaing another sell to someone that probably wouldn't have bought the movie to begin with otherwise. Hell, what I'm surprised at is that, seeing that someone is making money doing this, that they haven't come up with their own clean versions to put these places out of business. After all, we all know it is really about money.
What Clean Flix should do is offer the directors a couple of points out of the profit made from cleaning the movies. Then we could all sit back and watch the directors whore out their "creative vision" for a quick buck!
Usurper_ii
Ron Paul
Yes, it does violate federal copyright law.
The question is: should it?
Copyright is the right to copies, not derivatives. However, rightly or wrongly, Congress gave the content industries rights over derivative works which means just about anything with any relationship to a copyrighted work is supposedly under their control.
This is strange because any altered version is certainly not a copy.
Copy
So, one would surmise that copyright would not apply to altered versions as they are not "imitations." However, Congress did not see it this way, so the MPAA will probably win.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Damn right there is
The issue that the thread misses is that for the directors film making is a means to ends that include more than just profit. Kubrick, Stone & co also want to make statements. And the law gives them that right.
As a film financer I have a right to have the speech I fund protected. I don't like mysogenistic patriarchal attitudes in Utah any more then in Afghanistan.
Stopping a woman from showing her naked body is only one step from putting her on a pedestal and taking away her right to be a doctor or a lawyer or any other 'unsitable' profession for those who are placed on pedestals. And it is only two steps from covering them with a Burqua.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
These people aren't trying to take my naked women away they're trying to keep from looking at boobs themselves...and they own the video. As long as they don't come to my house they should be allowed to do what they want in their own. God bless freedom.
That's perhaps an extreme example, although you can take it further (what if they start adding scenes?).
No, that would be creating a *derivative* work, which I'm pretty certain is already covered under todays copyright law. There's a pretty big difference between an incomplete work (scenes cut) and a derivative work.
Oh, and I don't know if that's the case here but I'd definately put on a big disclaimer that the work has been edited without the copyright holder's permission. While I feel the right to cut scenes is fine, giving the impression that this was somehow approved is not.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There is obviosly a massive market for "cleaned up" movies, or they wouldn't be selling. Instead selling to this maket, and rolling in the dough, Hollywood is shooting itself in the foot, telling consumers they can't have what they want. This alienates many potential customers. Hollywierd is stupid. I support the fair use and personal property rights of consumers who are buying a video, then paying to have the "naughty bits" removed. I like to see the "naughty bits" myself, but not everyone does. Why don't these hollyweird directors whine and moan when broadcast television edits their films for content? Here is a lesson from Econimics 101. Anything that is demanded will be supplied. Hollywood could have been the ones raking in the bucks from the fretful parents and religious nuts, but now someone else is.
How ya like dat?
Dunno if you've been to college at all or recently, but any student I knew would much rather buy a used textbook - not only because they were cheaper, but because if the prior owner was at all intelligent, then it really reduced your workload by the book being well-highlighted. New books almost never sell until the used ones sell out. So the edited version has more value.
In the movie example, how would clean flicks stay in business if they decreased the value of the movie? They buy a movie at standard retail and sell it for more. And obviously they have customers. That's the definition of value-added.
A car is not a copyrighted work. Your analogy is poor and misleading.
A car may not be copyrighted, but it's fairly irrelevant, because there's no part in copyright law that prevents resale (Used record stores still exist). There's also no part that says "upon resale, work must remain intact." So, since copyright law makes no guarantee of creative integrity, the car sees the same protection under law: ie, NONE.
So I'd say the guy's analogy looks pretty good.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
The story is that they are suing, where the ultimate goal is to invoke the force of the government to make people stop editing.
IMHO, that makes DGA the bad guys. If we don't stick up for the Mormons, then the next attack will be closer to home. Next time someone will say that I'm not allowed to use a filtering proxy to change how a web page looks, or that I'm even not allowed to override a stylesheet. Next time, someone will outlaw fast-forwarding through TV commercials. Next time -- no wait, this already happened -- someone will say that it is against the law for me to use an "unlicensed" DVD player, or for someone else to "traffic" in them.
What it all comes down to is, whose rights does this editing infringe? The answer is no one.
Who actually suffers from it? Only the "Clean Flicks" customers themselves. But just because they are worse off, doesn't make them victims, because they are consenting, and you can't have a consenting victim. They think they're coming out ahead.
So are we going to use the force to protect people from themselves? Maybe someone thinks that you need a little protection from your decisions too. Is your religeon a decent one? Is your hair too long? Have you been reading subversive books? Have you been listening to loud music? Have you been ignoring your duty to marry and reproduce? And here's the kicker: have you been watching movies that contain desensitizing violence? ;-) When we set all these things right, it will be for your own good, and put an end to all the unwise and distasteful and hypocritical things in your life. I hope you will be grateful, citizen 542534.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
A car is not a copyrighted work. Your analogy is poor and misleading.
Actually a car is. Its standard to do this with any sort of design which alot of work has been put into, like a design for a building.
If it wasn't, you can be sure there would be tonnes of fake, cheap, imported Corvettes running around.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
What if they sold books with some "bad" pages ripped out? Wtf is wrong with that? As long as they're not saying it's the original book, and the consumer knows what they're getting... It's silly not to be able to do that, don't you think? If every copy is legally purchased?
One may have the right to copy their books, but once sold it should be out of his hands.
And this is different from illegal digital copies which are not bought originally.
Consumer vs. big guys, only in this case, the consumer is almost a big guy.
Wrong.... It IS Utah, AND the LDS Church.
Don't get me wrong, I am LDS, but there is a wierd chemistry between the LDS church and Utah that produces Mormons.
And it's the damn MORMONS that give all of us other LDS a bad name.
Remember the PhantomEditor.... if this suit gives rights to the consumer, I can see a scripting system where the PhantomEditor publishs his "cuts" and we, the consumers, run the cuts against our rips of the DVD... for our own private use.
This one is easy.
The films are copyrighted, and ripping scenes out is creating a derivative work.
Clean flicks is distributing derivative works without permission.
I mean, either copyright law is applicable or it's not. If it is, you can't redistribute derivative works witout permission. If it isn't, the GPL is meaningless, because permission is not required.
Morally, I don't recognize an automatic right to re-distribute derivative works, and when it is done for profit, there is really no reasonable defense.
MM
--
By including this sig, the copyright holders of this work or collection unreservedly place it in the public domain.
Granted. But what if you want to sell that book later? Is it still the same book you bought?
Used college textbooks sell for 1/2 to 2/3 of the price of new texts, even if they're the same edition and only a single semester old, for this reason: by applying your edits to the book, you're decreasing its value to anyone but yourself.
You seem to be opening a whole new can of worms. If you sell a book that you have torn pages from or written in, should that be illegal? You say it is of less value? What if Jim Morrison wrote poetry in the margins? Isn't that more valuable?
And what about the used book sellers? They are buying used books and reselling them at a profit and the author never sees a dime. How many times can you resell Darwin's The Origin of Man before it's worn out? Should the publisher be paid for each resale?
Viv
Gmail invites for ip
If you don't want your kids to see violence or sex, don't show them the bloody movie. Read them a book or something. Or would that be too much work for parents?
There's a persistent misunderstanding on /. regarding the purpose of Clean Flicks et al.
It's not necessarily about parents wanting to let their kids see cleaned up films. The puerile, hormone-crazed and generally sexually amoral /. crowd may find it impossible to believe, but there are plenty of adults who find that their pleasure in viewing films is reduced by the gratuitous sex, nudity, violence and profanity found in many films today. Although they're perfectly aware of the nature of the world and the immorality of most of the people in it, they find fictional representations of it distasteful, not entertaining. Particularly when it serves no purpose other than to titillate.
I'm one of those people. I spent many years in the U.S. military, so I'm certainly no stranger to profanity, and I even have an appreciation for its more inventive uses. Sex (and, hence, nudity) is an important part of my life and a key part of my relationship with my wife, but is something that I feel is better and more valuable if restricted to the two of us. Watching others do it on-screen cheapens it. Violence is an abominable fact of life, and excessive fictional depiction seems, to me, to desensitize me to its heinous reality.
I know this has to blow some of your minds, but I actually prefer my entertainment without unnecessary sex, violence, nudity or profanity.
I got my Clean Flicks membership a year or so ago, and I've rented a couple dozen movies that I would not have watched otherwise (well, sometimes I catch them on airplanes, also edited). I have not allowed any of my children to watch these movies because, even with the editing, they still contain adult thematic elements that are not appropriate for my very young children.
It's not only not always about the kids, among the people I know who frequent Clean Flicks, it's *primarily* for the adults.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
At the extreme you have folks who want to eliminate all traces of sex and violence from the popular media against the movie industry who wants to eliminate all property rights of the consumer.
This is a true statement, but not what's going on here. I see arguments in favor of the movie industry's position, but I vehemently disagree with this. These people are selling information, they are not making money by stealing, duplicating or otherwise appropriating the rights or works of others.
Look at it this way, if the company was selling a list of timecodes. "Turn of your TV from 00:38:14 to 00:39:15" if you don't want to see a violent scene." Would that be violating the rights of the movie's maker? If so, how is that different from a review, aside of specificity of information?
What if they provided a device that would automatically turn off your TV for you during those times? Or better yet, control your VCR to fast-forward through those bits? Would that violate the movie maker's rights? How is this different from that last scenario?
Take it another step, since modifying VCR's is impractical, why not deliver an edited version of the tape with the offending pieces removed? the only difference between this and the second scenario is the way it's implemented. This is practical, the other really isn't. If the customer is paying for the movie, in full, from the studio, than how can this be violating anyone's rights. Are more people getting to see the movie than would be without the service, assuming all videos are still purchased? How is this a violation of rights? If you side with the movie studios on this one (and unlike some people, I do not think they are all-evil or always in the wrong), it seems to me, by logical extrapolation, you have no rights to turn off your TV or even close your eyes if something comes on you don't want to see!
In my (IANAL) opinion, this falls squarely and without question in the realm of Fair Use.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Actually you are wrong. Cutting a work up and making something else out of it, even if you own the copy you cut up, is, in law, creating a derivative work, and may violate copyright as much as making a copy does.
Even a collage is not just cutting something up, it is adding additional material. A straight-out removal of certain portions -- tearing out pages of a book, for example -- does not to my reading of the law constitute a derivative work. (IANAL blah blah)
How about Prince Albert?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
CleanFlicks is merely providing a service. They are removing stuff from movies that you might not want to see. If you want to see the full-length movie with all its gory detail, you are always free to go somewhere else. So what's the problem? Why is it that people fight so blindly for what helps to corrupt our minds in the name of freedom. Let those who want to clean up their lives have a fair shot at doing it.
If you don't want me to modify a car don't sell it to me, clear?
So, can I just not sell my work to you if I don't want you to edit it?
Maybe a non-modification license would be enough?
IMHO, I can distribute my work under any license and all you can do is not buying it.
Best regards
David
This is where that little thing called truth in advertising would come in. Microsoft would have it on the shelf for all of a few days before the injunction prevented them from selling it due to false advertising. The Clean Flicks people are doing exactly what they say they are doing on the other hand. Removing swearing/sex/violence/etc.
I find what CleanFlicks doing is clearly illegal -- they are making copies of copywrited videos. You can't say that they are editing copies that people have purchased, they have to make a new tape (unless they just want to record-over objectional scenes, hard to do with VHS.)
VHS is dead, though. What is more interesting is that the way that the way movies will be edited is by instructing your DVD player to skip or mute certain scenes. I can find no problem with this. You are still buying or renting the original DVD, and you just have a player that skips on occasion. Many of CleanFlicks competitors are already doing this.
I can't think of anything wrong will selling an edit-list to a movie.
Now, I would never buy one whose purpose was to remove 'objectionable' scenes, but I will defend the rights of other people to do so. What possible reason could you have to object to how your neighbor plays the film that he rented?
There will be humorous or interesting alternative edits made. What is the harm in those? Who could it possibly harm?
The advantage of this will be that more flexible DVD players, either hardware or software, will be made. This is a good thing.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Suppose I bought a DaVinci painting, and painted over most of it, but left the signature, then sold it to someone as a DaVinci. That would be fraud, theft by deception, and in the very least unethical.
That is precisely what CleanFlix is doing to movies. They are desecrating someone's creative work. I would agree that they have a right to edit a movie and resell it, but they should be forced to strip the title and the credits (particularly the production/direction/writing credits) before they were allowed to resell it.
No one is saying that if you buy a dvd and take it home that you can't skip scenes or hit the mute button. Or that you can't edit your own copies. Just don't sell them using the reputation of the artists who created the original version.
Okay, this one is interesting -- people get up in arms about web filters, yet not about AOL's parental controls. Why? Because web filters (a) do not filter pornography very well, (b) tend to filter certain types of political speech (2600.com is the classic example) not because they're obscene, but because they're "inappropriate," and (c) are often deployed on unwilling adults; sometimes a library or cybercafe computer will simply be useless for researching breast cancer. No one sane will argue against your right to deploy a perfectly accurate web filter on yourself -- which is pretty much exactly what's going on here.
No, I changed my bleedin' book WITHOUT their permission. Their work is the same as it always was. What about airing movies on TV without any nudity or violence? That actually is sanitization without the permission of the viewer, unlike this -- why aren't you up in arms about that?
This bit could well be, word for word, the argument of a spammer trying the "free speech!" argument for why spamblock lists are a violation of all things holy. It's a stupid argument here for the same reason it's a stupid argument there -- because "that particular population" quite obviously would rather cede control to the hands of a third party, and in some cases (like this one) will actually pay for the privelege. The difference you're pretending to ignore is the difference between employment and slavery.
Yesterday I went to Wendy's and got a burger, and I picked the pickles off before I ate it, so I guess I have the same attitude. Fortunately, it doesn't bother me in the slightest.
I think a good law would be that anyone involved in the "content creation" business these days has to write a hundred times on a blackboard: My rights regarding this copyrighted work are exactly the rights granted to me by the legislature, and no more.
While I mostly agree with you, I think you are talking of US copyright law, which would probably be correct, as I take it this is a US issue.
As I understand it, in France, it would be illegal to buy a painting from someone, change the man's blue shirt to a red shirt, and display it in public.
Go figure. Would someone in France, care to confirm or deny what I have heard aboud your copyright situation?
Perhaps some are speaking from their understanding of copyrights as per their country and this is causing confusion?
A Nony Mouse.
found liable for buying postcards and modifying them without permission
Do you have a link or reference or something for that?
Here's the poll:
Do you favor:
a. preventing private users from editing the property they have bought and paid for for their own private use?
b. see answer a
c. see answer a
Very dumb how the movie industry doesn't sell their films with a pg13 or pg selection on the dvd. They completely lock out families with kids under 9 from all of the pg13 and up movies.
Since the issue in this case is around the editing of the media, perhaps a better idea would be for somebody to create a cheap hardware mod that works with most DVD players that would allow you to enter cards with data on various types of scenes in movies. For example:
type A: pornographic
type B: violent
type C: cowboyneil
Then, let the user tag into the card what scenes he/she doesn't want, and have the hardware skip ahead during those scenes. Of course, this would probably have the hardware vendors down your back, making the playstation mod-chip case look like a picnic. If there were a legal/grey-area-legal way to pull it off though, it would be a good idea. Since the original material isn't altered in any way (only the viewing post-material), there shouldn't be any contentions with the original creators.
And yes, sometimes it is nice to watch a movie for plot without seeing gibbles and bits everywhere - phorm
Copyright laws are not about phyiscal properity, they are about the control of distribution of their "intellectual" material in a fixed medium such as words on a page or a magnetic cassette recording of a musical performance.
The book or DVD disc is almost an accidential artifact that is no ways embodies copyright control.
With a book, the first sale doctrine, allows you to own the physical artifact of the paper and binding, and allows you to resell that single copy of it. It does not give you permission to alter the contents, or produce a reproduction.
Maybe I am wrong here, but I take it CleanFlicks produces a new DVD of the modified content, which in my lay understanding is an unauthorized reproduction of the copyrighted contents. It is not a backup copy because the contents are modified by CleanFlicks, so the exemptions for archival purposes are not relevant.
The reproduced contents are altered which makes it a derived work (reproduce, adapt and publicly present a work by cinematograph, that uses a substantial portion (i.e. the vast majority) of the original creator's content. This should fall under the copyright owner/creator's copyright control.
Lastly it violates the copyright creator's moral right (only creators not owners have moral right, at least in some countries).
I am a law student, and I am appalled by some statements made here.
Reading the FindLaw article, the author's bias is clearly obvious. However, I am going to have to stand opposed to everyone else because I am siding with the DGA.
The issue is a contractual one. The firm purchased the films, but then they edited them and rent them out for profit without the consent of the copyright holder, which is a clear breach of the tacit contract agreed to and limited under the wording of Title XVII of the U.S. Code.
The problem is that the firm is making a profit off of these edited films without authorization for redistributuion according to the terms which the studios require. What makes this egregious compared to normal protection under the Fair Use doctrine is that they are making a profit off of the fact that they are renting out these movies in a manner in which they are not authorized by the copyright owner to rent them. Fair Use usually only applies to noncommercial and private use of a copyrighted work, which is why a person is free to do whatever they wish to their own copy of a movie, book, etc. But once they begin commercial distribution of this product, they are no longer protected by Title XVII.
The columnist on FindLaw (who was a First Amendment lawyer for a major D.C. lobbying law firm) refers to parodies and "sampling." Neither, IMO, apply.
These version of the films do not fall under the definition of parody because a parody requires that the concept is essentially re-created through another person's work in reference to the original source. This is not the case. CleanFlicks is not remaking these films as family-friendly alternatives, which could constitute a legal parody. They are simply hacking up another intellectual property which remains protected under Title XVII as long as they do not use it for commercial redistribution. They are, which nullifies their protection under the law.
Secondly, this is not "sampling," Nor is is citing, quoting, or even referring to the original property. There is only a certain amount of a material which can be taken out and put into a distinct work. However, even if you consider these clean films to be completely new works with samples of the original material (which is a hell of a stretch, IMNSHO), they would still have to get authorization for the commercial use of a property altered from its original form and taken out of the original context.
The reason why airlines and TV networks can get away with this is because they purchase (in some cases, a lot) for the right to redistribute a film for commercial use. Case in point: When NBC purchased the rights to air Heat a few years ago, they purchased the right to edit the film for time and content to comply with FCC regulations. They purchased this right from TimeWarner as owner of the film. In editing the film, they removed in the area of an hour's worth of material so that it could run on a normal Sunday night slot with ~16 minutes of commercials every hour. The director, Micheal Mann, who is now being sued by CleanFlicks, was furious and demanded his name be taken off the film because that was not the film he made. However, because the studio owned the copyright his protests meants precisely dick to both corporations and in the eyes of the law. Another example is the debacle of Tony Kaye's actions while he was making American History X.
CleanFlicks, on the other hand, purchased a copy of the film, with all the inherent restrictions on commercial redistribution, and in clear violation of the law made an illegal profit (even if it was negative, there is a "profit") of the unauthorized commercial distribution of the original film.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the first amendment. it has to do with an egregious violation of a basic contract made between the owners of the copyright and the purchaser requiring any commercial distribution to be authorized by the owner.
...for someone to start the "Pr0n Flix" chain of movie stores where they *add* sex, violence and language to films.
I always felt that Disney films lacked some of those qualities. Beauty and The Beast would really be a smash hit they just had a little more sex it in it.
-s
So if I get up during a performance, I can be sued for NOT seeing all the performance?
Better yet, how about I don't read chapter 3 of a book because it starts out on a subject matter I can't stand. Am I liable?
If I get paid the same regardless of how much content is censored at a performance place, so what.
If I got paid for doing the same amount for doing less; Less is good.
I think impossing a creator's perversity on me and mine is a violation of my civil rights under the first amendment; Also.
I am all for an individual to do what he/she wants with the media he/she purchases. I am also for the right of any parent to control what media is consumed in their home. Companies like Clean Flicks just give consumers these abilities, while still allowing them to enjoy "Good Recent Movies." There is obviously a market for the stuff.
I think the Director's Guild hasn't a leg to stand on. The alterations are done at the request of the consumer. Copyright law is meant to protect the producers of content from others using it and representing it has there own, And also to make sure that the producers reap the benefit of there labor. Nothing Clean Flicks does compromises that. As for the integrity of the work, I think as long as the editing is subtractive, and at consumer request, they should be allowed to do this. Meaning not adding or changing scenes. Just cutting scenes and overdubbing profanity. Companies like Clean Flicks are not changing what the artists say, only what words, and images they use to say it with. And that is no different that editing a movie for broadcast TV or music for Broadcast Radio.
- clean flix is a service that does what you tell them to do with your media
- clean flix does not redistrubute films
- clean flix does not add scenes
- clean flix is not try to create new a "de facto" version of the film
The concept of your test is great, but your application is horrible.I have often wished for a slightly cleaned up version of "A Clockwork Orange" to show to someone who has issues around sexual violence (other kinds of violence are OK). Let's say I buy a copy on VHS, physically trim out the rape scene and splice the tape back together. Imagine being Stanley Kubrick now. How would you feel? Imagine not being able to make a physical modification to media that you purchased? You know what, I don't fucking care how Stanley Kubrick would feel about me editing his film, anyway. He can make his art, he can make his money, people can see it the way they want to. Everybody wins.
Sure, if they're buying a copy of your original every time they sell a redacted version then you make money, but perhaps that wasn't your intention. By bringing money into it - whether you ask for it or not - they also paint you as a whore
If you weren't interested in making money from it, then don't sell it. Because once you sell a copy to someone, they then have the fair use right to modify that copy in any way they like, and also to resell that copy. They don't have a right to create a new copy and distribute that, and they can't claim that it's the original when they sell it, but that's the limit of your power once you decide to distribute it.
This is the "can't have your cake and eat it, too" principle.
I'm sure if you distributed it with a contract attached that states that you retain ownership of all copies and specifying what may and may not be done with them, and if you made all recipients sign the contract, then the courts would back you up.
Whether or not you could get anyone to sign that contract is a separate question.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
hard to believe though it may be hurting people's feelings isn't a crime
Yes it is. In the extreme it's called "hate speech", but there are plenty of anti-discrimination, harrasment, and other "political correctness" laws that, in essence, make it illegal to hurt someones feelings.
However, hurting someones feelings by burning a copy of the book they wrote is specifically protected by copyright law as criticism, which falls under Fair Use. I would say there's a fairly strong First Amendment arguement to support it as well.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
What rights are those? If you don't want someone cutting up your movie, and possibly reselling it, don't sell them a copy. That goes whether "them" is Joe Blow or Microsoft.
What duplication? You seem to be talking about situations that do not exist.
My husband once had a novel published in Germany. The publisher attempted to turn it from a serious novel into an action story by cutting out all the philosophy, social criticism, and any other thoughtful bits. The resulting translation was 1/4 shorter than the original and resulted in the German reviewers accusing the book of being fascist.
Similarly, when Miyazaki's Nausicaa was originally released in the US (before the current Disney go-round), most of the flashbacks to Nausicaa's childhood and scenes of her in her laboratory trying to solve the ecological problems were cut, reducing the film to an action flick with people running around and killing each other for incomprehensible reasons.
For decades, the only version of King Kong shown in the US was one which had had a couple of the more violent scenes edited out. The result was to make Kong seem far less dangerous and compromise both the meaning and the emotional impact of the ending.
The problem is not that re-editors might bleep a word here or cut a few seconds of nudity there. It's more the problem of wholesale cuts -- take out a graphic rape scene and you lose the motivation of the character who tries to avenge it, minimize a violent ending and you blunt the criticism of the characters' actions which made that ending inevitable.
Beyond that, it raises the possibility of wholesale manipulation of film for political ends -- for example, turning anti-war films into films which glorify war or turning films which criticize racism into ones which show members of minorities as being agrieved for no obvious reason and the groups which exclude them as merely wanting to be left alone.
Granted, in all the cases I cited above, the cuts were authorized somewhere along the line. Original creators haven't always had full control over their works. But authors, at least, are becoming more aware of the problem, so that contracts today are likely to say something like "additions, abbreviations, or alterations shall be made in the text only with the written consent of the proprietor."
The easier it gets to alter films anywhere along the distribution stream, the more important it is to establish a right of artistic integrity.
is a very old concept. These are abridged flicks. No diff really.
> By your token, because I buy a book, I should therefore own all the contents of the book. This is the reason that copyright law exists--to protect the people who create things.
No, it's not. Copyright is there to ensure that a stream of new material is created and eventually reaches the end consumer. It is there for the benefit of society, not the benefit of creators alone. It is definitely *not* there to protect the artistic integrity of whatever the creator produces. If people are aware they are getting the censored version, and they prefer that, the creator can go fuck himself if he believes he has any right to force people to consume the whole thing or none of it. Do you want to make it illegal for people to walk out of movie theaters early too ?
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
By your token, because I buy a book, I should therefore own all the contents of the book. This is the reason that copyright law exists--to protect the people who create things.
You're suffering from a confusion of ideas. Just because I own a book does not mean I own the copyright to that book.
The copyright is the right to copy and distribute a work. Just like you can own and book and not own the copyright, so too you can own the copyright and not own a single copy of the book.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
You're on the right track. This issue is nothing about DRM or censorship. It's about creative control of artistic works.
About 10 years ago a sculptor was hired to spruce up a large empty plaza between office buildings to make it more visually appealing. He chose to put in a large metal plate over a hundred feet long which bisected the open space. The workers in the office buildings hated it because now they couldn't walk straight through the plaza during lunch or to get to their cars, they had to walk around this piece of art. The purchasers of the art decided to cut a passageway in the middle of the sculpture. The artist sued on the grounds that although the building owners had purchased his artwork, he still retained creative control. Unfortunately, the news media never followed up on the case and I never learned what the court decided.
Anyways, that's all this is about. If the artist (director) retains creative control and maintains that the work must be viewed as it was made, then it's illegal to edit out portions of the movie, it's illegal to step out during playback to go to the bathroom, it's illegal to pause the movie if the dog knocks over the BBQ grill and starts a fire, it's illegal to close your eyes if you don't want to see a particularly gory scene.
BTW, it's not censorship if the unedited version is as easily or more easily available. If it's censorship you want to stop, there are lots of movies that aren't available for purchase/viewing at all or are only available in edited format. They're from the early 20th century or during WWII and contain what are now considered improper political and racial stereotypes. What? It's not censorship if you happen to agree with it?
The "Big Three" do this all the time. Remember "f*ck you" becoming "thank you" on The Breakfast Club? If it can be "Editted for Television" why can't it be done so privately? Shit on the customer...they're hooked anyway. >
When I order a cheese burger, I have the right to get it without, lettuce, tomato's, pickle or onion. If I get my cheeseburger with this stuff, I'm picking it off. Same thing with movies. It should be my right to have the option to get it any way I want it. And Clean Flicks, is just taking off the produce for me.
Theonlyuse of monkeys is to testthings onthem.Some peoplemay say"Hey That'scruel!"and myresponse is"I don't like monkeys
I doubt anyone will read this, being so late, but here's a thought that occurred to me:
Cliff's Notes seem to be a similar analogy to what this company is doing, in some way. Think about it: you still get the gist of the story, you just don't get every single word. You don't get the inflections, the descriptions, the graphic detail. I don't know really what to do with this analogy.
2nd, let's assume that we never touched the media. No tape is sliced, no DVD is laser-beamed, but instead, let's imagine a viewer (say a DVD viewer) where the original media is inserted, and only certain portions are played as per a predetermined script.
1. Play time sequence 0:00 to 0:30
2. Play time sequence 0:35 to 2:59
3. Play time sequence 3:50 to 10:00
Now... have we committed an infringement? What is the difference between that and having a real person who has seen the movie say.. "Okay, now skip to *this* part" ?
I don't know.
"They said I probly shouldn't fly with just one eye," "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
This is an interesting problem for me to wrap my mind around.. part of me wants to side with Clean Flicks due to fair use and such. But the logical thinking side of me argues that if they don't like the movies content, they aren't forced to watch the movie. Saying that they can get around copyright law by forming a cooperative ownership club is kind of like saying libraries should be able to censor and change books due to the fact that people support them through taxes and are members by purchasing a library card.
One of the protections for the creator of a work which is built-in to copyright law is the right to control what are called derivative works. If I change something from an original work, whether it is taking something out like CleanFlicks or incorporating one work in another, I'm creating something new -- a new derivative work as it is called. Creating a derivative work without the permission of the original copyright holder is an infringement of their rights as guaranteed in copyright law. I think that while its current implementation leaves some things to be desired, copyright is a good thing as an idea -- it is set up in the U.S. Constitution after all, and you should be able to sell your book that you wrote without someone else selling it with their name on it. We want to encourage people to make new things and copyright was meant to protect those people's ability to profit from their own work.
If I look into the history of Cinema, there is one thing I see case after case after case of: censorship, either by the government or self-censorship under pressure from religious and community groups. This is the reason why we have ratings. Films with language and sexual content get "worse" ratings than those that do not. The ratings system has an incredible amount of power over the creation of movies in the first place, and this is tantamount to having CleanFlicks come in during pre-production and saying "no don't include that." There is a reason why a studio will do almost anything to make sure a film does not get an NC-17 kiss of death. The ratings system is designed so that you can say "look that movie has nudity and violence, and I don't want to see that" --- and so you go see another film or whatever suits your fancy. Does owning a copy of a film on DVD or whatever give me the right to change it as I see fit? No. Can I copy portions of it for my own personal non-commercial or educational purposes? Probably. Fair use is not an absolute right set up in any particular law. Fair use is a defense when you are sued for copyright infringement, and it has tests that are all decided on a case-by-case basis. What would be nice is if there was some legislation that outlined exactly what fair use is.
Movies as shown on network TV are edited, yes. They are edited often for time and for content. I think it is terrible to do so. In this case, however, the owners of the copyright have consented to the changes ( $ is a powerful motivator ) in order to show the movie on TV. I wish movies were not edited when they were shown, period, but I guess I'm in the minority.
I think if you don't want to watch a movie with violence, sex, or whatever, you should look at our built-in mechanism for self-censorship, the ratings, and decide what to watch based on that. That's what it is there for.
-K
What disgusts me, in this case, is not the copyright issues but the fact that some people will actually PAY to have "clean" movies...
We've always been at war with Eurasia.
If the director's case is uphelpd, then wouldn't it also be a breach of copyright to sell any book that didn't contain each and every letter it originally contained?
No, but it would (conceivably) be illegal to purchase a bunch of copies of books, edit out half the material of each one and then rent them out to people.
No - By his token, because you buy a copy of the book, you can rip out every 3rd page before you give it to your kids if you want, and then use a sharpie to black out the world 'sophistry' every time you see it. You own the book, you can modify your copy of it how you want.
Wether it is legal to buy the book, take it to my neighbor and pay him $10 to rip our every 3rd page for me and black out 'sophistry', I dont know. IANAL, but it seems like this would be legal too.
Free Online Dark Fantasy RPG - http://www.blackmud.com
Perhaps the 'manufacturers' of the original movies ought to put out a G-rated VHS version for those who would not otherwise buy or rent the original movie. Seems to me this just one other way they could profit from a heretofore untapped market. In the DVD arena, they could even have a better option - create a DVD that has both unedited and edited versions on the same DVD. This should satisfy everyone - while the directors might grumble that their 'vision' is tainted on the edited version, they profit no matter which version the buyer views. And, as a further bonus, these editing companies would be put out of business.
Too bad that's not what's happening
RTFA
> Traditionally, the way the directors handled these cases was pretty much - tough, that's my film, if you don't like some of the material, you're welcome not to watch. It was up to the individual. Here, you have what arguably is a distributor (the "co-ownership" agreement aside, which I would argue is purely a legal device), dictating what the audience sees.
If the directors had such a strong case, then airplane and TV versions of their films would never be made; there'd only be one version available, the original.
But there are alternatives available, and sold as such. Just not to the end user. You're not an airline or a TV network? Too bad, you can't buy that version even though it exists and was made with the director's consent - albeit contractual rather than artistic.
So Clean Flicks steps in and fills a market void with versions of films already being made for other markets. I have a hard time feeling sympathy for the directors - if they wanted control over the 'cleaner' version of their films being sold, they should have arranged for the release of the already-produced clean version. But they didn't. TOO BAD.
So, it's illegal to remove the centerfold from a Playboy magazine? I'd say a lot of my single male friends are felons, then.
This is a stupid lawsuit, and I hope the countersuit wipes them out. Once you sell me a thing, it's mine. If Iwant to cut pieces out, I will. If I want to add a splice, I will. If I want to make a copy, I will.
They can kiss my ass.
Personally, I believe that the Directors have a leg to stand on. They don't sue Television networks and stations for airing "edited" versions of their films. They don't sue airlines for showing "edited" versions of their films. They also don't charge these organizations more for public display of "edited" versions vs. "original" versions. All Clean Flix and the other companies named in the law suit are doing is renting "edited" versions. As long as they clearly state that the films have been edited, they are completely the same as what the movie industry has been allowing for decades.
What really irks me is that the movie industry could make it all go away if they would provide the "airline" version on DVD's along with all the interviews, documentaries, and trailers. It would take almost no additional space and the DVD players and DVD format already support it! They might even get more revenue due to increased sales of those DVD's.
Summary: Claiming the high moral ground based on "artistic vision" and then selling "edited" versions of the same work to certain lucrative markets while excluding others is anti-competitive and hypocritic.
I want to watch the shit fly on this one. Better yet -- someone should make John Ashcroft publicly aware of this fight. We'll have the most powerful Fair Use advocate faster than you can say "morning prayer meetings".
Ah, who am I kidding? He'll probably find a way to favor BOTH stripping or rights AND far-right puritanism at the same time.
By this notion the author would be guilty of violating his own copyright by autographing the book for you. ;)
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
A car is not a copyrighted work. Your analogy is poor and misleading.
Actually, it is. The car itself isn't copyrighted, but the design certainly is. Same with books, the paper, glue, and binding isn't copyrighted, the words are. Of course you can't copyright "stuff", copyright is for information.
If he decides to change the design of the car, then fine, he can do what he wants. Haven't ever heard of custom vans? Can he build a car that copies the design of a Audi? No, he would be violating Audi's copyright.
Now, they might not care since the nature of the industry doesn't make this type of behavior very profitable, but they could if they felt like it.
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
At the extreme you have folks who want to eliminate all traces of sex and violence from the popular media against the movie industry who wants to eliminate all property rights of the consumer
If you take anything to an extreme then you get all sorts of bizarre scenaros. For instance I had someone tell me recently that the War on Drugs was a good thing because if we legalize them taking legal drugs to the extreme then we would have anarchy. (oh brother).
Same here. No one said that they are taking all of the sex and violence out of current movies, however some people will pay money for movies that have it removed. What I can't decide between is rights of the consumer vs. artistic lisence of the directors. Personally I don't believe the directors are out to steal rights or make money in this case, if it was about money then they would release a 'mild' version of movies because its been shown that people will pay for it. I think to them it's like if you bought a famous painting such as 'The Birth of Venus' and then put clothes on Venus! They are just using copyright to protect their work.
So yes it is a tough question, but the question isn't between personal choice and morals its between personal choice and artists.
The Anti-Blog
What Clean Flicks does is as much "censorship" as much as dubbing a foreign language film so that people don't have to read subtitles if they don't want to.
Most of the people here who support the MPAA on this issue are just anti-Christian zealots who have been so indoctrinated into thinking Christianity is "bad" because it has standards of moral and ethical decency that they can't handle Christians being able to practice their faith at all.
The only reason that there is even a lawsuit over this is because the movie industry wants to cash in on it, but needs to eliminate the competition first.
The main thrust of my argument was moral rights - you should make a decision based upon the entire work, and either view it as it was meant to be seen, or respect the director's vision and not see it at all (if that's the director's wish.)
The secondary argument (censorship), was the idea that a third party could control what you can see or hear. Perhaps I should have modified the argument to encompass spam - I don't think anyone would contest the suitability of stopping spam mail (at least I wouldn't.) But would people stand for their mail to be subtly modified, even if they were notified of it? Also, the people maintaining block lists are not the same ones that are profiting the blocking of spam mail. The censorship argument is really an extension of the moral rights argument.
Personally, I have serious issues about taking this kind of activity to court, but after Clean-Flicks, in anticipation of being sued by the directors, sued first to declare their activity explicity legal, the DGA didn't have any choice but to go ahead and sue to protect artists' rights.
I think what it will boil down to is that clean-flicks will have to stop pre-cleaning films directly, since they are serving in a distributory capacity (in my opinion.) Instructions on how to do it yourself, closing your eyes, having a friend take care of it, that's fine by me - but editing someone else's work for profit? Not cool. I certainly would not allow my films to be edited, not without my involvement, or at least my consent.
You, the end user, can do whatever you want with the media. You can burn it, cut it up, remaster it, mix it, splice it, or throw it away. The instant you redistribute or start to share the results of your modifications, is where the creator becomes concerned - because it is then no longer their work, although it may be represented or assumed by the viewing public as such.
The instant where you redistribute for profit is where you cross the line - and that's what I assume the DGA is finding legal grounds to sue on.
BTW, I do believe that control over distribution is covered under the rights granted by the legislature.
Clean-Flicks' main legal problem is that "co-ownership" deal (where they say that the end-user and CF are the joint owners) is a shaky defense. If end users bought a copy of an "Austin Powers" videotape, delivered it to CF to sanitize, and then watched it, I don't think there would be an issue. However, they're offering edited films for rent, and are essentially acting as a distributor of altered content.
The real problem with this lawsuit is over gizmos allowing the user to implement blocking, as you come dangerously close to censoring just pure information (they sell a kind of "safe movie" software that tells your DVD player to censor your DVD at appropriate places.) However, I'm sure that the DGA is going to argue that because it's a monthly paid service - that there is technically no difference between the user having a set-top gizmo controlled by CF and getting an edited cable broadcast from CF. If you're going to piss on the DGA over something, piss on them over this.
Take a look at www.moviemask.com for this DVD editing functionality.
"It's perfectly legal to take free software and modify it".
... Clean flicks must change the name of the movie. This issue is resolved by notification to the customer that the modifications have been made which Clean Flicks is doing.
this is exactly what clean flicks is doing.
"introduce a few thousand security holes into it"
exactly how do you argue that pulling obscenities from a movie is analagous to security holes in software? don't bother answering because it is just as easy (even easier) to argue that the editing is patching security holes.
"then distribute the resulting binaries as "Apache". "
so the whole basis of your argument, keeping with the analogy, is that if you mod the software then you can't distro it with the original name. Well it's plain stupid to think that this equates to
The analogy works better as an argument FOR Clean Flicks.
not a member of the debate team I'm guessing?
I get your point, but Stanley Kubrick probably feels like "Hey I'm dead and burried". Worthwhile point none the less.
I mod down any one who says "I'm sure I will get modded down for this"
So shouldn't EVERY network TV station be guilty of "violating" these people's rights? I mean, Ted Turner should be in jail for life by now after the cut-jobs TBS does all the time.
/. woould be foaming at the mouth right now. But because it's the religious right, many of you switch sides. Not to troll, but this is so typical: I want speech I like protected, but not speech I don't.
Or how about radio? Most stations will *bleep* out all the curse words in songs. Are they guilty?
How about Condensed Books? They don't seem to have a problem here - in fact, they license it!
When you get down to it, the artist's "vision" is compromised all the time, in many ways. But no one steals the original, which is the important thing. Like someone else said, if this was modded games we were talking about, half of
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
I don't think that intentions matter here. By releasing the hypothetical work into the domain of public awareness artists opens themselves to many risks: ridicule, misunderstandings, laughter, scandal, and even mis-apropriation. The example you give of MS using the works in a context that may even be opposite of the intentions of the creator, or edited to give a different meaning or impression, or even simply mutilated to fit someone elses esthetic sense may be a gross violation of the work, it may even be deeply hurtful and destructive to the artist, but that doesn't really matter. The work is out there for anyone to do with as they choose (short of changing the by-line and re-selling it). That is the nature of art. You can no more control how someone uses your work than you can how they interpret it.
Any artist who publishes art in any form without understanding that is seriously mis-informed about the nature of creation and interpretation. I don't mean to digress into a discussion on the nature of art and artistry (too late now), but mis-understanding their place in the process of creation and interpretation will cause most artists a tremendous amount of pain. Any use is fair as long as it is not re-distribution of the work in question. IOW, the only loss involved in this situation (either yours or the real one) is internal to the artist, an arena that the law is uninterested in, right-fully(ha-ha) so.
"I think we should tax people who stand in water! " - Mr. Gumby
The DGA may be skating on thin legal ice with this one. Paramount already tried suing CleanFlicks (specifically Sunrise Family Video in Utah, one of their stores) over exactly this kind of editing of Titanic. I believe it was heard in Federal court, same circuit as Colorado, and Paramount lost badly. The decision wasn't controversial, it didn't involve any novel interpretations of fair use or anything, it revolved around long-established predecents about first sale and owner use. I can't dig up the text of the decision, but if it was Federal CleanFlicks is certain to cite it and being in the same circuit there's a good chance the court would follow precedent. And if the court rules for the DGA, conflicting decisions are one of the best grounds for getting an appeals court to hear the case to resolve the conflict.
LDS is a dangerous and illegal drug that will make you completely insane.
Here's the basic question: Do you side with CleanFilms and say that they have the right to modify a film, or do you side with the Directors and say that somehow their copyright extends to the performance of their works?
Here are some questions:
1) Have you ever made a mistake in a performance of a piece of music? You'd better not admit it, because if the music is copyrighted, you have violated the composer's right to control the music.
2) Have you ever messed up lines in a play, or even, perish the thought, cleaned up profanity in a play because it was performed by high school students in a public school?
3) Have you ever altered a piece of music to improve a harmony or whatever and recopied that music for the group of people you are performing with?
That's exactly what's happening here. Either you believe that a copyright is over the EXPERIENCE a user gets when he/she sees, reads, hears, etc., your work, or the copyright is over the ability to copy your work.
This company is agreeing to the terms of the copyright - 1) They are not creating new copies of this work. They are merely removing or altering content. 2) They are not selling these copies as the original - they are selling them as CLEANED-UP versions of the original. 3) They do so with the full knowledge, and approval of the consumer who has agreed to purchase the copy when the editing is complete.
Just think of the implications:
1) Your school could not perform most of the popular musicals available today, because to perform those musicals, schools would have to force children to use language that is inappropriate in school (most schools have policies against swearing).
2) No piece of music that is under copyright could be modified, arranged, or re-engineered in any way. That means that if you don't like the way the piece was arranged, and you can't find a better arrangement, you're screwed.
3) Directors would have control over the experience you get when watching a movie. You would not be legally allowed to use rewind, fast-forward or mute, because in doing so you are censoring them.
4) Oh, and by the way, they could lock the doors in the movie theatres, because you are effectively "copying" the movie into your mind by watching it, and you are not permitted to alter or change the experience. New rules:
- No blinking is allowed
- No kissing or anything that distracts the copying process
- No bathroom breaks. Either pee in your pants or learn how to empty yourself without diverting your attention or the attention of others from the movie.
- Home movie watching is forbidden unless you install a camera in your home theatre room or pay someone to come and monitor your adherence to the movie's copyright.
- No quoting lines from a movie. Not even the Holy Grail or Princess Bride.
- If you want a "clean" version of the movie, you have to wait for it to come out on TV in a director-approved edited-for-TV version. If you watch that version again, you must play through all the commercials.
Okay, I'm being a little ridiculous, but you see that a copyright does not give license over how the work is used, only over the fact that the creator of the work is compensated for each and every "copy" of the work in an equitable manner.
The beautiful movie Cinema Paradiso is about a man in early 20th century Italy who runs a movie theater's projector. One of his job duties is to clip out and re-splice movie reels, eliminating all sexual scenes.
***SPOILER***
In one of the movie's finale, perhaps the most powerful scene, Salvatore, the films star, is treated to an entire movie-reel containing all of the spliced-together sexual edits that Spaccafico the projectionist had to edit out. This scene shows what a horrible shame it is that the audience had never been allowed to see these movie bits. Never in film history has there been such a powerful message about the dangers of censorship.
That actually is sanitization without the permission of the viewer, unlike this -- why aren't you up in arms about that?
I did touch upon that briefly (and decried it for what it's doing to classic cartoons), but that's really between the directors and the studios (damn network censors - really, it's the unevenness of the censorship that's annoying, but that's another issue entirely...)
The main thrust of the DGA suit parallels my argument that distributing an edited work without the creators' consent effectively misrepresents the work (despite whatever disclaimers may have been inserted) because it was never authorized by the creator.
Suppose you're John Woo. Assume your trademark fight scenes were cut because of the violence. A viewer checks out your movie and decides you suck (not knowing that the best parts were cut.) Yes they knew it was edited. But did they know WHAT was edited? I think as a content creator, you have the right not to have inferior work distributed with your name on it.
I remember when the DVD format was still under development and people were duscussing some of the cooler things that the system would allow you to do. Many of them never happened. This idea (having multiple cuts on the same disc) was one of them.
DVDs could have been some much cooler if it wasn't for the MPAA!
A car is not a copyrighted work. Your analogy is poor and misleading.
Copyright exists to make easily reproduced items, like movies and books, work more like less easily reproduced items, like cars. It does not exist because copyright is a fundamental sacred religious doctrine or something.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Clean Flicks does not publish. The legitimate publisher gets paid. Every copy of a movie sold by Clean Flicks was first a copy sold by the publisher.
Bottom line: Copyright ends after the first sale. Once I buy a book, I can do what I want with it. Same as with movies.
It's a cooperative you he-haw. The owners of the videos set up a cooperative, and the cooperative does the editing. Then "sells" the video back to a member of the cooperative. There are no "profits". The "profits in a cooperative get distributed back to the owners at the end of the quarter, or year, after expenses are deducted. The distributed "profits" are in direct correlation to how much the individual paid "profits" into the cooperative for the dvds.
Basically, the individual owners set up a legal entity to track the logistics of who uses the services more, and who uses less. You use less services? You pay less overhead. You use the services more, you pay more overhead. Also provides legal protection for individuals because it puts the whole cooperative on the hook, enabling a pooling of funds for legal representation if they get sued, as I'm sure they contemplated when they set this up.
If the cooperative part of the story still confuses you, ask your local small chain supermarket/grocer how a cooperative works.
I guess you've never heard of USED Book Stores.
How many high school/college textbooks have you seen that have notes in the margins, highlighted sections, etc? How many of those college textbooks are re-sold?
Please put brain in gear before engaging mouth (or, in this case, fingers-on-keyboard)
ScottKin
I don't give a rat's behind about "karma" here or anywhere else. Don't like what I have to say here? Deal with it!
If someone wants to pay out cash for a clean version of "Titanic", let 'em. And, if someone wants to hire a Leo DeCaprio and Kate Winslet lookalike, and fill in the love scenes with some hard-core, let 'em. It's a big world, and we all don't like the same things. . .
That's hilarious. They showed "Something About Mary" on TV the other day, and with half the scenes cut to hell, many things became as pointless as the above. There were a half dozen scenes that were rendered incomprehensible by the butchery. And they were funny before they were butchered.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
Let fucking Utah have their fucking clean family flicks if they want such a goddammed thing. Why the hell should those Mormon bastards not be allowed to remove all the filthy cunt-shots from fucking goddammed movies if they fucking want it!
Jesus Fucking Christ, what got into the dicks of those goddammed movie industry bastards who won't let regular joe blowhard people clean up shit for their fuckin' families to watch in goddammed peace and quiet.
They get tired of that fuck-head purple dinosour after a while. You know, the one that sings, "I love you, you love me dammit!" or something like that. You just want to blow that bastard's purple fuckin' head off with a shotgun after your damned brats watch it 50 fuckin' times.
Let the little shit-heads and their ugly-ass parents have some real fuckin' movies to watch for once.
Table-ized A.I.
"Ooh, I know. I'm going to go buy a bunch of big long books and cut out all the violence and sex and maybe the boring passages, too, and re-sell them."
I believe that Reader's Digest has been doing something similar to this for decades...
By your token, because I buy a book, I should therefore own all the contents of the book. This is the reason that copyright law exists--to protect the people who create things.
No...you should have the right to buy a slightly more expensive copy that has some words whited out, paying the seller the larger fee, who in turn pays the author the full price of the book. I can buy a t-shirt and iron on an image, then sell it to someone without having Hanes sue me, where's the difference? Adding value to an "unfinished" product can just as easily be editing it.
Also, Utah is very conservative. It would be a ridiculous notion that a company couldn't use their own rights as a buyer to tailor products to the morals of their area.
--- What
On the CleanFlicks website, follow the link to Mulholland Drive and read their description of it. Are we to presume that the descriptions, including the terms "This sexy thriller," "dangerous web of erotic passion," and "Visionary daring, swooning eroticism and colors that pop like a whore's lip gloss" refer to the edited version? Bizarre.
Here is what it comes down to.
1. Is this covered under copyright law? Where is the passage that prevents resale? Where is the passage that prevents editing? They do not, I believe, exist. So really, the Directors don't have much of a legal leg to stand on...currently. I assume they're trying to threaten the CLean Flicks people enough to settle or something. If so, we'll see them paying extra for the privilege of editing.
2. This is a MORAL argument. And we all know how much we hate it when the religious right tries to take away our rights. Among them are porn, violent video games, atheism, abortion, flag-burning, etc. We all say things about "not having to agree with speech to defend it..." At least until it's some Christian group needing the defending. Then where are the free-speech proponents?
3. This will end up being a back-door argument into a cash play. They will try to get legislation to prevent resale of copyrighted works. And they will use this example as one of their harms. We know the republicans will back them - they always do - but they will use this argument to win a few democrats. Watch.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
The creator of the sculpture, Tilted Arc, was Richard Serra, and the sculpture was, unfortunately, removed. Here's more info on this.
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
BTW, it's not censorship if the unedited version is as easily or more easily available. If it's censorship you want to stop, there are lots of movies that aren't available for purchase/viewing at all or are only available in edited format. They're from the early 20th century or during WWII and contain what are now considered improper political and racial stereotypes. What? It's not censorship if you happen to agree with it?
I do disagree with it. I belive that any racism or stereotyping should stand, AS IT IS, as a window into a cruder era. Maybe there should be a warning (like the MA warning for language, sex, etc. - now for offensive characterizations). Consider all the classic cartoons that will NEVER see the light of day, because they had nasty portrayals of Japanese (as in Bugs Bunny Nip the Nips, or scenes where characters were in blackface. Offensive? Yes. And people should be aware that there was offensive content at one point in our history, and be able to see for themselves how Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Jews, etc. were treated in America, and STILL ARE in some places.
I think this is another case of the media (MPAA, RIAA, etc.) stepping on their own d**k(s). With Clean Flicks, at least someone is still buying the movie, so Hollywood still makes a couple bucks. What they seem to fail to realize is that the Clean Flicks clients can get the exact same version of the move for FREE by waiting for it to show up on TV. Then, they can tape it. And, for the moment, that is still legal.
Man, it is *so* upsetting to read all these complete misconceptions of copyright's purpose and its effect.
You say: "Cutting a work up and making something else out of it, even if you own the copy you cut up, is, in law, creating a derivative work, and may violate copyright as much as making a copy does."
To which I say:
Yes! That is a derivative work! It is *not* illegal to create a derivative work! The only thing "derivative work" means is that the copyright STILL BELONGS TO THE ORIGINAL ARTIST. No laws were broken.
So, Steven Spielberg still owns the copyright to the cleaned up version of Jaws. What does this mean? This means that CleanFlicks can't just start printing DVDs of the cleaned up Jaws. They *can*, however, keep buying copies of Jaws, and removing the parts they don't like. This is distinctly different from publication. This is exactly the strict (smaller) definition of fair use.
Creating a derivative work is totally legal. You just don't get publication rights to your work.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
I have a daughter. 6 years old. She's a big fan of Disney movies of course. So one day, she had a friend over, and they were watching the Lion King. This friend had seen it before as well. Probably hundreds of times.
(SPOILER ALERT!!!:)
Right after Mufasa was killed in the stampede, this girl breaks out into hysterics. Screaming and crying. We take her out of the room and try to comfort her - she's unconsoleable. We call her parents. Her mom comes over and collects her, and by this time the girl has calmed down. Her mom explained that her daughter was a little sensitive, and that she had taken all the home videos they had, and copied them, and edited out all the "intense" parts for her. So she had never seen the scene where Mufasa died before.
Now, otherwise, this girl is a rather normal, bright young child. We had no idea.
Even more frightening, is that this girl's mother has a Masters in Psychology.
After she left, my wife and I were like "What the fuck?"
God forbid that this girl's dad should ever fall off a ladder while painting the house, or mom choke on a ham sandwich or something. I mean, I can understand she's sensitive and all - but you shield people from the unpleasant side of reality for too long, and sooner or later, unpleasantness happens to everyone. And what's she going to do in those situations? Fall to pieces? Or call 911?
I don't let my kids watch PG-13 content without seeing it first. I know a lot of my 8 year old son's friends have seen The Matrix. We didn't let him see Fellowship of the Ring last year when it came out, but here it is, 9 months later, and we feel like he's more mature now, and we rented the DVD, and he enjoyed it very much and wasn't terrified of the nine, and didn't have nightmares or anything. He probably would have last year. Would I be pleased to have the choice to rent a hacked up version of the Matrix? No. What's the point? The movie is about violence, it's about the beauty of death and destruction. There's a story in there too - but really, what's the point? When he's old enough, he'll enjoy it. My mom didn't let me watch A Clockwork Orange when I was 10. I watched it when I was 16. Chopped up movies are for lazy parents.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
From the Salon article:
In a federal lawsuit, the guild is requesting an injunction against 13 companies that either rent movies that have been edited or sell software that allows consumers, through computers or DVD players, to edit movies themselves.
So it appears that the lawsuit is not only against companies like Clean Flicks which edit the movies for their customers, but also against companies which sell software that allow consumers to edit the movies themselves.
I'm really surprised that there is such debate on this topic, and I've got to believe that wouldn't be the case if this case wasn't about editing movies in a way people here don't like.
This has nothing to do with censorship. Censorship removes choice to receive a work the way the author intended. This adds choice to receive a work in a way the author didn't intend. The movies aren't being censored.
This is all about copyright. Among other things, copyright gives the exclusive right to create derivative works, and to distribute the work. The law has already established that renting is legal, however, provided that each copy is purchased, so that the author receives their royalties.
So it boils down to whether removing parts of a work constitutes as creating a "derivative work". If you want to argue in favor of the lawsuit, this is the ground to stand on.
I've gotta say 'No', tearing pages from a book, or removing whole scenes from a movie isn't creating a derivative work. Whether a middle man is doing it, or whether I'm purchasing software to do it myself, I think it falls pretty clearly on the consumer side of copyright.
A lot of people are saying that because the Clean Flicks co-op is doing it on behalf of its members, and then renting out the result, that somehow changes things. But not in the eyes of the law -- redistributing via rental a copy duly purchased is legal (thank goodness!). Since renting is legal, this is about whether copyright holders have the power to prevent people from removing pieces of their work. More than that, about whether companies can sell software as a tool for people to edit movies in this fashion!!
Dave
I do not believe you. You say, "What you describe is exactly what copyright is designed to prevent. Modifieing a copyrighted work for profit."
Where did you come up with this? I always understood that copyright was designed to compensate creators. Please tell me why you are right and I am wrong.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
...of course, I may have a vested interest. I'm just in the process of researching the creating of Dirty Flicks. I'd like to start a business to but extra violence, sex, and profanity into boring holywood movies.
Just imagine what a lesbian shower scene or three could do for crap like Serving Sarah or Blue Crush.
Cheers
-b
In the history of film in the US, religion has always stood in the way of expression -- whether informing public censorship (via the Hayes Commission) or merely yoking adherents to a strained choice of "approved" material (the Roman Catholic Index).
No one should confuse what Clean Flicks is doing with personal choice, however. Far from being a benign alternative to state censorship, it's merely a business model that codifies prejudices: Utah is the theory, and Clean Flicks is the method. Whether it is ancient buddhas being dynamited outside Kabul or Kate Winslet's lush breasts digitally masectomized from Titanic, the motive is the same. Such medievalism is aimed mainly at the young, the better to extinguish their impulses for thought and experience.
Beyond revealing the adaptiveness of technology to the unchanging dictates of Puritanism, this trend also points up further fault lines between modern and pre-modern America. The America that approves of AG Ashcroft cleansing the Bill of Rights is also the one that turns to Clean Flicks. Alas, 21st century America romanticizes 17th century Salem, and those of use who do not want to go back in time will have to resist those who do.
But we also have to laugh at something revealed by the Clean Flicks movement -- desire, unquenchable to the last! True religious conviction would lead the devout away from sinful Hollywood product into complete cultural separatism (as indeed the growing Christian entertainment industry would seek to do). But no, the call of experience and the flesh is too strong, even for our Taliban, and they can't resist peeking, once they've scoured the product of all its most obvious and obtrusive remnants, leaving, ironically, only suggestion... As pre-1960s filmmakers would tell you, it was always sexier like that, anyway.
Will they edit out the offensive scenes in Lucas films, i.e. anything with Jar-Jar in it? That'd be worth renting.
Hmmm, Clean Flick isn't so bad. Now I can watch "A Clockwork Orange," "Scarface," "Caligula" and "Platoon" in under half an hour.
c-hack.com |
Incorrect. Copyright law exists to prevent people from making $$$ by claiming the work to be owned by someone other than the originator of the work.
I can make a quadrillion copies of ANY book in the world, and as long as I do NOTHING other than keep them in my personal possession(i.e. not for sale or distribution) there is NOTHING that anyone can do about it. This is the same reasoning that allowed libraries to have photocopiers on the premisis.
Any money earned by CleanFlicks by performin these edits is done under the auspicies of performing a service and are not directly related to the sale and distribution of any movies.
In regards to your "big long books" analogy: If you possess a copy of a work and give that work to someone to "deface" or edit for you, you are absolutely allowed to do that as long as you do not re-sell the work as an Original
Copyright Law is designed to protect the originator/creator of a work from financial loss due to unauthorized reproductions being SOLD under a name other than that of the originator/creator.
ScottKin
I don't give a rat's behind about "karma" here or anywhere else. Don't like what I have to say here? Deal with it!
This would be really easy to implement also, at least on a PC/software DVD player - you could give the player the ability to read in a text file containing the edits. Then all you need to do is download a tiny EDL file. You'd have to own the original DVD to make any use of it, and I'm pretty sure you could argue that the EDL file is not covered under the DVD's copyright as a derivative work.
Then Clean Flicks et al could open up a website, kind of like CDDB, where you just stick the DVD in, and it automatically downloads the appropriate "clean" edit. (they could charge for each EDL download, or a monthly fee for access to the website).
Of course "Episode I: The Phanom Edit" type stuff would be easy to find also =).
Sophisticated players could look for audio fade-in/fade-out commands in the EDL to hide jumps in the soundtrack where a scene was deleted.
It would be tougher to do this with all-in-one hardware DVD players; maybe you could fit a USB port on one and download the playlist from a PC (yuck), or maybe the player could accept a "smart card" with the EDL on it.
But realistically, I'd expect that the movie studios themselves will eventually realize that they can charge extra if each DVD already comes equipped with a "clean" option. (they already edit for airlines and offer multiple language soundtracks; clean edits can't be THAT much of a stretch).
There is a lot of discussion in this thread about the consumers' rights, market forces, censorship, etc.
However, one point seems to be missed. If I create something (a song, a book, a movie) and publish it, I have copyright on that (unless I sell it - some of it such as English market only - to someone else). You are not supposed to change my work without my permission.
And the reason for this has not so much to do with market value as with whether or not the published work is my vision. If you change my work and then publish it, you are promulgating a false view of my work, my views, my ethos.
Before someone says it, slapping a label on it that you've modified it doesn't help. What was left out? By removing some of my content you may be changing the meaning of my work. In a sense, the modifier of the work is presenting a false view of the author's work.
Now if you were to get permission from the creator, that is a different story. The author can make an informed decision on whether or not the modifications are acceptable.
As for the rights of people to watch my work without the icky bits, pfui! Just because you want something does not confer any obligation on me.
How about DVD software that reads a standarized XML edit list and edits the stream in real-time during playback. Yet another great fair-use example for DeCSS that would help shoot down DMCA in the courts.. Perhaps there could also be stand-alone players that would read the users' edit lists from a smart media card. Then have a PC utility that makes it easy to edit the movie, produce the edit list, and add it to an online database. The file format could even contain alternative sound clips to be inserted in place of profanity, instruction to use video filters (ie. mosaics), etc. It might look something like this:
It would be no different than if someone were to take an O'Reilly book, replace a few words here and there, remove a chapter, and try and sell the thing as the original.
Yes, and the missed point here still is: THEY'RE NOT PASSING IT OFF AS THE ORIGINAL.
They are clearly marked as having their content edited to remove things that timid people find objectionable. They are not 'secretly' switching the original movies off the shelves of video stores with their own modified Folger's Crystals version. The timid people are seeking these people out and specifically buying the modified versions because they don't want to see the parts that were edited out. It is entirely different from your example.
Clean Flicks takes a movie that is not theirs, edits it, often poorly, without anyone's consent, and resells it to customers.
A movie that's not theirs?? Again I think you've been somehow mis-informed. They are not stealing other people's copies of movies, editing them without their knowledge and trying to "pass it off to people". They BUY each copy. They are the end user. They edit THEIR copy to remove content they find objectionable. The end result is still a SINGLE copy, which is a little bit shorter than the original. There are not 2 or more copies left over, there is only the original media, which contains a single copy of the work. No illegal copying was performed. Now they sell that copy to someone else who feels that they would not like to see the content that was edited out either, and they are fully aware that what they are buying is not the original unmodified work. Reselling an IP item which you purchased from the copyright owner is also allowed by law. You're not making multiple copies, and you're not disparaging the reputation of the content creator, because NOBODY thinks that this modified version was the original work.
How about another example. Some movie studios are getting absolutely ridiculous with the amount of previews they tack onto the beginnings of movies you buy on VHS/DVD. I have a couple tapes where there are literally 20 minutes of previews before the feature film actually starts. Now if I know I'm going to watch this movie often, and I don't want to sit there on fast forward for 10 minutes (and then be in the kitchen and miss the beginning and have to rewind and then fast forward again), I could just overwrite the contents of that VHS tape with the actual movie minus all the trailers. I have not made an illegal copy, I still only have one. Eventually I get tired of watching said movie, and someone I know says "hey man, I love that movie. I want a copy that doesn't have all those stupid trailers at the beginning either." So I sell my (modified) copy to him. He understands it's modified, and specifically wanted it that way. I even mark on the tape and box with magic marker that it has been modified, so that no one else later on could possibly pick it up and be confused about its modified status. What is the illegal part of this scenario?
Now if that series of events is legal -- ie. the modification of copyrighted content which is stored back on the original medium -- then how is making similar edits of the tape (ie. removing content I don't want to see) during portions of the feature film any different? Now if I went around making one single backup copy of my favorite tapes, and then edited only that copy to remove the trailers/content/etc, I am STILL allowed to do that. I cannot however, sell both copies to two different people. That would be making an illegal copy and profiting from it. But that's not what these companies are doing.
If you do know fair use rights, let me start by giving you a Q&A from the web site of the rental company:
Subscribe as member is the key. This is a cooperative. There are NO "profits".
Before reading further, if you don't understand cooperatives, I'd suggest talking to your local small supermarket or grocer chain. Excellent examples in the northeast are KeyFood, CTown, Gristede's (last one may be company owned chain, and therefore doesn't apply).
In the above supermarket examples, if I am a distributor or manufacturer, I sell to the main warehouse. I sell to the main warehouse at my selling price. The supermarket chain then sells my product to member supermarkets at my selling price, plus an "upcharge". The upcharge is determined by how large of an order I place. Who owns the main warehouse? All the member supermarkets. Who gets the upcharge "profit"? It is held by the COOPERATIVE. What does the COOPERATIVE do with it? They deduct operating expenses for the warehouse. Deduct shipping expenses of merchandise from warehouse to individual stores. Deduct advertising of the supermarket chain in the local/national media. Deduct payroll and other overhead of the people necessary to run the warehouse, trucks, media office, communications, LEGAL FEES, LAWSUIT SETTLEMENTS, INSURANCE PREMIUMS, and everything else related to the COOPERATIVE. What happens when "profits" are left over? They either get reinvested back into warehouse or other assets for current or future expenditures, or they get redistributed back to individual members at the end of each quarter or yearly. How is the formula for the redistribution figured out? Simple. You buy more, you get more back. You buy very little, you get very little back. What "profit" is left to the "company" at the end? NONE TO THE COOPERATIVE.
What is the goal of the COOPERATIVE? To take very little "profit" over the actual cost of operations. Why? Who wants to loan money to another entity and wait months to a year before getting it back without interest? Supermarket margins are slim enough that they can't afford to pay any extra upcharge/"profit".
How does this apply to the dvd place? If they price too much of a "profit" into their dvd, they won't attract as many members. And someone will be sitting on their money. Will "profits" be redistributed to members? In all likelyhood not, I suspect it will be reinvested into the web site, into the media costs, etc. Why would they want to attract more members? Pricing power. Negotiating power. Lower individual legal costs. Getting the studios to do what they are doing for the airlines, basic cable channels and television.
There's a lot of chatter about profit. But very little mention in most of the posts about the fact that the dvd company is a COOPERATIVE. I suspect most posters don't know how a COOPERATIVE works, and are panicking at the word censorship. It also shows the age of most of the viewers of this site.
When you have kids, you'll understand why it would be nice to find some movies that are similar to what you find edited on television, airplane trips, and even basic cable channels.
And when you learn about how a cooperative works, you'll understand why it is completely legal under fair use provisions what the COOPERATIVE in the story is doing, at the behest of its membership. What 70, 80, 90 year old judges will do with the case is subject for another
This isn't about forcing you to watch an edited movie. This is about being able to watch new releases with your family. Studios intentionally stick F*ck and other similar words into movies, counting how many times, in order to get the R rating. Why? PG means lower sales, and R means higher sales according to their research. So they make sure they put in enough profanity to get that R rating. And more often, the violence/sex or whatever is central to the storyline, according to the vision of the writer/screenwriter/director/whoever. But it may not be central to the vision of the storyline to a family sitting at home with young viewers.
I just saw trading places for maybe the hundredth time last night on basic cable. I saw it first on premium cable, with all the profanity. It was funny then. It was funny last night. I couldn't watch the premium/screen release with young kids, but I could watch the basic cable version. So the studio releases edited versions for basic cable, and that's OK with the posters here. But if I, through a cooperative, decide to rent/purchase an edited version of trading places so I can watch it with my family when I decide to watch it, you have a problem with that? I don't own any video editing equipment. Am I stuck because you have the capability and I have to farm it out?
Grow up.
Go check out Mr. Skin. Their motto is "Fast Forward to the Good Parts."
It's called right of resale, and everyone has it. You seem to be under the impression that CleanFlicks is copying movies. A work's creator, on the other hand, does *not* have the right to ensure that every item resaled is in complete or in the original condition. Just goes to show that slashdotters can be as oppressive as anyone when it aint their cause.
Play Command HQ online
What rights are those? If you don't want someone cutting up your movie, and possibly reselling it, don't sell them a copy. That goes whether "them" is Joe Blow or Microsoft.
Not exactly easy, if you want your movie to enjoy a large market. Best Buy doesn't exactly check the antecedents of people before selling them movies.
I wouldn't want to watch watered-down versions of movies, but since there is a company which offers such a thing, I guess there is a good market for it. The main point here is that directorial egos are hurt when people chop off scenes ruthlessly. Typical of the /. crowd to bring up censorship, big brother and the end of the digital world.
What you are really refering to, is an artist's 'Moral Right' to control the 'vision' of an artistic work. This means that no one can change or distort an artistic work, without the permission of the original artist.
While this might sound good in theory (Why not protect the artist?), in practice, it is one of the most dangerous ideas I have heard in a long time. The idea that someone could be legally prevented from modifying their own personal property, solely because the artist disagrees with the modifications is scarey to say the least. Where would this right end? How would it be enforced? Can the artist keep track of the painting after it has been sold to ensure that it hasn't been modified, or can they inspect someone's living room to make sure it displays the painting under optimal circumstances? Where would the artist's rights end and my rights, as a property owner, begin?
Personally, I believe the artist's rights end as soon as they sell the painting, movie, or what-have-you. The only way they should be able to maintain any kind of control (beyond what the already way too powerful copyright laws give them) is if they keep it to themselves and never let anyone else see it, duplicate it, sell copies of it etc. If you want to release your art or sell copies of it to the public, you must accept the fact that someone may do something you don't like with it.
Are Cliff Notes illegal yet??
Wouldn't this be a precedent?
Cheap storage VM.
You see, the advertisements run during these broadcasts are offensive to my nature, as I do not like to subject myself to advertisement (the OSDN banner is *killing* my sensibilities right now). I wish there were someone who could edit the beer and car commercials from the telecast at my local bar as it's my right to free speech.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
I just got the clean flick version of Pulp Fiction. It was 10 seconds long.
I disagree with the main thrust of your argument. The question of what you "should" do is immaterial; personally, I think it's reasonable to want to watch "Leaving Las Vegas" with your teenaged kids without the rape scene. Even if I believed that this wasn't something you "should" do, though, I wouldn't think the use of law to prevent it was justified.
Interpersonal mail isn't the same as movies -- if the mail was an open letter, and some news sites bleeped out the curse words, marked up the text (like this), or skipped sections of it (ellipsis), that would be find with me. One essential difference is that it's trivial (easier, in fact) to get an unedited copy of the movie; this is simply not censorship.
This contradicts your earlier argument about "moral rights" (nice soundbite, BTW.)
Certainly you must follow the rules if you are copying or publically performing the work in question -- but if Cleanflicks were doing that, there wouldn't be any of this claptrap about editing; regardless, they'd be redistributing without permission, which is, of course, illegal. They're not, though, and it isn't.
Again, this contradicts the "main thrust" of your argument.
So if you do it one way (the pain in the ass), then it's okay, but if you do it another (the easy way), then it's fine, even though the ultimate effect is the same either way? Sounds like bad law to me.
Horrors! We wouldn't want to set upon the slippery slope that leads eventually to users controlling the content that appears on their hardware! Look, if the guy down the street wants his TV to say "Smurfs" for "Palestinians" every time he watches Fox News, that's fine with me -- even if it wasn't, it should certainly be legal. If people really want sanitized content, then let 'em have sanitized content -- it's part of the same bag of freedoms that lets me watch "Hot Naked Badgers in Bondage" without being hassled by all the people who choose not to watch that particular title.
Cleanflicks doesn't rent out movies.
The issue isn't so much about censorship as it is about copyright infringement and fraud. CleanFlicks has no legal right to edit and resell copyrighted works. It's that simple. When you purchase a DVD/VHS you do not *own* the movie, you have purchased a license to view the movie for an unlimited amount of time and unlimited amount of viewings. You have not purchased the right to show the movie for profit or alter the content and redistribute it for profit. TV and so called Airline versions of motion picture licenses are quite different than private viewing licenses. The DGA has been joined by the WGA and I would expect SAG to join them soon.
Here's another angle. The movie companies willingly sold copies of their movies to CleanFlicks. The movie companies are allowed to refuse to sell to people and organizations they don't like. If they don't like what CleanFlicks is doing, then don't sell them movies.
I see this company as being enterprising in filling a need they perceive in the marketplace. We really must get over the entire notion that making a profit on something necessarily makes it evil. I sell computers and consulting services? Should I not make money on that activity? Well, that is beside the point.
:)
If I as a consumer, want to edit a video tape I purchased, I can do that. If I lack the means or the know-how to do it, I can then pay someone to do it for me.
Now, I am the guy being paid to do this. I get dozens of calls every week for the same service. Being the enterprising person that I am, I excercise some initiative and solicit this service because if this many people are calling, there must be a lot more out there that would take advantage of such a service if they only knew about it.
The artist got their money with the purchase of the original video tape. The consumer has a legally purchased copy. The consumer wants to edit out the language or violent scenes and pays a service company to perform the work. No harm. No foul. One use I can see is perhaps editing out foul language from the Star Trek movies (e.g. IV) so my kids could watch them.
Now that I have apologized for the concept, I don't see the point. The work put out by the director or studio is what the studio/director wanted their creative work to look like. In many cases, tampering with this weakens the message they are trying to send. If the violent content or language or sex is offensive, perhaps you should just not watch the film at all. Going back to my example of Star Trek IV, the language does not bother me, but I will not let my kids watch it because of that. I would not pay someone to edit the film just so my kids can see it. STIV does not have so great a social impact that my kids just HAVE to see it.
I think these people are doing nothing wrong. The studio was paid for the film in the original transaction. If the consumer wants to "clean" it up a bit and has to pay someone for their expertise, so be it.
-- Those of you who think you know it all are very annoying to those of us who do.
Quite simply, I don't walk out of the movie feeling clean if it's got lots of naked women dancing .
It's worse for bedroom scenes.
My wife walks out feeling dirty if it's got tons of gratuitous violence.
I ***REALLY*** don't like the stuff. I would go for "edited" versions every time, if I had the choice. I never have, so I simply haven't seen a whole bunch of movies that might have been good.
Maybe it's better that way. But society is more messed up when you *can't* have censorship.
I, for one, want it. Please censor my movie. Really.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
If you buy a movie and rip content out of it, then it would be false advertising to claim that it is the same movie any more, don't you agree?
And yet, if you call it something else, or claim that it is a different movie BASED on the original, then you are violating copyright.
So, in short, their product is illegal because it is a separate product which contains an illegal amount of the original.
Another example: if I take the newest Stephen King book, change the title and two of the pictures, and then claim that I am selling the newest Stephen King book, I am obviously infringing copyright. If I call it anything else, though, then I am plagiarizing. Right? Seems simple enough to me.
Yeah we've begun to lean towards the side of the copyright holder too much--I like to write and record my own music. If someone wanted to change that in any way and resell it (providing my cut of profit isn't damaged too badly) I say let them. Too many artists take themselves too seriously, and not only are we buying into it, but so are the big companies. I'm not trying to make a huge broad claim here or anything--just noting that there are negative impacts from the view of creators selling a hugely limited and controlled access to content, rather than selling the content itself and explicitly disallowing only fairly narrow acts that threaten profit and such.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
That, when hooked up between a dvd player and a television, changes one specific movie from the way the author intended to the way i belive it should be played (with more/less violence etc.) The device does not contain any of the original movie in it, it only modifies a copy (which the viewer would have to purchase seperately). I sell this device for a profit.
What is the difference between my device and the just purchasing and modifying each movie.
I believe the real irony of this story is that, by patronizing CleanFlicks, its customers are creating a greater market for the films that offend them!
If a large segment of the population "voted" with their pocketbooks by simply not renting films with violent/sexual content, then Hollywood would likely sense a market for more family-oriented films.
However, thanks to CleanFlicks, that segment can continue to happily fork over money for "sanitized" versions of violent films and Hollywood can continue to churn out enough to meet their demand.
Personally, I think it would be interesting if DVDs came with branching that matched a "rating" system on the player. Have a selection of settings for sex, violence, bad lanauge (none, implied, brief, visual, explicit, say... something like that) and let the player edit.
Movies could show a list of "minimums" the specific movie supports on the packaging, and the consumer can decide at playback time...
That would let the rest of us see everything, and keep those who wish to self-censor happy, hopefully.
Existing players wouldn't support this, but many allow firmware upgrades... the "default" (ie without settings) version of a movie could match the theatrical release anyway. Or, of course, they could have a sub-menu with a list of releases by theatrical rating.
And, of course, allow directors to have a part of the editting process....
Care to provide a single example of a right which you believe Mr. Ashcroft is in favor of `stripping'?
A car is not a copyrighted work. Your analogy is poor and misleading.
Au contraire, my dear.
Car companies spend tens of millions of dollars (by some definitions hundreds) to promote the identity of their marque, so that when you hear "Cadillac" or "BMW" you instantly have a certain clear and distinctive "vision" in your head (I'll bet it just happened too, when you read those brands).
And yes, in different ways they are protecting that "vison" with copyrights (trade dress, mottos, etc.), design patents, trademarks, utility patents (think cup holders), and every other form of protection that our government has created as a part of their mandate to "promote the useful arts".
Better luck next time.
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
Here is a point that I'm shocked that nobody has seemed to consider. EVERY time an "R" rated movie is broadcast on national TV it is censored, without exception. So what is everyone's problem with these people selling an "edited for TV" sort of version of a movie? Funny no one is trying to sue Readers Digest for chopping up long books and reselling them to people. This practice has been going on for decades now and nobody has seemed complained about that.
Also another question that this would bring up to consider is this, why aren't the directors suing the FCC for not allowing smutty content on the national airwaves. Effectively, isn't the FCC doing the same sort of thing that Clean Flicks is doing? In fact the FCC is doing much worse than Clean Flicks because they FORCE the censorship of movies and with Clean Flicks, YOU have a CHOICE. The big TV networks are certainly profiting off of the edited versions of these very same movies that are in question, so what is everyone's problem with a small company such as Clean Flicks profiting off of edited versions of these movies?
Most of the debate here appears to be less about Clean Flicks itself and more about the legal precedent that this case will take. While Clean Flicks is doing something relatively benign to the original material, there are other routes that third parties could take here.
Imagine, for instance, that instead of editing bits out of a movie, someone decided to add their own material to a work and sell the resulting composite for a profit. It's not really any different in that you're altering a piece of creative material to suit your own vision, and then reselling it. If you do this with books, you'll get your ass sued very quickly, and rightfully so. I really don't see how it's any different between books and movies. Furthermore, I don't see any distinction between removing and adding content. You're still profiting from a derivative work without the consent of the original creator.
Yeah, basically, that's what I meant to say. Thanks for clearing that up, though.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
I'm no fan of Republicans, but take a look at where the money is going. So far this election season, the TV/Movies/Music industry has given 77% of their campaign contributions to Democrats.
On the other hand, while they may give more money to Democrats, they still give money to almost as many Republicans (just in smaller amounts). 411 out of our 535 congresscritter have their hands in the media industry's pockets.
A more accurate analogy...
You have missed the whole point that Rogerborg was making. If you allow one to happen then the other extreme can happen too.
Sometimes you have to look at extemes to see the real issue.
Old7
There is no freedom from misrepresentation (effective or otherwise) (libel and slander are illegal, of course, but that's so far afield of what's going on here as to be absurd) -- someone could fast forward through the fight scenes in a John Woo movie, or not understand the movie, and the same thing happens. Part and parcel of doing artistic work is that people say wrong-headed things about what you made; you don't get to ask the law to protect your work against unfair criticism.
Look, I can sympathize with what you're saying -- but there are real freedoms at risk, here, not just the director's natural desire to protect his creative ego and his reputation. The tendency lately (in rhetoric, and to a lesser extent in the courts) has been to pretend that holding the copyright on something gives you the unlimited ability to dictate how it's treated by the world. Linking to it, watching it on unauthorized devices, copying it for personal use, reverse-engineering it, benchmarking it, cloning its interfaces, and now watching a legal copy that's been edited -- all of these are verboten, because it would be bad for the copyright holder. Well, yes, some of these activities are, indeed, bad for the copyright holder -- but that's the breaks; life is hard; that doesn't mean they're illegal -- because almost none of these activities are actually bad for society, and some of them are good. The effort to prevent them, moreover, has already passed some really vomitous legislation, and it certainly seems that more is on the way.
The analogy I like for this goes as follows: Certainly, I don't want my daughter dating some tattooed asshole who just got out of prison. I would do everything in my power to prevent it. But that doesn't mean it should be illegal. Because then where would we be?
I think it has been pretty well established that there is no legal basis to sue a Value-Added service industry for providing a service when no copywrite has been abridged and everyone (including the directors) makes their money. So what's this really all about? Its about these directors playing to the brainless herd that is the Left in this nation who worship at the altar of Hollywood and its values. It's about these directors trying to "stand up to the little guy" for daring to question these "values" in their films -- like they are some sort of dignified sincere hero/artists full of character -- instead of the corporate shills they really are. Unfortunately for them, they have made so many "stand up to the big guy" films that even the dullest bulb at the Hollywood slop bucket can see what's really going on between some Mom & Pop film-editing joint and the Evil Capitalist Hollywood Machine(tm).
Sorry, but copyright doesn't place any restrictions on modification of a work. Copyright (in it's purest form) is pretty uncaring to the non-profit or for-profit nature of what you're doing.
At its core, copyright is about giving an author the exclusive right to make a copy. Making copies is exactly what copyright is designed to prevent. Once I've obtained a legally made copy of such a work, I'm allow to do whatever I want to the copy I want. The only restriction is that I cannot distribute copies.
Can I write in the margins of a book I own? Yup. Can I sell a book I own? You bet. Do I need "fair use" to do either one of these things? Nope. This is simple doctrine of first sale. You sold me something, I'm free to mangle it and transfer ownership of the original to my heart's content.
The automotive example earlier in this thread is pretty good. Despite some silly comments to the contrary, automobile designs are copyright protected (if they weren't, we'd be seeing a glut of cheap, low-quality but extremely similar looking car knock-offs). There are many businesses which specialize in modifying automobiles and reselling them (hot-rodders, companies that do the "stretching" of stretch limos). Almost none of these companies bother talking to the original manufacturer because they don't need to.
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true
There's also no part that says "upon resale, work must remain intact."
Not true. If the copyrighted work does not remain intact, then you have, in fact, created a derivative work. The copyright holder has the exclusive right to create and distribute derivative works based on the original work -- the law is quite explicit about it. Clean Flicks are indeed creating derivative works and reselling them without permission of the copyright holders.
This doesn't mean that if you rip a page out of a book you can no longer sell it. But I am quite certain that you cannot start a business whose sole purpose is to rip pages out of books and resell them as "clean".
Note that nothing prevents the directors from mutilating their movies and distributing the "clean" versions, since they are the copyright holders. However, a third party cannot do so without permission.
Note also the implications on GPL that this case will have. (It's been pointed out in the previous /. story about this case). GPL relies on a simple trick: you cannot distribute other people's copyrighted works without their permission. GPL grants you said permission provided that you play by the rules, which means, among other things, that any and all modifications you make to the code must also be licensed under GPL. This keeps the Free code Free by removing the ability to relicense it.
However, if it is decided that you do not need to obtain the copyright holder's permission when distributing a derivative work, then the permission GPL gives you becomes moot: you do not need to accept GPL to distribute the code, since you already have that right. That's something to think about it before you cheer for the "cleaners".
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
So the copyright has nothing to do with your ability to modify the car.
So, can I just not sell my work to you if I don't want you to edit it?
Maybe a non-modification license would be enough?
IMHO, I can distribute my work under any license and all you can do is not buying it.
If I walk into a book shop, pick a book off the shelf, take it to the counter and say "I'd like to buy this please" then I absolutely agree that the checkout person can say "Oh no, we can't sell you it but I can offer you a license to make certain limited uses of it, just sign here and here...". It's extremely unlikely that I'd choose to shop in such a place but I have no problem at all with the concept. In that position I could accept the license or reject it, clear cut just as you say.
Right now that is nothing like what happens. We both know that books are sold not licensed. We both know that I'm not going to get sued if I decide to soak my book collection in ketchup, because they're mine and I'm allowed to.
An example that does take place in practice, is that I borrow a book from the library, it's not mine and I can't mutilate it without the owner's permission. I have no problem with that at all. If I do buy them, however, then they are mine and I can do with them what I like.
If you want to license your books instead of selling them then go ahead, just don't expect to do very well. This is not a system that is likely to appeal to consumers. One of the reasons that a lot of us buy books instead of using libraries is that we like owning things. If you rely on book sales for a living then reduce sales to loans at your peril.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
The real problem with this lawsuit is over gizmos allowing the user to implement blocking, as you come dangerously close to censoring just pure information (they sell a kind of "safe movie" software that tells your DVD player to censor your DVD at appropriate places.)
Arrgh, overuse of the word censor. What I meant was the instructions to tell the gizmo to blank out the movie at spots is just a bunch of times and signal commands. You don't want to start regulating whether it's legal to send a text file with a list of times - therein lies the path to madness.
The analysis is really quite simple -- is there consent, actual or implied, either to: (i) reproduce the work; (ii) distribute the work; or to (iii) make derivative works. A quick review of the website indicated that the editing is not a "cut-up" of the original tape, but rather sale or rental (distribution?) of an edited (derivation?) COPY (reproduction?). I think a persuasive argument may be made that, unless a defense is available, the art of editing new copies and distibuting them constitutes an actionable offense. [Indeed, the content manipulation is not relevant to this part of the analysis -- I would come out the same if it was a pure 1:1 copy, with the distribution of the copy while retaining the original "for archival purposes."]
The next question is whether a defense applies. Since the original copy is not distributed, first sale probably does not. The next question is fair use, requiring a four-factor analysis that I am not sure would be present here. And here is where the director's equities, and the for-profit nature of the editor, will fit in.
As a lawyer, my answer on questions like this will always be along the lines of "it depends."
Three little words (correctly spelled).
Get.
A.
Life.
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
Since I'm not a big enough fan of the Dogg to ever have bought one of his albums, I was unaware of this edit, thanks for the information.
My other sig is extremely clever...
"Oh, him? He's harmless. Part of the free speech movement at Berkeley in the sixties. I think he did a little too much LDS."
- James Tiberius K.
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
For creative people, reputation can be worth a lot, in terms of work you can get, and an audience willing to spend money for your work. Sometimes, reputation is all you have.
Don't forget, for all the abuses that have been perpetrated by the corporations against the common citizen, copyright and patent law are rooted in the constitution, as a method of promoting the creation and dissemination of creative works.
There is no new legislation at stake here. No underhanded attempts to extend copyright protection for non-individuals (ie corprations), no dark-of-the night clause inserted by the RIAA to claim permanent ownership of an artist's master recordings, no DMCA to lock up anyone who opens up their Discman to see what makes it tick.
What is at stake here is whether a commercial enterprise has the right to modify creative content, even at the behest of its clients, without the permission of the rights holder/creators - a case that clearly falls under current, existing (hell, even pre-DMCA) law.
As someone who one day hopes to make a living, selling those rights (right of first publication, right of syndication in North America, etc.), can you blame me for siding with the artists on this one? After all, if you have no rights to your work, you have nothing! You might as well go to trade school and make $60/hr as a plumber...
What happens when this becomes common practice, and 100 years from now, nobody has seen the original version of the Godfather? The only copy available is the CleanFlicks version that omits all violence and otherwise 'offensive' material? These people are trying to Disney-fy mainstream media. I'm with Scorcesse on this one... if violence offends you, then don't watch the Godfather, go rent The Mighty Ducks.
. SLASHDOT: Home of the vicious nerd.
Sounds good to me. If you want to run a web filter on your machine for your own use that filters "unsuitable" sites, enjoy! It's your money. The problem with filters isn't that they exist, it's that 1) they refuse to tell us what they are specifically filtering and 2) they want to enforce these filters on other people (like adults at a library. Oops, I guess the page on breast cancer you were interested in is prohibited by the filter, too bad. Oops, no translation services so you can read the article in a foriegn language, too bad.)
Myself, I'll continue to enjoy the un-cut, pure internet.
Well, I'd never use such a store, and neither would any of my friends. But so long as I have access to other bookstores that will sell the full versions, I don't care. I think you'll find the market for "sanitized" media is pretty small. Americans may talk puritan values, but we like our filth.
The United States have never formally recognized an author's moral rights. I think we're better for it. Moral rights would significantly restrict my ability to use things I've paid for. Right now the only thing I can't do with a book is make copies and redistribute them. I can redistribute the original. I can make copies for personal use. I can do anything else I want. Moral rights gives the author the right to restrict what I do with the book I paid for.
Furthermore, moral rights are harder to nail down. US copyright restricts copies for X years. At the end of the X years, we assume you've made "enough" money to justify your creation and it goes public domain. We made a trade off between our ability to copy things and incentive for authors to create originals. What about moral rights? How many years must go by before you've enjoyed your moral rights enough? Can you really say that after X years you no longer deserve them?
This particular population specifically chose this option. It's their choice to make. And if they want, the uncut version is certainly available to them.
I'll agree with you here. I don't understand this mindset of "I want to see such-and-such a movie, but I don't want to see certain parts of it." But would you force these people to see the full movies? It's their choice. Why take choices away from them?
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Just a question to toss out to everyone--how might the legal ability to modify without permission and then legally distribute (albeit with a disclaimer notifying the buyer of changes) apply to software? Wouldn't it be legal, then, for an OEM to sell a version of Windows or something, and rip out parts or modify it? It might work better and not have as many hooks in it then... but what if some company distributing Linux did the same thing? A consumer who is willing to give it a whirl because of its improvements and price (free!) could be easily turned off. Okay, okay, maybe I'm getting a little conspirational here, but it's possible too for MS to hatch their own little Linux divison and market it as, say, "Red Hat with some minor mods". If it worked like crap, do you think the average consumer would be miffed at MS or Linux? Just trying to see different ways this could apply to us...
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
Unwritten rule 8.2.1.1a '..whosoever uses Linux shall be the winner of any argument irrespective of all previous rulings. In the event that both contestants are Linux users, the participant NOT making a patent application shall be the winner as per 7.6.4.8b (above)...'
That's right, just like I can buy a car, respray it, replace the seats and resell it. Oh no, profiting without respecting a 'specific vision' how terrible. If you don't want me to modify a car don't sell it to me, clear?
Any and all modifications, where sanctioned by the Micro$shaft
Mobile Transportation Production Corporation of
America, MUST be performed by Micro$shaft Certified
Mobile Transport Technical personell at a liscensed
MMTCoA Technical Support Service Station.
Any persons attempting un-authorized access to said
Mobile Transport will be vaporized.
They don't have to make a new tape. You can edit the existing tape. Sheesh, it's brain-dead simple to do. 1. Load the tape into an editing machine 2. Spool the tape to the correct start/end points of the scene to be cut. 3. Slice the tape at both points at a 45 degree angle. 4. Discard cut tape. 5. splice the video tape using celluoid (scotch) tape. 6. Trim the scotch tape to the video tape width. 7. Repeat steps 1-6 above until the tape is edited as desired. 8. Rewind and play in VCR.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
I would definitely pay money to have sex, violence and profanity *added* to some movies. It will actually make them watchable.
Really? You try setting up a factory and making 2003 Ford Escorts and see if you don't get sued into oblivion. Cars are most certainly copyrighted, they just aren't as easy to duplicate as most of the copyrighted work discussed on slashdot.
Earlier in this thread, you said that it would be fine if people brought movies to CF, which then spliced them for a fee -- you're contradicting yourself again.
There is no law against modifying "creative content" which you legally own, at the behest of clients or anyone else. If you want to dispute this, please cite legislation or precedent.
Most of what you say I've already addressed upthread.
I'm pretty sure cars are covered by design patents. (which are distinct from "regular" utility patents and copyrights)
No, the GPL is needed to edit and redistribute NEW COPIES YOU HAVE MADE. It is not needed to edit or redistribute the SAME copy SOMEONE ELSE MADE.
It's legal to sell used books, even used books that have had pages ripped out or notes written in. This goes a long way towards disproving your statement.
As for censorship -- so what? This is not the government censoring here! It is the audience itself!
For example, I have a proxy filter on my computer. I get rid of ads with it. I also get rid of other things that bother me, like excessive logos, or annoying graphics or text. (e.g. Aint It Cool News has webmail -- I don't use it, so I have programmed the filter to delete that, and thus I never see it)
This is not really censorship. This is my selectively choosing what I will and will not look at. Do you read the ads in a newspaper or magazine? I don't. This is little different, except that we now have a machine that helps you in the process of not wasting your time on looking at crap -- by using choices about what to hide from you, THAT YOU MADE YOURSELF, AND CAN ALWAYS CHANGE ACCORDING TO YOUR WHIM!
There's a _world_ of difference between the Soviet Union telling me what I can and cannot look at, and me making my own decision. Likewise, I do not make decisions for anyone else, though I'm happy to share my filters with anyone who wants to use them because they have made similar choices.
To decide for yourself seems to me to be the acme of freedom -- not necessarily tolerance or open mindedness, but freedom nevertheless.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
If the directors where half as smart as they think they are, they would be producing the edited versions themselves. Obviously there is a market for this, as the marketers of anime have found. I have quite a few unedited anime titles for me. I also buy the edited versions of some of these so my 9 year-old can watch them.
Laws should make sense. It makes sense to me that the artist's unique original work would be offered greater protection than a reproduction. I would not use an iron with nails welded to its flat surface (Man Ray's Cadeau) upon an original's canvas, even if I owned that original. A reproduction print though, I'd consider that fair game.
For a theoretical example, it's like not being able to hunt members of an endangered species, but you could hunt clones made of members of that same species. Aside from the moral issue of cloning animals just to kill them, and assuming that cloning a species doesn't remove originals from the endangered list. (Of course, humans are protected whether they're endangered or not, so that's not a defense for hunting cloned humans for sport.)
Would you pay a museum to see classic Greek statues dressed in clothes from the local Sears? Or paintings with Colorforms placed over the "naughty bits"?
The DGA and the outspoken directors need to educate people that buying these films is buying crap. Sure they have the right to buy a copy of the Venus deMilo and smash it up in their backyard, it doesn't make them saint or villain, just clueless.
That's okay for you to hate Utah. I hate Nevada and certain parts of California *cough*San Francisco*cough*. Las Vegas is a dirty town full of dirty practices. I hate sex being thrust so forcefully into the public media and I'm a staunch advocate of abstinence until marriage, and for a goodytwoshoes like me, driving around Las Vegas and just seeing billboards is an affront to all I hold dear.
CleanFlicks, which there is one in my town just about 7 or so miles from my house, works by paying a fee of 15 dollars or so per month to be a member... or, in other words, you have joint ownership of the movies that are edited. Then you can rent (I have a pretty good idea that you don't have to pay extra for a certain number of rentals per month beyond the membership fee), or rather, check out what you already own.
You're right, it's not surprising that some enterprising people who both want to see good entertainment and have standards concerning what that entertainment is have come from Utah. Culturally, we are different than the rest of the nation. We delight in our peculiarity, and I'm happy that most people in my community hold the same moral standards that I do. I don't have to worry very much that strangers I meet will be outwardly foul and disgusting people.
I've been through US Army active duty training, travled a good deal around the country as well, so I know there are a lot of good people outside Utah, but I enjoy the particularly high concentration of them you find here.
Anyway, I rent from Blockbuster Video and simply avoid Rated-R movies (though I've seen the Matrix, Gladiator, and Saving Private Ryan within the past year... violence doesn't bother me nearly so much as nudity and sex), so, not being a member/patron of CleanFlicks, I don't know all of the particulars save what I've mentioned.
Besides, if I buy a duplicate of the statue of David and I want to put boxer briefs on it, that's my prerogative.
The way you put it certainly makes me re-think my previous position, but I still wonder if it is all right to take someone else's product and re-package and re-sell an alternate version of it without the permission of its original author.
How about if I hack a Super Mario Bros. ROM and re-sell that (after buying as many copies as I am going to sell, naturally, so that I am not cutting into Nintendo's sales)? I'll make sure to tell everyone that it's really SMB and I've just "modified" it a bit. I am pretty sure that has never been legal.
What about if I buy 20 bags of cheetos, remove them from their packaging, add a few ingredients, and re-package them in my own bag which says "Clean Films Cheetos" on it, but of course, also mentions on there that it DOES in fact contain modified cheetos. That seems pretty close to what these guys are doing, and I doubt anyone would get away with it with that sort of product. Why is it different for movies, exactly?
Despite all that, I think that, in the end, it will all come down to the fact that CF is using someone else's trademark without their permission. You are correct in saying that it is most likely not an issue of copyright.
A more accurate analogy would have them slapping "edited to remove socio-political expose"
stickers on the side (since Cleanflicks seems to be honest about what they're doing.)
Given that the company doing the editing in this hypothetical situation is Microsoft, the label would more likely say "New and Improved Microsoft Movie XP Special Edition".
This is not intended as cheap MS-bashing -- it's intended to point out that the labeling will, in every case, use wording that puts a positive spin on the modifications which were made.
Oh, and also "they" are the tiny shoestring operation (Cleanflicks), and "you" are Microsoft (Hollywood) -- your entire analogy hinges on the editing people being powerful enough to displace the "untainted" copies in the marketplace
That was the entire point of the analogy. What's good for the goose is good for the gander -- if you support the small guy's ability to edit the big guy's movies and redistribute them, you must also support the big guy's ability to edit the small guy's movies.
If you don't want someone cutting up your movie, and possibly reselling it, don't sell them a copy.
I have a movie, and Persons A and B are interested in buying it. Person A wants to watch it they way I released it, so I sell a copy to him. Person B intends to cut out all the objectionable content, and since that goes against my wishes, I refuse to sell to Person B.
However, Person B can easily persuade Person A to sell his copy to him.
I am not arguing agaist the doctrine of resale, but you can see from my example that the net effect of it is that as a seller, I have NO control over who I sell it to.
What duplication? You seem to be talking about situations that do not exist.
So Cleanflicks unspools the original VHS tape and makes its edits with a razor blade and splicing tape? They've found some way to write new data to read-only DVD media?
Making a censored copy of a movie entails, by definition, making a copy of it.
As I see it, CleanFlicks and other companies doing what they do are in violation of copyright because they are making derivative works and selling/renting them without permission of the creators. The exception for derivative works applies only for parody and criticism, covered under Fair Use provisions.
CleanFlicks' purposes don't seem to fit under either of those, or under any of the other purposes listed under Fair Use provisions: "comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research".
And even if they were doing it without making a profit, they could still be found in violation of the law. Brad Templeton has an excellent site on the "10 myths about copyright" that explains not-for-profit violations (Myth #2).
Finally, the purpose of Copyright is not to protect the economic rights of a creator; the actual Article from the Constitution (Article I, section 8), states
The Congress shall have power... To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
By giving protections to creators, there is incentive for them to create and share those creations with the rest of society "to promote progress of science and useful arts".
On a side note, if you ever have an opportunity to take a course/workshop/etc. on copyright, I highly recommend it. I took a 2 1/2 course last summer though the U of Mich and it was fascinating -- I didn't know how much I didn't know!
Me, if these people are buying the clean parts of the movies, how do I go about purchasing just the naughty bits left behind? And how many naughty bits can they fit on one DVD?
Okay, here's my thinking: If Microsoft did as described, I wouldn't like it, but I would grudgingly admit that it was legal (with Microsoft, I'm used to it.) However, since the most important facts of the situation were exactly reversed in the hypothetical situation, I didn't feel the need to give the analogy much thought.
Or, to put it another way: If all the locally-owned restaurants in an area colluded in some legal way to put a McDonald's out of business, I think that would be Right, but if all the fast-food chains colluded to kill a locally-owned place, that would be Wrong. Both would be legal, but since I think that locally-owned businesses are good for the world, I would support the first and object to the second. I don't think that's hypocrisy; "good for the world" isn't guaranteed to be preserved along all possible lines of extrapolation.
Extremes, yes. Opposites are a different story.
If the films are distributed under a GPL style license, everbody has the right to edit them and re-distribute. But I dont think they are.
Theres two ways to take that, and they are both correct.
1) If the films were GPL you could distribute edited versions.
2) If the films were distributed you would need a liscence like the GPL.
In either case, your answer is still correct "I don't think they are". They are not GPL, and they are not distributed.
What this people is doing has nothing to to with copyright, but with censorship.
Correct, since they are not "copying". However I'd have to challenge the accusation that this is censorship as you seem to mean it; which is deciding what other people see on a governmental scale. You'll note that these people decide as individuals what they well see for themselves, not for their neighbors, friends, or the populace at large.
When someone censors parts of an artistic work, its changing the meaning of what the artist tried to express.
That is debatable, but the pros and cons of changing what an artist tried to express are not important here. I will mention that I saw once a version of Shakespears "Twelvth Night" done in "Rocky Horror Picture Show" drag, and that is far closer to the vice you describe then having someone edit the video tape I bought. I wound up walking out after the first act, was that censorship?
But what I do find important is that I don't care what the director was trying to express, if he has to resort to certain measures to "express" it then I shouldn't be subjected to them. In this case forcing people to watch such expression is more censorship then allowing them to watch what they want to watch.
However!
I do believe that the director and editor(s) should have the option to take their name off the modified work before that work is sold or otherwise distributed to others. An "Alan Smithy" clause, as it exists between directors and producers.
I don't state that this would be simple or even cheap to enforce, but I sure as hell don't want someone creating an abomination based on my work and then distributing it with nothing more than a "Stuff was changed." disclaimer.
On the other hand, if someone pulls off a brilliant bit of re-editing, I may just hire them for my next film.
Moekandu
"It is a sad time when a family can be torn apart by something as simple as a pack of wild dogs."
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius. -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
for broadcast TV?
, English is such a static thing. Why don't you go and read Canterbury Tales and shut up.
Actually, the Cantebury Tales is an excellent example of why enforcing grammatical and spelling rules (silly though they might be) and settling on *some* standard is better than none... because nobody wants today's information to be as difficult to decipher as Chaucer's are to today's people.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
A. They post on Slashdot.
I don't mean this as a troll, but I'm astonished how many people are missing a vastly important distinction here:
There is a difference between what the law should say and what the law currently says. The latter is the issue; the DGA and the directors it represents are claiming that CleanFlicks does not have the right to resell modified versions of copyrighted works. I haven't seen word one that the DGA is in the wrong: You can buy a work, and resell it at will (doctrine of first sale), but not if you modify it.
Now, whether this SHOULD be the law is a totally separate issue, and I can't understand how an entire site's worth of readers can conflate the two accidentally.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
However, what will happen (eventually in the future) is that you'll have the original stream, and CleanFlix (or whoever) will transmit to you commands to modify the file. That is, you provide "An Officer and a Gentleman", and they provide the instructions "strike all content between 1:10 and 1:13."
Then your media player will merge the movie and the instructions and play the "modified" film.
Ok, now in this hypothetical situation, what infraction did Cleanflix commit? They didn't distribute a work or a derivative of the work. And yet you know the media companies and f-ing congress would go after them.
(This is the same issue that Gator (was it?) was having when they put ads over Yahoo!'s ads.)
I want you guys to think about this very carefully, because I feel it's quite important: we're talking about the mandatory presentation of content in the manner of the copyright holder's choosing.
In the case of my Cleanflix hypothetical, I'm talking about making it illegal to distribute a list of scenes from a movie, through the perversion of copyright law.
I hope you're thinking that's insane, but look! It's what we have already in the case of web page framing and advertising! It's been through court that you cannot distribute software that modifies the rendering of a web page from what the source site intended!
Read that again! It's the same issue as not being able to distribute a list of scenes in a movie. In the case of the browser, even though you do not distribute a derivative work of the web page, you are being held liable in the same way if you frame a page, or alter the rendering.
"You can't modify my page before the user sees it! That's copyright infringement! It's like you're making a derivative work!" It sounds like common sense, but it's WRONG. The thing is, it's ok to make a derivative work. People do it all the time. I underline important passages in my college texts, for instance. But I can't resell that as "Footext now with underlines!"
I can, however freaking read it after I've underlined it. And I can tell someone else to turn to page 37 of their copy of the book and underline the second sentence, too!
Now, of course, the ease of copying and merging of the changes into the film does make a difference that should be considered, but the eventual conclusion must be that the user is allowed to modify content with a list of instructions provided by a third party.
This is because, in the US, being able to provide a list of changes to content is protected from the government by the right to free speech, and this should take priority over copyright law.
The wrench in the works is that the movie people can put protection schemes on their software and not license the decrypters to companies who make the editing software, and then the DMCA prohibits the distribution of said software. Wheee!
The DMCA must be destroyed. But that's another story for another time...
Okay, there are two issues here -- morality and legality. Morally, I wouldn't support the situation described, for obvious reasons (censorship and deceitfulness.) My understanding of the law is that Microsoft has a legal right to do the thing described, but if someone found a technicality and nailed them on it, cool -- because what they're doing is censorship (or rather mouthsewing), and deceitful. I support the right to do what you wish with legally purchased "content" (beyond copying it etc.) enough to allow even Microsoft to do it, but that doesn't mean that I hope that this happens to (say) Freedom Downtime.
Further, if I were the judge/jury, a lot of what I thought of a case like this would hinge on the deceitfulness angle -- did people have an accurate understanding of how the movie they were seeing was edited? In the case of Cleanflicks, yes. In the case of Microsoft, no.
This seems like the same kind of thin technicality that led to the following ruling: Running a computer program involves making several copies (original media to hard disk, hard disk to memory), and this is prohibited without permission of the copyright holder, therefore, EULAs are 100% binding (I wish I could dig up the case itself -- can anyone help me out?) In my book (IANAL, naturally), making a copy as an incidental part of doing something un-copy-ish is fair use (as long as you don't rent both copies or anything.)
From archived memory, I believe the sherman anti-trust act states that a business cannot refuse to sell something because they disagree with what the buyer will do with it after it is sold. I think Microsoft used this against IBM in the 80's. Anyone remember that? If so, does that apply here? (I imagine anything applies if you have good enough lawyers.)
Supply and Demand is the reason for used college textbook prices, not damage or anything else. If demand dictated used book prices be higher than new, they would be. Or, if what you added or removed to/from the book added value, maybe it would sell higher.
I think a better argument, based on the discussion so far is: Is CleanFlicks doing as service for their customers, for the customers benefit, or editing the content and reselling for the benefit of the company. Many of the previous posts mention this.
Some say that "If I want someone to tear pages out of a book/remove frames from a movie because I'm unable or unmotivated to, that's my perogative." others say "You're editing copyrighted material, and reselling it." Both statements end up with the same result, it just twists the intent while accomplishing this task. I don't see this as a problem, if I want to show my kids Braveheart, but I'd rather they didn't see the boobies and blood. If there were a convenient way of doing this, I don't see it as any different than a TV version of a movie, just sans the commercials.
(insert attempt to be witty here)
Some of those chick flicks I get dragged to could use a good explosion or three (preferably when all the sensitive whiners are in the same space/time)... and I'd love to just cut to a sex scene whenever all the grrrrl-friends are sitting around bitching about guys.
A Human Right
There is fair-use but there is also a difference between a business and a person. A person has lots of legal rights that a corporation does not. Can a business take a can of Dole peaches, rip the label off and say they are (K) Brand peaches? No. That would be mis-representation. To say that it is a matter of fair-use is ignoring the fact that as a business they have certains but also certain responbilities when they do business. I think that CleanFlicks is going to far with editing versions of movies without permission. a person has a right to modify products that they buy but a business does not. It can a slippery slope where they can misrepresent a product or good.
Today's StudioBrief on the Internet Movie Database has an article about this Slashdot discussion.
The article is here.
Just my $0.04 (adjusted for inflation)
Why does Hollywood object to people seeing what they want in a movie by taking sex and violence out when the whole reason they put sex and violence in is because "that's what people want to see," and "we're just mirroring society?" Very curious.
So, does that make me a terrible person, or is it OK because it was my tape?
I think this should put the whole edited tape thing in perspective.
for (i = 0; i amendments.count; i++)
{
if (i != 1)
printf("Amendment %d\n%s\n", i+1, amentments[i].text);
}
for (i = 0; i < amendments.count; i++)
{
if (i != 1)
printf("Amendment %d\n%s\n", i+1, amentments[i].text);
}
Well, since I'm feeling lazy today, I'll limit myself to "Due Process" (re: detentions without charge and without access to legal representation). I'm sure other people will point out my many omissions (maybe something about religion).
Now, the trouble is that, in the process, you make intermediate copies in between, and, the final is a copy of a copy. So, it can be said that copyright has been violated. This just goes to show how stupid copyright (in its real world incarnation) is in the first place. If you use an editing suite then, unless there are fair use provisions, like the ones allowing temporary copies in computer memory, protecting you, it is a copyright violation. If you take a razor to the tape, cutting out the parts you do not want and then pasting it together, then no copying is involved. The directors would probably still whine, but the simple fact is that the copyright owners exclusive right to copy was not infringed. The trouble with doing it with a razor is that the video will get snowy and flicker at the points where the cuts have been made, plus the joins may damage the video heads. Something else that could be done is to encode some instructions to a specially designed video player over the first few seconds of the tape ("FBI" warning, usually) that tell it exactly where on the tape to skip portions. Then, the tape could be played at a slightly higher than normal speed, and be cached as it goes. This could be accomplished digitally, or it could be done with an analog tape delay system. If it is done with a tape delay system it may become a copyright violation, however. From what I understand of copyright law, the digital version is protected, but I do not know if the analog version is. What fun, what fun.
There are all sorts of interesting philosophical questions this raises. Moving bits of the video around on the original tape is, strictly speaking, a copyright violation (barring fair use), but what if it were done by separating the magnetic medium from the plastic film (how it is done is irrelevant, this is a thought experiment), scraping off the bits that you do not want, then sliding the bits you do together and rebonding them to the plastic? No copying there, so no copright violation. Now, how about a difficult one... The video signal is stored on tape using areas of differing magnetic potential. Those areas drift and bleed into each other naturally over time. What if you could force them to drift to a diffent position on the tape, while retaining the same configuration in relation to one another? Let's say that you are using some sort of device that creates a very precisely shaped magnetic field. The process would actually be very similar to the normal editing process where you copy to another tape and copy back. However, rather than being copied off, the areas of differing magnetic potential would actually be pushed on the tape. They would never cease to exist, they would just end up in a different spot. The end result would be indistinguishable to editing with a standard editing suite, but it would involve no copying in between.
Obviously thought experiments and logic mean squat to politicians and judges. Still, wouldn't it be nice to live in a fantasy world where the people in charge of us thought long and hard about the consequences of their actions before taking them? Ah well.
I'm a Christian, and I think I'm the only Christian to read Slashdot. I seem to be the only one who has posted on this topic. I'm a network technician at a fairly large church. I installed linux on a server for our missions org this weekend. I have written some articles for a decent sized hardware site, and I have had one of those articles plagurized by perhaps the biggest hardware site (the one that's constantly in hot water and photoshops fake pictures of "confidential" high end computer parts) I read slashdot several times a day. I am one of you.
I've read every post on this, up until now, I'm sure a few hundred more will pour in by the time I'm done typing. I've seen some very accurate sentiments, and some fairly childish ideas.
I hate censorship. I hate the DMCA. The same people that are suing clean flicks are the same basic people who are pushing congress to move towards "secure" computing. These are the people who are pushing for DRM. I have GBs of mp3s that I legally own the copyrights for. I built a car computer for playing them. When I like a movie, I buy the DVD, and then I copy it to my hard drive. I don't want to be some jamoco who carries around a case of 2000 CDs and DVDs everywhere I go. That's what they want. They want total control.
As a network administrator, I see DRM as something that's going to cause so many headaches. Every program will have it's own dumb code and I will not be able to ghost a hard drive over to another computer.
And this is just more of the same. I'm trying to have a clean mind. This is between me and God. I don't seek to impose my standards on anyone else. If some of the ultra-right wingers got thier way, they would create a police state where alcohol, cigarettes, swearing, and non-marital sex were non-existant. But this would not lead one more person to Christ. In fact, such unbiblical heavy handedness would drive people away.
I don't watch movies much anymore. Lord of the Rings, Spider Man, Star Wars, they were decent enough. I've never watched a censored movie, except the 3 billion censored movies I've seen on TV. (hipocrytes) If I want to censor a movie, or have someone else do it, there's nothing morally wrong with it, and I can prove it.
1. The artists behind the work have been properly compensated for thier time. (thou shalt not steal)
2. The artists have been properly credited for their work. Credits remain unchanged.(not like when that site plagurized my article)
3. The media is clearly marked as being censored. (no attempt to impose belifs on others, no deception)
4. It is not uncommon for a middleman to make a profit on something.
5. If the directors tolerate censorship for time constraints, language, violence, and nudity when their movies are on TV, why won't they tolerate it on video? Any director of any movie who has allowed censorship in that media has no right to deny the same censorship on another.
Part of understanding copyright is that it is (or was) media independant. You own the right to listen to a song if it's on tape, record, or CD. So if editing for TV is ok, but doing it on tape isn't, then they've crossed the line into areas of SECURE media and DRM. And to say it's different because Clean Flicks is making money on it is invalid, because ABC makes money when they show a cleaned up version of a movie.
I feel that the same people who are against clean flicks are the same people who would jump up and defend The Phantom Edit, and the same people who would jump to defend Dirty Flick's right to insert sex scenes into clean movies featuring celebrity look alikes and edit in swearing into disney films. When some group goes after TIVO, they will stand up and shout "you can't do that"
How long will we give away our rights? Freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion are all fading away. Even if you hate Christians and you want to see Clean Flicks burned down, one more incursion by "big media" (AOL/Timewarner ABC/Disney RIAA MPAA Microsoft/NBC Intel/DRM) will not help you in any way, but it can certainly hurt you. There's no telling what kind of precedent this case can establish. Some judges are so goofy they will say "well, it's illegle to edit copyrighted movies, so it's illegle to edit copyrighted network protocols." (say goodbye to SAMBA)
When a people HAVE a right, it's theirs until they let someone take it. But when a people try to get back a right that was taken from them, there is usually a lot of bloodshed.
How far is too far? Let them take our clean movies and TIVOs. We don't need them. One day we'll be slashdotting talking about how cool the net used to be. Before Microsoft's EULA required all PCs to be welded shut to prevent tampering with the DRM. Before all movies and music would only play on the disc that we bought them on. Before the entire net was filtered and your ISP reported evey action to AOL/Timewarner so they can send you spam and junkmail. Before E-wallet monitors every dollar you make and spend and reports it to the IRS and AOL/Timewarner so they can direct proper advertising at you?
Zero, because Darwin wrote no such book. He did, however, write a book called The Origin of Species
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
Damned mormons, can't they leave us alone? Is this store in South lake city btw? I know that they have a store like that over there
if you think that the "ideas and values" held forth by Hollywood(tm) are shared by 95% of all Americans. Nevermind the rest of the world. Part of the backside of the First Ammendment is that, while you have the right to say (and, I suppose, film) anything you want, I have (once I've paid the admission price) the right to pay attention to or ignore, as I please, whichever parts of that statement I may or may not wish to hear.
If you want to watch a film that I have funded a part of the price I want you to pay is to be exposed to the ideas and values I seek to promote.
HAH!! ON WHAT PLANET do you find this enforceable?!? Sorry, but your money does NOT buy you that. What are you going to do? Arrest me for leaving the theater during some scene _you_ feel is "important"?
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
We might as well put pants on Michelangelo's David. That filth just needs to be hidden.
Upwards, not forwards!
Has anyone else ever watched TV? They edit the movies for content EVERY DAY. I don't see them getting sued over it. They pay to show the movie on their station and can edit it as they see fit. Anyone who thinks it is any different for this company is just siding with Big Business. Too bad Blockbuster and Hollywood Video don't get into this cause that could really turn the tables. I am all for allowing this company to edit movies for content cause USA and TNT do it every day and hollywood still allows them to show the movies.
Lost my other post :( So i'm going to repost what i said.
At my school, school books are rented out to us each semester. We pay 30-50 $ for those books, then return them at the end of the year. First day of school, we write our names in the books. Then during the year we highlight crap, write notes, etc. At the end of the year, the book takes those books back, and we don't get our money back (they're rented). Then, next year/semester, the school sells those books back out to the new studends. OMFG! My school just brok the copyright law! THey sold something that was changed from its original form! And they didn't even tell anyone!
I don't see my school getting sued though. Point- reselling or even renting edited stuff thats copyrighted is NOT illegal.
And don't say anything like "those books are subsidized by the state," ours aren't. We have PREMIUM books.
I would just like to say to those who are of the mindset of... "if you don't like it edit it yourself..." need I remind you that decrypting the DVD to get at it and edit the content is technically illegal (DMCA). As is defeating the macro vision to make a VHS copy for editing.
By taking companies like this down Hollywood is basically saying "to hell with the customer."
As long as they are getting the money for the movie (a copy is legally purchased for every one edited) and as long as the content creators are still receiving credit I don't see what the big deal is...
What Hollywood is saying is Spielberg can replace the guns in E.T. with walkie talkies (because of his kids) despite what the viewing and paying public wants. But I can't decide that I want that same movie for my kids to watch without the profanity?
That sounds rather ludicrous and egotistical to me... If Henry Ford had his way cars would still be only one color, black.
Content creators still get credited. All parties get paid the same regardless of the films content. People buy the movie they feel is appropriate for their family. What's the problem?
If they are taking these companies down they better start giving me back some of my rights for the stuff I spend my hard earned $$ on!
Copyright law prevents me from copying your works, it doesn't (or shouldn't) stop me tearing out the pages in copies made with your permission and purchased by me.
Actually, copyright law grants five rights to a copyright owner - not just the right to prevent copies from being made. One of those is the right to prepare derivative works based on the original work. How is tearing out some pages and selling the new derivative work not a violation of copyright law? IANAL...
...is that someone may make an all-white version of "The Wiz".
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think you're using an incorrect term ("MORMONS") to describe those LDS members who, against the doctrines of the LDS church, take a "holier-than-thou" attitude, while hypocritically participating in things like drugs, sex, alcohol, vandalism, etc. I've heard such people referred to as "Jack Mormons," as in "Ain't Worth Jack" which seems a bit more fitting.
I live in Utah. I'll agree that there is an abundance of "Jack Mormons" here, but claiming that the LDS church controls the government, and that Utah sucks, ad infinitum, is incorrect.
It would seem to me that the directors of a film would have every right to deny the "sale" of edited movies that they created. We would all object if someone were selling "edited" copies of books that removed "objectionable material" and would applaud any author who chose to sue over the practice. Do not let our distaste for the film industry colorize our thoughts on this matter, There is, however, a way in which the company could proceed in a perfectly legal fashion: do not edit any given movie until AFTER a customer requests that a movie be edited, then edit and burn the new copy. The technical details could be worked out so that this would become a short process (the movies are "pre-mapped" so that they can be edited as they are burned for instance) but it would remove the process from the real of "sale of edited works" into the realm of a "service," namely, editing films for individuals. It would be as if someone were paying someone else to "preread" a book and use a black marker to remove material that they would find objectionable. A silly distincion, I know, but the letter of the law makes for weird distinctions.
I am very opposed to censorship and I don't think censoring the movies is good. I also think kids shouldn't be allowed to watch any shows/play any games that are not good for them and I would set the barrier much higher. Parents can't tell me that they can't enforece this on their kids. They are just too lazy, e.g. think it won't hurt them. Fine! Their kids! I respect other opinios on that.
But when I buy a tape I have the right to do as I please with it and when I am finished I can sell it to anyone I please (except minors, of course). What the heck do they think they are that they want to restrict those rights.
Why hate Utah? There are a lot of artistic wonders in Utah (Utah Symphony, Mormon Tabernacle Choir), not to mention a lot of natural rock formations that have an artistic quality (Goblin Valley, Arches Nat'l Park, Bryce Canyon, Zion's Nat'l Park, etc.). The things you list as your reasons for hating Utah are stereotypes. You hate the stereotype.
Though I have to admit.. while highly inaccurate, the "Mormon Twins" characters from Ocean's Eleven were extremely hilarious. (Do I have my movies right? It was Ocean's Eleven, wasn't it?)
Ocean's Eleven is also a movie that would still retain its original story if the curses were bleeped, dubbed, or muted.
A solution to the problem with music today
... like the movies get edited all the time for TV. I don't see a problem with paying someone with the skill to edit out parts of a movie that I might find offencive to purform that service as long as I have purchased a copy of the movie first.
God knows that the movie industry doesn't like it when we record movies from a television broadcast. Our fair use rights be damned.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
It's used. I believe it is law that you must declare a used product used if it is, well, used. They KNOW there is the possiblity that it is not in original condition.
A car is a perfectly acceptable example. It's a good. Books are goods as well, with additional protections that were given to keep them as a purchasable good. Copyright law gives parity to creative works, in an attempt to put them at the same level as physical property, such as a car or a house. You are the person being misleading, since you want people to believe copyright law is granting some weird exceptions, put in some spin that it's of special value beyond standard goods. They are not and should not. (I disagree with limitations on copyright, if you are thinking about trying that.)
Your arguments are very similar to what the Author's Guild has put out. They want to charge readers that go to library's for each checkout. They want to inhibit used books sales. These arguments are similar to DRM arguements--it's about the benjamins, the business model, not INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS.
Hmmm, what if Clean Flicks sold *data*, that your 'intelligent' DVD/VCD/VHS player could interpret as commands to apply to the movie in question. For instance there could be commands like: "Time 1013-1025 seconds::Delete footage" or "Time 2300::Superpose EmbeddedGraphic#234 on RectangleRegion (232,334-677,234)".
The distinction between movie and review in this case is very clear.... and perfectly legal. It would in essence be a sort of like a super "TV Guide", with granularity down to the second.
What Clean Flicks seems to do is very close to this - modify a copy of the movie at the request of the customer who owns the rights to watch the movie as he sees fit. I think this should be legal.
I don't care about the law, the First Amendment, artist's rights, or any of that!
After seeing so many classmates waste their childhoods under overprotective parents, I'm sick and tired of them, and I want to whack them all over the head with a clue-stick! I mean, who'd want to watch Eyes Wide Shut with all the sex scenes cut out anyway? It'd be, what, a half-hour long, and damn boring!
"I'm sorry, our daughter isn't allowed to date. She's too young..."
Eat this! (WHACK!)
The world can be wrong today for once.
CleanFlicks *is* given permission from the final purchaser, after said purchase, to edit the film to his or her liking. The purchase has already taken place, the rights to the physical media are no longer in the studio's hands once that purchase has been made. They do not retain ownership of the physical videotape.
You're confusing CONTENT with MEDIA. Yes, you own the content of your "story", but that doesn't mean you can prevent me from crossing out words in my magazine copy that I purchased.
Right. Your school couldn't *publish* those books. So they don't. Just like CleanFlicks, your school is exercising it's fair use rights to modify and sell its physical posessions.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Yup. Another example: Armageddon was shown on ABC a few months back. Most of the initial meteor strike in New York was censored out (for obvious reasons). The eye candy was pretty much the only reason to watch that movie. Without that, the only things left were the shabby plot and unlikable characters.
Well, I was going from memory, but Google search on "copyright collage derivative" threw up:
I can't find more references right now. Reading some of the other posts suggests that it may come down to whether a copy was made in the process of editing it, which if they are using video tape, is almost certainly true.
NO ID: BEING FREE MEANS NOT HAVING TO PROVE IT
OK, I'll give you that. How about "Edited for general consumption"?
If you go back and read the point that I end on, you might see why I chose to present it this way. I'll spell it out: don't cheer on the little guy, if by doing so you help to set a precedent that the big guy can exploit.
- They can simply buy your rights away from you, even if you don't want to sell.
What rights are those? If you don't want someone cutting up your movie, and possibly reselling it, don't sell them a copy. That goes whether "them" is Joe Blow or Microsoft.How do you know that they won't cut and resell it until you've sold it to them? You ask every purchaser? OK, what's to stop them lying about their intentions? Nothing. So what's the mechanism that protects you from this? Why, it's copyright law.
- commercial editing and duplication
What duplication? You seem to be talking about situations that do not exist.They'll be making copies of a single edited master. That's duplication. Do you need it explained further?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Did you even read the summary? They are NOT republishing. Every movie that they edit, they pay the studio for.
I agree, that if they were copying and re-publishing, then they would be in the wrong. That isn't the case tho.
This is absolutely about the right of the end user to do what they want with the movie that they buy. Would you feel better if the consumer bought the movie somewhere else, and brought it into Clean Flicks to have them edit it, wait for it to be finished, and then carried it back out? Would that make it in issue of end user rights at that point? What if Clean Flicks not only provided the editing, but they sold you the unedited version, then you handed it back, and they edited it for you, and you took it from there? Same thing? (yes). So now, what if rather than make you purchase the unedited version, hand it back, wait for the editing, and what not, what if they had it pre-edited for you, since that is really the only reason that you would buy the movie from them anyway? McDonalds pre-cooks the food in anticipation of someone wanting it. Clean Flicks simply pre-edits the movie, in anticipation of someone wanting a mangled copy of the movie.
This is absolutely a consumer rights issue. Although I would be more likely to hang out in the Dirty Flicks store someone mentioned above, You and I have no more right to define their morality than they do to define ours.
bleh. Forgot to log in....... Tut'n'common
Yeah, it's a damn shame when the public does something or 'misinterprets' something or even decides that it could be better. That is the risk of any artistic work or performance.
How many interpretation of Shakespeare have there been? 10,000? 100,000? None match the original, though all (where honest) give credit and homage to the original. All are legitimate, though most are of dubious quality.
It's tragic and amusing when an author yells to his critics, "But, you've gotten it all wrong!". Yeah, so? When a work is released (and that is a VERY appropriate term) to the world at large, a certain amount of control is, and should be, lost.
There is no censorship, since they don't claim it is the original, and they make absolutely no attempt to modify every copy (something done by Hollywood on a daily basis). They are providing a service, nothing more.
One of the companies being sued makes a program that sits between the VCR/DVD and TV, and blanks the screen or mutes the sound at pre-set times. I can't believe anybody would think that showing LESS of a copyrighted film is a copyright violation. Is it thus a copyright violation if a mother covers her child's eyes with her hands during a gruesome scene? Or if I go out during a boring sequence? Is it a copyright violation for a rich person to have a trained servant with a stopwatch take a curtain and cover the screen with it at pre-set times? Would a company training people to do this be sued? Is use of the fast-forward and mute buttons a copyright violation?
This leads to a question. Are movies licensed like software or sold like books?
ARP
hmmm, missing the right and left sides that get cropped when optimized for TV viewing. Watch any R rated movie, where did all the R rated content go???? What's the fuss. Their market is people that want to see the "TV" version of the movie before it gets to TV!
The detention of enemy combatants under military jurisdiction (not without due process, by the way, just without the strict timelines imposed by civilian jurisdiction) is a practice which goes back to the earliest days of our Republic, and which has been repeatedly upheld by the Supreme Court, most recently in the 1942 case Ex Parte Quirin .
If you want to claim that this is prohibited by the Bill of Rights, by the way, you'll have to explain why Madison (the author of the Bill of Rights) used this during his presidency against French and British saboteurs...
Duhh, okay... so my brain wasn't working that day. I stand by my position, though -- I think you have the right to do whatever you want to legally obtained "content," including modifying and/or reselling it, and I think that should apply to Microsoft as well as it does to you and I. The fact is that Microsoft would be more likely to use other, equally legal (monopoly issues aside) tactics to bury the hypothetical movie -- pressuring movie stores not to take it, making and giving away copies of a similar or counterpoint movie, etc.
I don't think "no harm, no foul" is setting a bad precedent that could lead to future fouls. Others may of course disagree. *shrug*
Copyright law doesn't protect against reselling (first sale) or modification (parody, time & space-shifting.) It protects against unauthorized duplication and public performance.
My feeling is that that's fair use -- i.e. that they're paying for as many copies as they're renting, which is legit (think of "copying" a computer program from HD to memory -- that's fair use, too.) I didn't see any mention of unauthorized copying in the DGA complaint, and I'm pretty confident that that would have made it to the top of the list if the renters had been anything but 100% up-and-up, since it is indeed out-and-out illegal.
from Salon:"In a federal lawsuit, the guild is requesting an injunction against 13 companies that either rent movies that have been edited or sell software that allows consumers, through computers or DVD players, to edit movies themselves."
they lose me in the second half. companies should not be allowed to edit a movie without permission and then sell it, but users should be able to do anything they want to it.
Evil is the money of all root....
IANALBMSILI (IANAL but my sister-in-law is...)
Anyway, ran some of these issues past her(she's a trademark attorney, so knows a bit about copyright issues..):
1. The Co. in question is buying and editing legal copies, not selling pirated versions, etc..
2. Consumer's right to modify media they own
Here's what she said:
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defense founded on the first sale doctrine (this doctrine says that a copyright holder's right to distribute its copyrighted work is limited to the
first sale - this is why it is legitimate for there to be used book/cd stores, etc.).
But, I don't think the first-sale doctrine would give them a free ride here because they are impacting two rights of a copyright holder (the right to distribute and the right to create derivative works). Because of this, I think the court would interpret the first-sale doctrine as covering only the re-sale of unaltered works/copies and would not extend it to the situation at hand.
As to the point that the copyright owner isn't losing money if people would only buy the edited copy, our professor drilled into us the point that it doesn't matter if the copyright owner doesn't have an edited copy of their own out there for sale (and perhaps never will) because he/she has the right to license to someone else the right to create the edited version. So, someone doing the editing without authorization (and for profit), is impacting the copyright owner's secondary market rights and potential profits if the copyright holder enters that secondary market. The courts do protect this, even if it seems that the copyright owner will not enter the market in the near future, etc.
The other argument - that editing requires skill is more interesting - perhaps if their entire business was structured so that consumers would mail in their copies with requested edits and then this company would perform the service.
To me this would be less clearly infringing, because the customer would have the right to do what they want with their purchased copy. But, where they are selling the finished, edited product to the customers directly, that smacks more of copyright infringement because they are producing a derivative work and then distributing it.
----
anyway, this thread's a day old and 800+ comments long -- nobody's going to read this now...
You set it up so well that I can't resist:
[x] CowboyNeal
--iskander
Hey, I told you I was a lazy bastard. I need responses to be delivered to me on a silver platter. First Amendment - check.
Say what you will about the FARC, but it's EXPRESSION OF OPINION we're talking about here for fuxake!
Care to explain how a university asking students not to serve content over the university's pipe can possibly be considered a violation of the first ammendment? At all?
The right to free speech doesn't mean the right to a free T3 over which to speak, you know...
I know. It was a Monday morning. Glad someone noticed..
Viv
Gmail invites for ip
Stop molesting children, child molestor.
I got tired of listening to the recording on the phone at the movie
theater. So I bought the album. I got kicked out of a theater the
other day for bringing my own food in. I argued that the concession
stand prices were outrageous. Besides, I hadn't had a barbecue in a
long time. I went to the theater and the sign said adults $5 children
$2.50. I told them I wanted 2 boys and a girl. I once took a cab to
a drive-in movie. The movie cost me $95.
-- Steven Wright
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