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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!"
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?
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.
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
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."
Really, if they are placing a beard on Captain Kirk why not? I mean people have paid for this work. It's theirs.
If someone buys software from me and takes a chunk out. And resells it why should I care, I'm getting paid for my work. If they were buying one copy editing it and reselling it a million times sure sue em.
But isn't this what we bitch at MS for every week. The ability to not be able to make changes to suit you needs. Freedom isn't about protecting what we like, it's about protecting what we don't like.
We become just as bad as the people we complain about when we oppose companies like clean flicks.
I'm sure if MS was taking someone to court because they were removing Win32 from it and replacing it with X and Gnome and all the things we like we would be vehemetly opposed. You cannot set arbitary limits on freedom.
The rules we set have to be applied in a broad and general sense.
"I do not agree with what you say but I defend to my death your right to say it" -- Voltaire
I thought you couldn't do that, because the splice would mess up the spinning head. So I figured the editing involved temporary copying.
The issue isn't that it's censorship. Different edits happen all the time. The thing is, those edits are done with the permission of the people who made the movie in the first place. CleanFlicks, and other companies like them, have decided to take it into their own hands. They're editing and re-selling without the permission of the people who made the movies.
If they had permission, there'd be no need for a lawsuit. Just because they have a desire that isn't being filled doesn't mean that they have the right to break laws in order to fill it.
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.
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.
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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
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
"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
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 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
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.
I think you are confusing the point. This is not censorship. The original is stll readily available to anyone. This is more artistic license - taking a product you own and having it reshaped for your own enjoyment. Not at all unlike colorization.
Profanity - The sign of a small mind trying to express itself.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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
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 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!
Everybody denies I am a genius--but nobody ever called me one!
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!
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.
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
"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.
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
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?
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
--
perl -e'$_=shift;die eval' '"$^X $0\047\$_=shift;die eval\047 \047$_\047"' at -e line 1.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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/
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
found liable for buying postcards and modifying them without permission
Do you have a link or reference or something for that?
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).
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.
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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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
So basically, you're claiming it should be illegal for stores to mark up the price on a product beyond what they paid for it?
After all, they're making a profit off of someone else's merchandise too.
Better outlaw capitalism just to be safe...
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.
No it isn't. All the movies are clearly marked as having been edited.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Something just occured to me during all this arguing censorship. How different is what Clean-Flicks doing, by snipping out the "bad" parts and marking the tape as edited, versus Wal-Mart selling CD's censored by a third party, often not even marking them at all?
/. (I cannot seem to locate the article, if anyone knows where it is at, please reply) about that, I have specifically avoided the CD section at Wal-Mart. I let my money speak for me. In the past month, they opened a Sam Goody in town(more expensive, but less hassle, and they have a decent anime section :)
Ever since I have read that article on
I live in Rexburg, ID, where there is a Clean-Flicks a couple of blocks away from me. Since the populus is a vast majority of Mormons, they should have a customer base who is interested in the service. Every time I have walked by or driven by the place since I used to work at the pizza place next door, I have not seen a SINGLE person enter or exit that store. Across the street there is a Hollywood Video which gets a LOT of traffic.
I think my point speaks for itself. I think most college kids around here do the same with their money, even though it seems to fly in the face of their moral education.
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.
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.
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 |
Maybe these adults whose tender sensibilties do not permit them to view sex or violence should go out and make their own films instead of denaturing an inherently violence or sex-based movie down to their tolerances.
I'm not saying Clean Flicks shouldn't be allowed to do what they're doing, I'm just saying that these people are fooling themselves. If you delete the sex, violence, and profanity from most of the movies out there right now, there isn't a whole lot of substance left. So why do it?
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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:
Er, it's traditional to insert filler between mutually exclusive assertions so as to make the contradiction less obvious.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
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 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.
Resale is completly different, yes if you buy a tape you can sell it, but you can not edit it, copy it, and sell 1000 edited copies of that tape.
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.
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.
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.
Care to provide a single example of a right which you believe Mr. Ashcroft is in favor of `stripping'?
How different is what Clean-Flicks doing, by snipping out the "bad" parts and marking the tape as edited, versus Wal-Mart selling CD's censored by a third party, often not even marking them at all?
You named the difference right there.
Walmart gives you edited content and frequently doesn't tell you its edited. These folks do.
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.
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.
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?
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.
yeah, I begrudgingly accept that it's their right to do it, I just think it's dumb for reasons already outlined in my previous post. I mean, take the fight scenes out of The Matrix and what the fuck are you watching now? Keanu Reeves looking confused, without any badass kung fu to get you through it.
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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."
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.
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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.
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.
we're not defending selling copies though. just edited originals.
-- 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.
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.
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.
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.)
since the end result is the same, does the process actually matter?
... 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!
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.
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.
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.
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...