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Hollywood Says No to Filtering DVD Player
haplo21112 writes "There is a posting over at ZDNet about how Hollywood continues to trample on the American consumer's free use rights. They want to prevent the sale of a special DVD player which can be used to edit out offensive material from a DVD in realtime. While I don't agree with censorship in general, I do believe its everyone's right to do what they wish with their own media."
I also think that everyone should be forced to watch these movies. If we're going to rob people of their rights. Let's not half-ass it.
Money Grabbing Fattiefats.
00101010
This technology would allow for parents to show otherwise questionable movies to their kids. That would lead to a higher number of movies bought or rentals per family, because some movies are no longer out of the question.
Not that I am agreeing with the censorship, I just don't see the logic in trying to ban this.
"You sir, have just crossed my happy line..."
This isn't so bad. Perhaps they'll make parents actually think about what DVDs they let their children watch instead of thinking technology can parent for them. (yeah, fat chance, I know) (also, Double standards: I can have them, you can't)
How would people feel if someone wrote some magical piece of software that prevented users from having to view annoying copyright- and authorship- nag banners and notices that appear while running software ?
I can't wait for someone to start making filters for these that skip over everything but the "objectionable" content...
The 2-disc LOTR set I own has been FILTERED out of the extended version of the movie. Should I surrender to the local authorities?
my stereo should be illegal, it adds distortion to music in real time
-- OMFG = Oh My Floatse Goatse
Wait for someone to invent a really useful device that would sell more of the media company's product, sue them out of existance, then release their own copy of said invention. They can't just appreciate that someone is helping them get to a larger audience.....
Why do i suddenly have this image of the Ned Flanders and the boys trying to watch a cleaned-up version of Pulp Fiction?
"There is a posting over at ZDNet about how Hollywood continues to trample on the American consumer's free use rights. They want to prevent the sale of a special DVD player which can be used to edit out offensive material from a DVD in realtime. While I don't agree with censorship in general, I do believe its everyone's right to do what they wish with their own media."
That is pure HogWash. Smoke this in your pipe and Shove it...
It's just another example of Hollywood trying to F*ck the consumer while making more money. Now the studios have this great idea that now they can release censored versions of your favorite movies so that these timeless masterpieces can be shown to your kids. While I agree that this isn't a perfect plan, I think it would be cool to show my kids Animal House, with a few scenes removed (they don't need to be seeing Tits on-screen...yet). Instead of buying this DVD player, Hollywood wants to make those parents buy the standard version and the censored version to double their profits off of these consumers.
I'm guessing that the studios aren't so much interested in forcing people to watch "offensive scenes" as they are in ensuring that they are going to be the sole avenue for producing "Family" or "Edited" versions. A Studio might, for example, decide to release a PG-13 version of James Cameron's Aliens. There would probably be a market for that unless, of course, ClearPlay, CleanFlicks or some other company is already providing families with the ability to edit their R-rated Aliens DVD on the fly.
The author of the article would have a stronger argument if he wasn't distorting the true intentions of the studios like that.
GMD
watch this
A DVD player that won't let you watch DVDs the way you want to watch them? How long before we see TVs without 'mute' buttons. Can't you just do this kind of thing now anyway with a decent VCR and a little time? When will the anti-digital madness end?
No one is telling anyone they are not allowed to watch what they want, which would be an abridgement of free speech against the person who was trying to allow others to watch what that individual wanted, but rather not allow someone not to watch only the parts they want. How is this really any different from allowing scene selection? ("Let's see... I want to watch Moria, then Weathertop, and then I want to watch the Amon Sul. After that, Matrix lobby scene, followed by Agent defeat.") I don't see any difference between watching scenes in a particular order, through using scene selection or, heaven forbid, PowerDVD's bookamark system, and a DVD player that skips particular scenes entirely.
This position is similar to a position that says "You are required to watch our films." It's not censorship, since it doesn't forbid some things from being shown, but it is absurd and outrageous.
Sigs are like bumper stickers.
I find those warnings offensive.
I'm not a criminal, I bought the DVD and I just want to see the damn movie. I want to remove those warnings
Kilroy was here!
Folks,
We need to be very careful about throwing around the word "censorship" in a context like this. IMO, it is not censorship or anything like it for a parent to fast-forward through a questionable scene in a movie. It's not censorship for a commercial organization to decide it doesn't want to carry/show/broadcast certain material.
Censorship is state-sponsored, implicitly-at-gunpoint, restrictions on free speech, freedom of the press, etc. It's prohibited by the Bill of Rights .
No JarJar! Imagine the possibilities!
There are certain movies that are great, but not quite acceptable for my family to watch.
With a technology like this, you could tell the DVD player what's appropriate for the audience.
It would be a really great solution to show certain movies in schools too.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
A device that does that puts the power to choose what to see and what not to see in the hands of the consumer, where it belongs.
If people find certain scenes in certain movies offensive, maybe Hollywood shouldn't force its paying customers to watch those scenes.
Anyone else bothered by being chained to a chair by with his/hers eyeslids ducktaped open? Really, Hollywood should stop doing that to their customers
--You know it makes sense, a little reminder from jointm1k.
Does anyone else feel a parallel to when the Catholic Church went along "censoring" all the great works of art which contained nudity by drawing or painting over them, and adding leaves, etc? Personally, I feel art should be left alone. The greatest and most heralded art was made by singular geniuses; no good art was ever created by a committee of politicians...
Hollywood just lost me for good. Much of their product offends me and they want to force it down my throat. Well you know what they are a depensible luxury, I don't depend on them like I do food and water so out the door they go. I have been enjoying life without cable TV for two years and now I'm chucking the player. And the TV.
Good-bye. And please stay away.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
...in having your content altered to suit your audience if they're willingly choosing it?
This reminds me of that rental store that had movies with swear words etc edited from them. They got sued for that.
I'm an artist. I don't like changes to my work. But if somebody says "I'd like it this way, several other people would too, so I'm going to make the changes myself and save you the trouble..." then my attitude is "Cool! My audience expanded!"
"Derp de derp."
I can see to motives behind this:
Some directors have "final say" in the contract for a movie, so that they can refuse to let a movie be published, edited... most big directors require that in a contract. This has been the source of many disputes, and why many great movies never made it to network television (which has to censor content).
That's one motive.
The second is simply being stupid, and wanting control. Considering this technology could be made so that it doesn't allow for easy copying of content, what's the harm?
Perhaps Hollywood and the directors should look at making a PG, PG-13, and an R rated verison of their films. These different versions would as simple as hireing someone to edit and ADR the movie.
Oh, wait Network Television (Most owned by the same movie companies) already does this and they don't complain. Never mind. Again a double standard. But wouldn't it be nice if I could do that with the push of a button and the production quality wasn't as bad? I remember seeing a version of the Thomas Crown Affair which was missing much of the nudity. I bring this up becuase a PG/PG-13 version of that film was what I saw on Network TV and it didn't suffer all that much as far as the story goes. I definitly think there is a market for this. I could probably count my parents as two people who would have seen the PG-13 version of this movie?
Ted Tschopp
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
This is the same principle as those folks who rent out edited DVD's so junior never lays his eyes on a female breast.
This is the same principle as those folks who would "colorize" a classic Black & White film to make it more appealing the general massses.
A artist should have a right to have his creation be experienced unaltered. Unless of course, the artist himself has made the alterations.
This is a simple case of artistic integrity. It is the directors name that scrolls on the screen at the end of the movie.
If you don't want to watch something, do what our president said to do "Turn off the on button"!
Of course, this is Slashdot, where people find a million and one reasons and rationalizations to cut, copy and paste the creative hard work of others.
The nerve of Hollywood to take away my fast forward button! That's a crucial part of my DVD player!
I suppose that in the end, all we'll have left is the eject button to slide the tray in and out. Missed a part? Start it over. Got to pee really bad? Start it over. How dare we, the consumer, get in the way of the director's pristine vision of the movie. We must be savages.
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
This is not about the government censoring what any content producer has to say.
This is about whether YOU have the right to watch something the way you want to watch it.
This is about limiting your freedom. Pay attention as slowly all of our freedoms disappear.
PS.
There is a vote on the ZD page. Go vote.
How long is a clan version of Pulp Fiction anyway? 15 minutes?
Is that supposed to be Clean? Cause if you really mean Clan, I didn't know the KKK had anything against Pulp Fiction, except for perhaps The Prestigious Samuel L. Jackson's leading role...
Actually, you're right either way, it would be about 15 minutes long.
I love the part in the article linked to where the ClearPlay CEO talks about watching movies with his kids and being uncomfortable with the language. Excuse me? You're watching R-rated movies with your kids and you all are uncomfortable with the language? Here's a tip: watch G-rated movies. That's what the rating system is for. Here's another tip: don't let your kids watch anything but G-rated movies if you don't want them hearing bad language. It works in my household.
Then there's the part in the ZDNet article about "Hollywood shouldn't force its paying customers to watch those scenes." Excuse me? Last time I checked, Hollywood has not forced me to watch anything. If you don't like nudity and violence in your movies, don't watch R-rated movies. It's simple.
To the real issue, though, it seems that there is no difference between CleanFlix and ClearPlay. Both want to profit by creating derivative works of copyrighted material. ClearPlay isn't some magical filter that automatically detects bad language and lots of flesh. It is a subscription service that will filter out movies that they have "edited". Same thing, different approach. Expect Hollywood to smack them down.
Use the rating system folks. It's your friend.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
It will also make all the Utards mad-they don't like Rated R movies in Utah.
...special 15 minute edition.
I hate comercials at the begining of my DVD and find them offensive(I already own the damn movie stop selling me Coke!)
...when you do it to yourself. It's called freedom of choice. It's only censorship when you prevent someone else from seeing it.
/. settings to filter out Jon Katz stories, that's my choice -- not censorship.
If I set my
If I fast forward through commercials on a taped broadcast, that my choice -- not censorship.
If I want to use a DVD player that imports an edit list that filters out the naughty bits, that' my choice -- not censorship.
Ideology is for ideots.
Given the US court system is (and always has been) a legal crap shoot - e.g. the judge you get is far more important than the law - no one can tell how this will turn out.
However, I believe the smart money is on the "censors" in this case, because they aren't actually modifying the media. Again, just like with Google's page rank system and "net nannies" sold to private parties, this is simply another form of "opinion" they're peddling. And in general, you can't sue people to change their opinion. (Or rather, you can, but it won't do any good.)
Speaking of oddities however, it's been quite a while since I've seen something as surreal as a Microsoft employee complaining about Google's "monopoly" against Search King. Dahlia Lithwick seems to think that court case is somehow much closer than it seems to me, which scares me because she has real legal training, so maybe the courts really are going to start forcing people to alter or not publicize their opinions.
Didn't you know? Hollywood producers/directors are doing everyone a great big favor by educating the planet with their well-balanced world-view. If someone filters or otherwise make any changes the movie, how will their propaga^H^H^H^H^H^H enlightenment work correctly?
We're trying create a brave new world here people, get with the program...
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
I do believe its everyone's right to do what they wish with their own media
It's not 'your own media' dude.
When you download Linux, you DO NOT OWN IT. Copyrights are ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. You only have rights to it, as granted by the owner of the material, and this is how it should be.
I'll give you a wonderful example. Brigham Young University decided to show Schindler's List to the students. Except, they wanted to show their own version, with all the "offensive content" removed. Speilberg said "no way", and he was fully within his rights to do so.
If copyright owners are not allowed to control what happens to their work, we could not enfoce the GPL. Free software would die.
Does this mean that I will be able to get Japanese porn that doesn't pixelize the genitals?
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
I think when a director releases a film, it's their 'work of art' (whether or not it's a good film) and should be left in tact. They choose the scenes, the camera shots, and yes maybe the gratitious sex, violence, etc. - but their intention is for you to see it the way they, and the studio choose to. And if they choose to do a "Director's Cut" later and add/edit content - that's their choice, as it was their project, they own the rights, NOT the consumers.
If you don't like 'x' content, then your freedom of choice is to NOT watch the bloody nothing, not to edit or create your own version. You don't like what's out there, then go to film school and learn to make your own movies, but leave another artist's work alone.
Go ahead, flame away, but I think everybody likes to scream and rant about 'my rights', 'me me me!" and forget others have rights and protections as well.
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
A movie is art. Offensive or not it is art and it is the vision of the director. Just like real art can not be sensored either should movies.
"They want to prevent the sale of a special DVD player which can be used to edit out offensive material from a DVD in realtime."
But they want to require the sale of special DVD players which edit out foreign material from a DVD (ie. region lock-outs).
I knew the MPAA and the DVD Consortium were two-faced, but this is just ridiculous. About the only common trait between these two positions is the elimination of options from the consumer marketplace.
I could see that Hollywood is taking this approach to get a foot in the door for when the more interesting filters start appearing. For example, given the direction that modern advertisements are going I can forsee a future where they become an integrated part movies (they sometimes allready are). It would be in Hollywoods favor to have a case on it's side that helps the ban of 'advertisement-filters'.
If you do a Google search for news on this device, you'll find out that the movie studios have nothing against it. In fact, they'd like to sell movies to parents that wouldn't buy before because of mature content.
The suit is being pursued by several directors who insist they have "moral rights" on their films. Now, from their perspective, the device is akin to someone covering the Venus of Milo's breast, or putting duct tape over Goya's Naked Maja. They claim the movie is art.
So, save the kneejerk reactions and start posting nice.
For the record, I disagree with the suit, and I think all the device does is automate what I can do myself anyway. I can fast forward boring/sexual/violent parts anyway and they can't do a damn thing about it, so I can't see the problem in making the process more efficient.
Take out the tits and you have a wonderful collection of drinking, food fights, horse murder, shoplifting, beatings, sexual predators, ROTC, segragation, reckless driving, marching bands being led into walls, pirates and future senators.
Let the kids see the titties.
OK,
So what do you have to say about Network Television editing movies for Broadcast Television. Why hasn't there been such a huge outcry?
Ted
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
... is that survey shows that 18% of people think. No, I have not right do do anything AT HOME with MY DVD that might interfere with copyright as the corporations understand it. Hopefully those are people on Hollywood payroll. But if not, that is a serious problem.
Scroll to the bottom of this article to read Roger Eberts opinion on this.
So it seems that hollywood and the MPAA is not content to have an entertainment monopoly. They also want to force their ideologies on you if you want the privilege of being entertained.
While many in the slashdot community may not mind constant sex, violence, murder, torture, communist propaganda etc. in thier movies, I personally get tired of seeing it. Most psychologists agree that what you see and hear has and effect on your behavior, even if it is only subconsiously.
If I do not want to use part of what I buy, I have that right. Hollywood should be happy they have the right to put this kind of stuff in their movies. Trying to take away other poeple's freedoms is not showing much appreciation for these rights.
The DVD specification allows multiple paths through a movie. There were two intended uses for this, the first being the ability to put a 'Director's Cut' and a standard edit on the same disk, and the second to allow exactly this kind of filtering. A DVD can be released with two, different rated, tracks through the movie, one missing out some 'offeisive scenes' (like when the director decides to really overstate a point in case the single-figure IQ audience segment miss it) removed. Any DVD player which correctly implements the DVD specification will, if set to a parental lock mode, play the lower rated track. Why is this being reported as if it's some kind of new technology? Just because hollywood hasn't yet figured out what they can do with their technology...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Check out this legislation - an amendment to the DMCA that will allow exactly this sort of fair use under the law. I hope it passes.
hrm. then again. maybe not.
Wasn't that the cool short film set in a Diner?
I suppose if FF, Rew or Pause, you are not seeing the movie exactly as it is presented (because you skip some of the content or seeing something twice). Should Hollywood sue DVD player manufacturers with these buttons?
I have a partner who has combat-related PTSD. Artillery, automatic weapons fire and PBR's in a movie will trigger nightmares.
It would be nice to be able to pre-mute the soundtrack, at least. It's often hard to dance on the mute button to get the dialog and avoid the rat-a-tat-tat.
This was a particular issue with the movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy." Mostly a charming tale, and the war scenes did have artistic merit, but we would have enjoyed the non-war parts of the movie much more if we could have squelched the guerilla warfare sound effects.
My point being, it's not all about porn. There are more diverse motivations out here.
Scroll to the bottom to read Roger Eberts opinion on this.. http://www.suntimes.com/output/eb-feature/cst-ftr- ebert23.html
We need to add a simple scene scripting language to open source players.
The players would have to identify the movie inserted, and select a script based on it. The script would, at first, simply be commands like:
At frame 5,342 mute
At frame 5,370 unmute
At frame 8,330 goto frame 9,010
At frame 10,377 place a black square(x1,y1,x2,y2) with ID 1
At frame 10,402 move and resize square ID 1 to (x1, y1, x2, y2)
At frame 10,700 remove square ID 1
There could be other options such as only viewing a section of the window, zooming it, pixellizing instead of blacking out, etc.
Such a simple script language could be represented in an XML file and database. You could attach ratings to each particular script action, such that the end user could say, "I don't mind profanity or violence, but cut out the hardcore sex."
Not only would such an open system allow 'clean' editing (which could be added to a centralized database, much like FreeDB does for CD listings) but you could offer your own move edits - shift scenes around, cut out jar jar, etc.
-Adam
Maybe Hollywood should contract a company to manufacture a DVD player with no next/prev. track buttons. That would certianly solve this problem, and then some. They could go all out and make one that has no play or pause buttons, either. That also solves that whole copy protection problem, because that way you couldn't even watch the movies let alone copy them.
--
Adobe's anti-counterfeiting softw
This is exactly the same as "those wankers over at CleanFlicks." We are talking about reediting movies according to third-party tastes. The only difference is what that taste is. The editing is the same.
The orignal is not hurt by putting in code which would skip certain parts. This isn't censorship becuase it allows the orignal to still be viewed. Ted
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
If parents want to watch an R rated movie, why not wait until it comes out on TV? Pre-edited for your convienice, so as not to offend Wheel of Fortune viewers.
Please. Taking out the swear words, violence, and sex out of most movies destroy the entire film. How will Billy understand the 3 minutes of 'Deliverance' or 'Natural Born Killers' he gets to see?
Read a goddamn book, you easily-offended fuckhats. There is sure as shit better fucking shit in a good book than there is in some overfuckinghyped, Hollywood focus-grouped shit film, you cockwrestlers.
Profanity is all around you already, and can appear without warning. Are you going to monitor Billy's friends language, every word said on the bus, school, overheard phone converstions, slumber parties, supermarket magazines, bathroom stalls, tourrets syndrome sufferers at the mall, ect,ect,ect 24/7?
Where does it end? How far away from the real world will you keep Billy? Will your oppressive control result in turning your son into a cannibal pumpkin rapist? Are your particular pumpkin-fucking hangups reflected in the DVD edit? How will you know? How can you make sure Billy never sees any pumpkin-fucking? How will you request 'No pumpkin-fucking!' without feeling dirty that you said pumpkin-fucking aloud? Is pumpkin-dry-humping ok?
Have you thought about actually *talking* to Billy, and explaining the reasons behind profanity, violence, sex and when/if they are appropriate?
eh. Easier to buy a DVD player than raise your kids.
*FUCK!* Sorry.
Say I sell a book that contains an index of book page numbers that are "OK" to read. Is this within my rights?
Hollywood is offended by this for artistic reasons. When someone creates a Schindler's List or Saving Private Ryan, the horrors of war need to be seen. No one should be "kiddie-izing" such films.
What if I were to decide that Snow White needs sex scenes? Should I be able to hire animators to add a dwarves-gang-banging-Snow-White scene and sell (or rent) a DVD with that? Should I be able to create a PVR-style box to automatically add those scenes when someone watches the DVD?
If parents want to watch an R rated movie, why not wait until it comes out on TV? Pre-edited for your convienice, so as not to offend Wheel of Fortune viewers, and hysterical mothers.
Please. Taking out the swear words, violence, and sex out of most movies destroy the entire film. How will Billy understand the 3 minutes of 'Deliverance' or 'Natural Born Killers' he gets to see?
Read a goddamn book, you easily-offended fuckhats. There is sure as shit better fucking shit in a good book than there is in some overfuckinghyped, Hollywood focus-grouped shit film, you cockwrestlers.
Profanity is all around you already, and can appear without warning. Are you going to monitor Billy's friends language, every word said on the bus, school, overheard phone converstions, slumber parties, supermarket magazines, bathroom stalls, tourrets syndrome sufferers at the mall, ect,ect,ect 24/7?
Where does it end? How far away from the real world will you keep Billy? Will your oppressive control result in turning your son into a cannibal pumpkin rapist? Are your particular pumpkin-fucking hangups reflected in the DVD edit? How will you know? How can you make sure Billy never sees any pumpkin-fucking? How will you request 'No pumpkin-fucking!' without feeling dirty that you said pumpkin-fucking aloud? Is pumpkin-dry-humping ok?
Have you thought about actually *talking* to Billy, and explaining the reasons behind profanity, violence, sex and when/if they are appropriate?
eh. Easier to buy a DVD player than raise your kids.
*FUCK!* Sorry. Edit that out.
I would make a distinction between the individual's right to modify in any way works they have purchased, without redistributing them, and the right of a corporation to make big bucks selling a machine that has its sole utility in hacking apart other people's art. I have no problem with a machine that edits and replaces parts of the film with the consent and instruction of the artists, but selling unauthorized modifications to someone else's work is clearly not fair use: this is no different from a third party selling DVDs of modified scenes from the original work, it just includes a handy machine to also hack those scenes into the original DVD for you.
Of course, these objections are pure hypocrisy coming from the same media giants that speed up movies and squish the credits down to a quater of your screen, if they show them at all, but that's a separate issue.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
George Orwell - "1984"
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Product placement is at stake here; Hollywood's fallback position to losing whole screen advertizing is advertizing on part of the screen or sound.
Computers make it easy to add color or Coke. Or to delete color or Coke.
Make no mistake about it, Hollywood only cares about Money (thus it cares about ads whole or part screen), not bare breasts.
Never used the feature, but I recall DVD having the selling point of parental controls, where someone could set a content rating limit (G,PG, high sex/violence) and if a scene exceeded the limit, it would just skip it.
$cat
This is a great example of a frivilous lawsuit. (Corporations abuse the judicial system for their own advantage to a much greater extent than individuals but that's another topic). There are no laws that allow Hollywood to dictate how you view your copies of content. The only basis of their suit seems to be a derivation of the EU's moral rights to a copyright. The US has only one moral rights case (Monty Python v. ABC) as precedent where the creators of Monty Python sued ABC because the edits for commercials ruined the integrity of the show (e.g. made Monty Python unfunny). Cutting out offensive material from a movie would only harm movies whose only intent is offense (cough Tom Green). Moral rights belong to the artist not studios holding the copyright holder. The studios have a very strong case against CleanFlick on the basis of copyright and trademark infringment. They'll probably put them out of business in order to sell their own sanitized versions of movies (probably the same ones that are shown on airlines and networks).
i dunno, but i just saw "Cowboy Neal Says No To..." then I refreshed the page and it said Hollywood..hmm..
At least the war on the environment is going well
Hollywood needs get off his fat fucking ass. They have no business dictating how a movie should be viewed. I see no difference between censoring profanity and converting a movie to tv format. If they were so god damn worried about it being true to the creative vision of the director and crew, then all movies should be in letter box with the same theater quality audio.
I want a DVD player that allows filtering so that my children can watch movies that, for some content reason or other, I would otherwise find objectionable.
Take for instance BASIC INSTINCT. Popular movie. The once plentiful media references to it have made it a part of our cultural milieu.
But if I want my kids to be able to watch this movie without being subjected to sex scenes, violence, bad language, alcoholism, and misogenist scenarios then I NEED a technology such as this one.
Why is it that the higher-ups are forcing diligent parents to present these movies in their entirety to their little ones. Won't someone please think of the children.
Then Hollywood will sue all the networks for inserting commercials when they broadcast movies.
Right?
This is one of those topics that inflame me.
Just as I have no right to force shut someone else's mouth, someone else has no right to force open my eyes.
The media is not altered. The content on the media is not altered. The content decided to be viewed is selectively chosen.
Did anyone here READ the article? The issue is not about users editing movies to suit their individual needs, it's about a company called ClearPlay who has already edited the movies for the user.
The DVD player contains information about thousands of hit movies. When you try to play one of those, it will edit the movie according to the standards that ClearPlay chose, NOT WHAT THE USER CHOSE!
Users may have the right to make derivative works for movies for non-monetary personal use, but ClearPlay doesn't unless it wants to pay copyright royalties.
and maybe we will be real happy without those usage nazis.
the first amendment enshrines the freedoms of speech and association. it does not force us to listen to any drooling lunatic on a soap box. and it does not force us to pay money to a bunch of humiliators who want us to squat and say thank you when they dump on us.
you don't suppose there might be market backlash underway already, people not paying full price for limited access to bad content? hollywood can just go down to the DIVX corner of Circuit City and see how their plans work.
if there is a floor worker at CC that still remembers DIVX.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
So this thing edits the naughty bits out of films? I thought WalMart already did this.
irb(main):001:0>
I stopped watching Hollywoods' films after I began
to appreciate real cinema (European, American
Alternative). OK, I did an exception for LOTR.
Maybe the next star wars too.
.
Anyway, that's OT. The common sense tells me that
I can modify the content *ANY WAY I LIKE*, provided
I am not distributing the modified version, nor
showing it to others. In fact, the latter should
not necessarily be the case. I agree that the
modified art cannot be shown in public exhibitions.
But if I show it to my friends only,
that should be OK, provided I indicate clearly
that it's not the original.
.
Just think of bying a picture. Sure you can
draw on it if you like, cut parts, etc. I see
no problem with that whatsoever, unless you
try to sell it afterwards. Or think of a book.
If I want, I can use it as scratch paper, or
I can tear some pages. This is a dumb thing to do
with a good book, but it should not be illegal.
You've got to ask where this would stop. If I want to play pieces of my DVDs cut-up and in whatever sequence I want, that is my right as an owner of the media. My wife often doesn't want to watch anything with extremely violent scenes, and these scenes are rarely important to my enjoyment either (often I'd just as soon have them gone, but not so strongly that I wouldn't watch). There still might be a legal issue WRT the "skip data" because a court may decide this is derived from the original work, but this still shouldn't stop the individual from cutting a work in any way they please.
Also, if they appose "special" players that can do this, I suppose they want to outlaw any playback through a computer. Even with MS style DRM, computer playback will be likely to give you a lot more flexibility than with any purpose built player. This may, in fact, be the origin of the fact the MS is supporting the electronics industry against the content providers. Ultimately, Hollywood wants to prevent any playback flexibility, which is the whole point of having PC playback anyway.
Finally, does anyone really think these "special" devices would even work? You're going to have to have some security controls related to loading the "censor" data, and how old do you think the kids have to get before their hacking skills out-distance their parents ability to control these devices. I'm sure that some with some devices all it will take is a power cycle, and you'll be able to play the raw disks again.
To those people shouting censorship because people could have the right and choice to edit the movie for their own use, what planet did you come from??
I must agree with the auther David Coursey on this. Can you imagine having to read every page of the morning newspaper (OK I'm of the age when i still read a paper newspaper). The next thing that Hollywood would have us do is make it illegal to turn down the volume next time we watch a DVD.
BTW, ILLEGAL is a sick bird..
Semper ubi sub ubi
No artist has the right to have his creation "experienced" at all. You get to create it. The viewer decides whether it's "experienced" or not.
Censoring the censors?
WORD UP!! :) this is so true! fuck them all.
So it says:
http://www.cleanflicks.com/rentals/
What do they do? Lock the DVDs in cages for 6 months until they're free of impurities?!
I just hit the "next" arrow on my dvd remote...and then in realtime it skips the part i don't want to see...
like Phoebe's mum in Friends who edited out all the sad bits from the childhood stories we should not just have happy endings but happy beginning middle and ends too.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Filtering movies and skipping parts of the movie isn't something all that new. A buddy of mine has a small black box that sits on the top of his television and reads the closed captioning, and takes out all offensive material. It does this while watching cable television or VHS videos. Why so vocal when the technology has existed for several years?
My proposal is this: allow companies to sell dynamic-edit capable DVD players. Also allow companies to sell software to create the edit files based on some open standard file format. They can still make money on the idea of clean movies without actually selling an illegal derivative work.
If the studio wants to sell an edit file for their movie, they can. If I want to edit certain content so my kids can watch, I can. If I want to email that file to my friends and family, I can do it. If I want to share that file with a few million of my closest friends on a P2P network, I can.
Finally a legitimate use for P2P!
This space intentionally left blank.
Found this interesting too, see this page it shows a student at BYU as helping to develop the EDL feature. For those of you who don't know, BYU is a LDS (Mormon) school in Utah. Cleanflicks caters mostly to Mormons. (It's a Utah company.)
I can't wait until someone uses this Mormon-developed feature to edit movies down to just the vulgar language and nudity...
yet they keep all the lying, cheating and violence in.
It's really ironic that the beautiful things need hiding and the distressing things are left in plain view.
It's bad enough they end up seeing shite like Shallow Hal.
What films would be on offer anyway?
Alien
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5 people go into space, one by one they go missing then Ripley says "it's alright now, they've gone".
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
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Gang of teenagers go into the woods. One comes out.
Deep Throat
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Woman goes to the doctors. The End.
Pulp Fiction
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Two guys talk about fast food. Man & woman do a funny dance. Two guys drink coffee.
Jaws
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Some people go swimming and don't come back. Man goes to find a shark.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
the RIAA is against individuals downloading music via the Internet. How long before these industries either up and die or realize the customer is always right? I'm hoping for up and die, then maybe we can avoid any more "Charlie's Angels" sequels and Drew Barrymore can be relegated to her rightful role in budget porn.
Dollars to Donuts, the MPAA has a bot that is just flooding the polling server, and accounts for that 18% of the survey. Which just attests to the fact that everyone has responded so resoundingly against the MPAA, that concerned humans (and slashdotters too) are outflooding them.
I mean really are they next going to tell us that to use the fast forward, pause, and rewind buttons are a violation of the copyright, and if we want to get up and go to the bathroom, or make popcorn, we have to miss the movie just like they intended us to do in the movie theater.
Well it is quite obvious that all of the Executives have Au Pairs to watch their kids for them while they are off busy at fancy Hollywood parties. They handle the copyright violations by having a person fastforward through the bad bits for their kids.
Sig Nazi- "No Sig for you, come back 1 year."
'If you don't like 'x' content, then your freedom of choice is to NOT watch the bloody nothing,'
But that is precicely what ClearPlay is doing. It is looking at the movies, and giving (for a price) their opinion of what people will choose not to watch, and giving them a technological means to do just that, while letting them watch the rest of the movie that they (at least in ClearPlay's opinion) do choose to watch.
I am not trying to say whether this is right or wrong with this post. I am saying that this is merely a case of technology giving people a finer degree of choice.
Second point.
'not to edit or create your own version.'
you seem here to imply that what ClearFlix and ClearPlay are doing is the same. They are not. with ClearFlix you only choice is to watch their edited version (which in my opinion is a derivitave work in violation of the copyright). with ClearPlay, you still have the option of taking that movie and playing it in another player with no changes.
sidenote: if this player does get released, how long do you think it will be before someone writes software that allows you to create your own list of scenes and words to skip (or even rearrainge scene order)?
If Hollywood wins this, we might have to view all posts at -1.
ugh.
the chapter skip, fast forward & rewind, and pause buttons from your remote. After all, movies are meant to be watched all the way through without interruption.
If you don't like watching it that way, then you're free not to watch it.
That's bullsh*t of course. Once I own the media, I'm free to do whatever the hell I want with it for my own private use.
If you don't want to see "offensive" material, then start your own country. Oh, we already did. Well in that case, MAKE YOUR OWN (expletive deleted) MOVIE!
(sig on loan to Smithsonian)
Stop watching.
...goes away.
1. Like magic, Hollywood ceases to 'force' anything on you. The tape, the chair - it's all gone.
2. Even better, enough people stop watching and Hollywood just
I think it's the opposite of what you're saying. While there are many movies out there that just show T&A for money, there are a lot of movies that do these things for art; take for example American Beauty. It's all part of the art. If you censor that movie, the message is gone. In art, it's all or nothing. It's like reading Nietzsche without the 'God is dead' quotes because it might infect your kids minds. If someone is too young, ignorant, etc. to handle parts of the film, then don't show it to them at all; all people need are more false values. As an artist myself, I can say that I don't want edited versions of anything of mine going around. Parodying is one thing, as is copying; art is still there in one form or another. But in censoring...what's left?
We now have confirmed reports from an informed Orange County minister that Ethel is still an active communist.
Beautiful. Elegant. Classy. Original. And, most of all, an undoubted truism. 4 stars. Moderation pts please?
These tyrants think along the same lines as dictators. I've seen better behavior from Queen "Bloody Mary" of England!
No matter what the GPL says, it still doesn't preclude someone from making a copy for personal use. If the law treated code the same way it does other media, someone could make a copy of binary, compiled GPL software for a friend and not make the source available (gasp!).
Ok, there aren't many ways you could violate the GPL and still fall under fair-use rulings, but the point is that fair use laws trump the GPL in this and all other circumstances. The GPL is based upon granting additional rights contingent upon additional restrictions built upon a solid base of copyright laws... but that doesn't mean the GPL can be more restrictive than existing copyrights.
Copyrights are not "ALL RIGHTS RESERVED," stop parroting paid off lawyers. Copyrights are a specific, carefully defined set of rights afforded to copyright holders and withheld from everyone else for a limited period of time for the specific purpose of making monH^H^H^H^ encouraging the production of useful arts.
No university has the right to distribute or publically perform a modified work (unless there is significant educational or intellectual value) but the crux of that is the modification / public performance. Brigham Young was not within its rights due to that very specific combination of issues. Courts have been very, very liberal about modifications for personal use. Universal has the exclusive rights to public performance, which enacts far fewer fair-use clauses.
It is your media. You OWN the DVD, the media that the copyrighted material resides on. The media is just a means of communication, and copyrights do not refer directly to the media. I do not have the copyright to the amorphous video pattern, but that copyrighted pattern is a way to control electron beams, not the electron beams themselves. Patterns do not have ownership, irrespective of their complexity or the cost of creating them. Mathematical equations do not have ownership in this society, and THIS is how it should be. The producer of the movie is granted specific rights to encourage production, but these are different rights than those afforded to owners of physical objects. Physical objects are afforded a specific set of rights to help create plenty in a world of scarcity, and copyrights to create scarcity in a world of plenty... different tasks, different jobs, different rights / restrictions.
Learn the rights you have, or you won't know what you are losing.
- c
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
the idea of taking away content from movies it's stupid in general. People here are talking about studios wanting to release PG13 versions of Aliens or Pulp Fiction or whatever, so the DVD player goes against their sales... Well, what ever happened to just not showing your kid Pulp Fiction? There are kid movies. I lived through the 80s and didn't see many adult oriented movies, not because my parents didn't let me watch them, but because I just had no interest in them. I never wanted to watch Glengarry Glen Ross, or Aliens, or whatever. I watched crappy Richard Prior blaxploitation comedies like The Toy... I had interest in them. Anyway, this whole argument is dumb. Parents shouldn't have to be able to take away "bad" content from movies since kids probably have more interest in seeing stuff like Britney Spears' Crossroads, or Dana Carvey in Master of Disguise. When I go into the theatres to see a rated R movie, I don't see kids in there unless people bring their screaming babies into the theatre. I don't suspect that kids aren't there because their parents aren't letting them. I usually think it's because they have no interest in seeing them.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
I have to disagree. If I buy a bodice ripper novel and choose to read only the dirty sections (or choose to read everything *but* the dirty sections), surely I cannot be faulted for not forcing myself to read what the author intended. If I start reading Les Miserables, and then finally put it down after the 10,000th total change in characters, can I be forced to continue the novel because Victor Hugo is offended if I do so?
/. "create account" process is too overwhelming for me.
On the other hand, I saw on the McLaughlin Group a few months ago that there are companies that make and rent edited versions of movies to clientelle such as the religious right. I, and all on the panel, agree that THIS IS WRONG. The difference is that, in the first instance one is not disseminating the edited version, whereas in the second, one is.
As I understand it, this technology simply automates the task of "filth expurgation". While I find the idea of so doing revolting, surely it is neither immoral nor illegal. Unless and until I am able to permanently *change* the *original* media (or "rip" the film in its expurgated form and disseminate my ripped version, which is already illegal), Hollywood is wrong to stop this technology. What a surprise.
I have not read every thread--but several people mention that "the next step will be editing out commercials etc.". Why has no one mentioned that Tivo and similar already do that? It's apparently legal. Basically, the technology we are talking about will do for movies what Tivo already does to television. What's the big deal? (Other than stupid, crass, laziness on the part of American parents who should be doing their own work if they must protect children from things that the rest of the Western world doesn't give a sh-- about).
(Sorry to be anonymous coward, but the
Jack
So by some reverse engineering and hacking one should be able to make a DVD player that only shows scenes with sexual or violent content, right ?
Cool. I'll buy two.
People in this country are obsessed with controlling every single aspect of their pitiful little lives. One of the points of seeing movies is to EXPAND the mind. Same for reading books. If you want to censor all your own input, you deserve to live in a boring world of G-rated pap.
O~ Him that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green. -- Francis Bacon
As far as I'm concerned, what I buy is mine, the copyright is there to prevent me from profiting off of someone else's work. If the studio's really didn't want their material copied they'd keep they're movies in the theater only.
I can finally filter out the plot lines from my pron DVD's!
I have friends who are film students. None of them would want people to strip scenes out of their *art*. I don't see people blacking out sections of picassos work. The argument for this seems to be 'for the kids'. I say, fuck off. If its got an R rating, your kids can wait to see it. I do not believe that people should be *vandalizing* and *defacing* these peoples work just to make it 'ok' by their standards for kids to watch. If you're a teacher and you want a section of film for a class, but part isn't appropriate, then use a VCR and copy the scenes you want to use. I think a DVD Player that filters things out it total b.s. Watch the movie and get the message the way the author, director, producer intended. Thats my opinion. I don't care if you want to take the time to edit the movie onto a tape, go for it, but I don't believe these functions should be built into DVD players, simply because if you don't think that parts of the movie are ok for your kids or audience, then you should pick another film.
You are an absolute blithering idiot. If I purchase a book, movie, painting, or whatever, I have every damn right to do whatever I want to it. If I want to skip the boring parts of a book or movie, I can. If I want to do this by ripping pages out or using software to automatically skip bits, I can. If I'm a rich crazy bastard and want to buy every Picasso I can get my hands on & send them through my woodchipper to make cat litter, I can.
An artist has the right to publish/create whatever they want to and to have their right to exclusive reproduction protected, but they have no rights whatsoever over the _physical media_ once the sell it to someone. If I buy a painting for 5 bucks today and it's worth 50 Million in a few years, the now famous artist has no right to a single penny of the profit I make selling it.
Likewise, a movie director or writter has no rights to control what I choose to do to view his movie if I own a reproduction of it.
Call it 'Home Theater PC', which describes better what the device actually is.
Most games have the option of having all offensive turned off and I think the XBOX has it built into the hardware itself.
Why is this a big deal? If anything they are appeasing those who say kids are watching movies that they shouldn't be. If the offensive parts were filtered out then their bottom line would expand and they would make more money and that's what it's all about to them anyway.
It's just getting sickening with all of the business entities out there who don't care about anything but having the ultimate control over products they sell. We as consumers should have two options.
Sell two versions of dvds. One that is pre-filtered and one that isn't filtered. Shit there goes the bottom line. Leave it up to the consumer to filter and it's out of your hands plus it doesn't cost you a penny. Oh yea you also don't piss off the consumer which these days doesn't seem to matter to them.
You aren't free to do anything, until you've lost everything.
"I can say that I don't want edited versions of anything of mine going around"
In this case, the edited version is not "going around" Are you saying it should be illegal for me to white out every instance of "God is dead" from my copy of Nietzsche?
Yes, some films would be destroyed if you expurgated them. So what? If you watch _American Beauty_ with the language set to one you don't understand, it pretty much ruins the movie also. Does the mean the studios can demand that I pass a Spanish comprehension test before I can watch it? What about idiots who totatlly misunderstand the point of a work of art? Should people who don't understand that Frost's "Mending Wall" is an argument against walls not be allowed to read the poem? When you release a work of art, you lose some control over it. You can demand that people not release derivative versions, but you can't demand that they appreciate it or watch it a certain way.
This is weird. I distinctly remember that when the very first DVD players were introduced to the market, the studios advertised this exact feature - the ability to see the same movie "as intended for grown-ups", then for example "as intended for 16-years-old" and the for a small child. The whole page in the Sony DVD brochure was dedicated to nice colorful schematics of scenes/parts of soundtrack being edited out "on the fly" at different points of the movie based on the selected "maturity level"... I thought this sounded rather interesting (from the technical standpoint) and also had a potential to be a lot of fun, and I was sad that none of the released DVDs actually supported this.
--- Frantisek Fuka (Yes, that's my real name and you have no idea how it's pronounced)
I could almost agree with this, if only these bastard hypoccrites would stick to this principle when the same movie is shown on TV. There they are quite satisfied to let the networks chop the movie to hell, removing not only critical to the story parts, but also things a lot more tame than things that were shown on "Three's Company" decades ago. (I still remember with disgust that CBS cut two Teri Garr lines from Young Frankenstien - "Thank You" and "Here?, Now?" . The studios let them and likely outright helped them.) If a movie can be censored based on some network idiot's whim and then broadcast to others, then you certainly should have the right to censor your own copy in the privacy of your own home.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
"The major studios and the Directors Guild of America are essentially saying that, when you buy a DVD, you must watch it exactly the way it was created--or not watch it at all."
I wonder what their attitude would be if one of the words of that quote were changed:
"The major studios and the Directors Guild of America are essentially saying that, when you buy a DVD, you must watch it exactly the way it was created--or not buy it at all."
If I were a stockholder in that company, I'd demand to know why they're drawing a line like that for their customers to cross. I mean, if the attitude is "It's our way or the highway", then there's really no reason to think they have customer satisfaction in mind, right? Who'd want to buy a DVD if they're unwilling to listen to people? "Nar, we don't want to put any extras on the DVD. That costs more."
So, I take it you are against the modifying of games, the modifying of hardware such as Xboxs, PS2s, and Dreamcasts?
Look it up. It's a copyright violation to show a movie to a large group without the creator's permission.
To reiterate, if I decide to cut out the naughty bits on my bought-and-paid-for Schindler's List IN THE PRIVACY OF MY OWN HOME when showing it to my kids, nobody - not Spielberg, not you - has the right to tell me any different.
Well, maybe you do. If this court case wins, maybe I'll be following the example of the dude who put his DVD player up for sale.
above
Wow I can now watch porn movies only for the great plots and acting.
Now if they could only do the same so I could claim I only read playboy for the articles.
they say "no" to any player that doesn't adhere strictly to the DVD consortiums rules. that includes requireing macrovision be enabled and that non-skippable portions of disks be non-skippable among other things..
Filtering out "-1 Troll" posts violates the DMCA?
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
Yeah. And when you go to the bathroom during the commercials on TV, you're STEALING!!! Thief!
And when you hit "fast-forward" to skip the boring part of a movie, you're RAPING THE DIRECTOR'S VISION! His VISION, damn it! Have pity, for God's sake, for the poor blind director with nothing but his money to comfort him.
So do it! Just say NO to remote controls! Sit in that couch, tape your eyes open, and WATCH those shows like their Creator intended!
I'd love to be able to make my own masks for movies. For The Phantom Menance it could turn the volume way down whenever Jar Jar speaks so that it doesn't hurt my ears. For La Femme Nikita it could turn on the subtitles for the parts where the French is too fast for me to follow and turn them off the rest of the time so they don't mar the beauty of the film. For Pitch Black, it could skip the really bright flashes of light in the opening sequence which always give me a headache.
Studios have no qualms about watering down their own movies ... movies are already edited for tv in content, length, and aspect ratio. The studios just want the exclusive right to possibly produce watered down movies themselves and profit from said watered down movies.
As for the "if you don't want the bad content, don't watch the movie." I know it's kind of knee-jerk and you hear that argument a lot. This fails to remedy the fact that it doesn't make any sense. There's no moral or logical imperative I am aware of that states that there's something wrong with liking only portions of a whole. It's only really a valid argument if you hate people you think are prudish or if you are an artistic fascist. And then it's still juvenile.
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
and simply purchase ClearPlay. Then they can control how the "editing" occurs. They could then charge the Movie Studios an "editing" fee for creating a cleaner movie. Everybody wins. But chances are that this won't happen.
It's unfortunate, since my guess is that there is a pretty big market for a DVD player like this.
I mean natural language recognition isn't that far along that you could pick up All profanity. And what about innuendo? To make an R movie TV primetime ready you'd have to take out things like "he's out getting his knob polished".
And then there is violence. How can you tell if a scene is violent? It's like those porno image filters from a few years back that failed miserably to parse out adult images while keeping false positives low.
Hell, I see any of these DVD players failing miserably. The first errant "fuck" that makes its way through would sink whatever company put them out.
The only sure way of censoring a DVD would for an editor to go into the DVD and say "1:15:30 to 1:15:42 are to be removed", "Insert alternative dialogue in Robert DeNiro's dialogue from 0:1:15 to 2:11:10". Of course does the modern technology support this? I guess you could have a separate "clean" audio track but I don't think you can arbitrarily have a DVD player skip specific time slots. I'd think you'd need a complete new edited video track as well.
What is music when you despise all sound?
Am I violating the artist's rights when I close my eyes when a scene comes on that I don't like? I can't see how anyone could maintain that I'm doing anything wrong. This DVD player simply facilitates my attempts to avoid seeing things that I don't want to see. What if they sold, instead of a DVD player that blanks out offensive scenes, a device that covers my eyes and ears whenever an offensive scene came on? Could the studio sue them on the same grounds that they are currently suing them on?
What if I buy a DVD and just watch one scene over and over, never the rest of it, because I like that scene, and only that scene? Why can't I do that with the DVD I purchased, in the privacy of my own home?
Finally, my right to close my eyes, or choose to have them closed for me, is not diminished merely because I choose to trust someone else to decide when to close them for me.
Too late...
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
Sure, that is how you would WANT it. Just like copyright holders want to collect royalties from secondary sales, but don't have the right to do so.
Skipping certain scenes or muting certain words of a movie is just like ripping pages out of a book or blackening over selected words with a magic marker. No copies are being made or distributed, so copyright law does not prevent the purchasers of the books or movies from deleting any content as they desire. Doesn't matter what you want. Copyright law does not grant infinite control.
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There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
This is exactly the manner in which Blockbuster forced Full-Screen movies on the average consumer.
If you notice, movies made after Blockbuster became a huge mega conglomerate, are made in very close shots so the transfer to Full Screen Videos and DVD's would not be a pan and scan nightmare. Hollywood's standards are to shoot movies in this manner because of Blockbuster's influence. The same thing will happen if this DVD maker gets his way. Hollywood will further censor and place more stingent policies that will take away a screenplay/Director's vison than they already do.
Movies made before Blockbuster are cenematically better and more creative than movies made now a days. (Independent movies aside)
If this tool is to be allowed into peoples homes, it will put a permanent, negative, and irreversable mark into the creativity of movie making.
If you don't want you or your kids watch potentially offensive material...DONT FRIGGN WATCH IT!!!!
Censorship in TV and the movies are bad enough as it is. Check out the Problems Jimmy Kimmel has with his show. This is but an example of what happens when stupidity and Political Correctness goes unchecked.
We don't need another homoginization or censorship of creativity.
Dolemite
Save the World! Use a Quote!
By fighting a device that cleans up movies, Hollywood may go a long way towards convincing some of the more pro-business members of Congress to support consumer fair use legislation. Those guys are generally all for big business rights over the consumer, UNLESS that business is forcing decent people to watch smut.
Build a man a fire and he will be warm for a night; set him on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life.
Over dinner, after my last post, i was thining about how the MPAA could actually implement such a decision. Quite frankly i dont see how one could write a license to cover this and not screw up everything else.. Let us postulate for a moment, the MPAA doenst want to alloe players that can skip over parts of a movie based on content the viewer might not want to see (for whatever reason of tgw week [sex violence etc]). Ok how do you word that? "The licencee is not allow to view the movie out of order because of percieved objectionable content as it violates the artistic vision of the producers."??? Ok, I suppose this allows you to skip. FF, rewind for any other reason other than it being "ojbectionable" (as being ojbectionale is the reason why ppl are making these things). Thing is The mpaa has no right to tell you you *have* to watch a particualr portion of a work... not only is it unenforceable, bit really way out of bounds. If we assume they dont grant a CSS license to anyone making a dvd player that can skip predetermined content, that realy donest stop someone from making software for a dvd-rom on a computer from doing it. Basically this is about dictating patterns of consumption. Thats really none of their business. This is a differnet issue than 3rd parties released 'clean' versions of a movie, thats clear copyright violation. Are we going to need to worry about (more) restictions on how we choose to consume a work?
Ok, here's my opinion on it.
If I own a DVD, it's well within my rights if I don't want to see it all the way through, mute some parts, hear some parts in a provided alternate language track, watch it backwards, or skip over parts I don't want to see. Consider: if I feel that the best way to experience looking at a painting I own is to look at it standing on my head, no one has any right to criticize. You may think me silly, but you can't say I can't do that, even if you painted it.
Censorship implies that there is a third party (such as the government) interceding and preventing the original art from being shown. In the case of the Brigham Young University viewing of Schindler's List, it is censorship because it wasn't a private viewing by a home video owner, but a public showing, and BYU wanted to censor what it considered offensive. That is a case where the artist has a right to prevent a showing.
On-the-fly editing is not censorship. If I choose to see the film in such a manner as I see fit, the director has no right to say I can't, because I'm not imposing my view onto others, like BYU was by wanting to show a film deviating from the artist's vision.
By extension, I think ClearPlay is perfectly legal. ClearPlay is not distributing any version of the film, it is providing a method of playing studio-made DVDs while editing on the fly. The viewer and owner of the disc needs to agree that she wants to see the film in the way proscribed by ClearPlay (by paying the service fee ClearPlay charges), and therefore I consider it legitimate.
For what it's worth, I wouldn't pay a monthly fee for access to editing filters I can't save or edit myself. I WOULD buy a player or playing software that would allow me to impose my own filter.
"What's so random about flipping a coin? Ever heard of the I Ching?"
"Hollywood is offended by this for artistic reasons. When someone creates a Schindler's List or Saving Private Ryan, the horrors of war need to be seen. No one should be "kiddie-izing" such films.
What if I were to decide that Snow White needs sex scenes? Should I be able to hire animators to add a dwarves-gang-banging-Snow-White scene and sell (or rent) a DVD with that? Should I be able to create a PVR-style box to automatically add those scenes when someone watches the DVD?"
One word: YES.
If you aren't making copies of the edited version, you can mix and match the scenes however you want. If somebody wants to buy the sexed-up DVD player you made, they should be able to do so, as long as they are informed that the player isn't playing the original content 100%.
If somebody personally doesn't want to see the horrors of war in Schindler's List, they should be free to do so, as long as they're not preventing anybody else from seeing the full thing. I suppose you'd rather have people's eyes held open with duct tape and their bodies chained down to their seat for the duration of the film, so they are forced to either see all or nothing?
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There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
So does that mean that DVD players will no longer be fitted with the "chapter selection" feature? Because, if I push chapter 2 it usually skips the warnings and ads and previews and credits and gets straight to the action! And if it doesn't, that is what FF is for. So are new DVD players also not going to have the "FF" feature? Because if they're not, then I'll just hit the next chapter button... *rant continues through all buttons on the usual DVD remote*
So, does that mean that DVD players will have a single button, "Play," with an auto-eject feature so you have to watch the whole thing? What a load of crap! I'm going back to the superior quality of Beta-MAX. At least then I can watch the movie twice without having to get up to push the tray back in!
The GPL is all about consumer choice. The only reason the GPL exists is to guarantee consumer choice in a world of copyrights and licenses. The GPL exploits laws that usurp consumer's control to give the control back to the consumers. If these laws did not exist, the GPL would not be needed.
This is why it is often called "copyleft" instead of "copyright". It is designed to turn copyrights on their head.
I must agree, a player like this is considered fair use, plenty of people will still deal with ads, and in fact, if people decide to bypass them, its their choice, you purchased the dvd, its YOURS, no need for licencing on media like that, the filmmaker owns the movie rights, you own the right to play the dvd as you please...
What is supposed to be the legal basis for the prohibition? Is it that the CSS license prohibits the DVD player manufacturer from including this functionality, so this manufacturer is violating the contract, or is it that they haven't licensed CSS decryption and are using some derivative of decss that might violate the DMCA, or is it just that showing snipped versions is illegal?
The last would be absurd, even though that's what it sounds like from the article. The first would make sense: if the DVD manufacturer is violating a contract, then that's wrong. The second is more controversial. But as for the third, surely it would not be illegal for a person operating a VCR to have a sheet of paper with a bunch of time codes, and to fast forward appropriately according to the sheet. And if it would be OK for a person to do it, why would it be wrong for the person to deputize a machine to do it?)
Those of us in education feel quite free to show clips from rented videos. Our university counsel has no objection as far as I know (I queried about my own classroom practises). But the fast-forward thing just is the same kind of thing--just think of a bunch of clips.
(Next they'll want to prohibit me from turning my head away from a scene I don't want to watch!)
GreaT.. I can use this special player to weed out all the annoying sex scenes. ahh yes precious porn plot. But then again theres only so many times you can watch a guy deliver a pizza.
Movie viewers were sued by the MPAA for turning up 5 minutes late at the theater. Their tardiness caused them to miss the first 5 minutes of the movie, which wreaked irrepairable and irreversible damage to the directors in Hollywood, because unless every viewer sees 100% of every film, their artistic reputation will be destroyed.
At the same theater, other viewers were sued for going to the bathroom in the middle of the film or leaving early. The amount of compensation sought in the lawsuits was based on the length of time the viewers had missed from the film, so eventually they decided it was not worth it to sue a young lady who covered up her eyes for 2.3 seconds during the beheading scene.
---------
There is inferior bacteria on the interior of your posterior.
While I rarely side with the movie industry...
Here's my take on this.
The companies making these special DVD players shouldn't be allowed to distribute their own edits.
However, I see nothing wrong at all with adding the functionality/technology so that the end user can edit the movies for themselves - or download (as someone else suggested) edits created by other users.
I have a problem with these DVD-player companies making available (for free or sale) edits. If a 3rd party website/person wants to make them available for free, fine. But by making them available directly, they're altering content and profiting from it. I feel that is wrong.
Your freedom only gives you the right to invent your own filtering DVD player.
Who's going to determine what's offensice, here? If the player is going to seamlessly skip offensice sections of the movie, then those sections need to be tagged somehow. But, what one person finds offensive is not the same as the next. In my opinion, all the Anakin/Padme dialog in Attack of the Clones should tagged as offensive.
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
I reckon their agenda is to make sure your darling little Timmy can watch "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" without seeing that penis in act 3. It's not like removing the penis would detract from the movie in any way. I'm pretty sure the director put it in just to tweak the people at CleanFlicks.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Breaking the law is a crime even if you didn't know the law existed. And while you might try the "I didn't know this was under copyright" to make it accidental instead of willful infringement, I don't think any judge would buy that even if there was no FBI warning at all. It's just there to remind and/or annoy you.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Also in other news, Gibson is suing Fender because they claim Fenders amps do not make the latest Les Paul sound like it's "supposed to."
I guess they were seeing enough penisses in Church as it was.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
While I don't agree with censorship in general, I do believe its everyone's right to do what they wish with their own media
No, it's not. Just as you cannot remove parts of code that you "don't like" from closed-source software. If you don't want to watch the movie, don't watch the movie. You do not have the right to use a movie's (copyrighted) footage to create what is essentially a different movie. What you have is a license to watch the movie, not to change it. If someone wants to release "open-source" movies , fine, let people do what they want, add scenes, remove scenes, whatever. As long as they're someone's IP, they cannot be changed without the author's consent. If you want to skip a scene, you can skip it by pressing fast-forward, but in doing so you acknowledge the scene exists.
Since we're at it, why don't we make some boxes to automatically censor inconvenient parts of History? Or inconvenient news? Wait... the USA already has that, it's called TV.
RMN
~~~
I can do that already. When Pauly Shore shows up on my screen, I hit the little "FF" button.
The way things are going, a DVD player will be a box with two visible features: a tray for the DVD and a single button: open/close.
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
I think the real problem is we don't have enough sex and violence in movies
Somebody ought to invent a device to add a few more interesting scenes to DVDs
As this would be analogous to ejecting a VHS tape and playing a p0rn movie for a few minutes every couple of scenes before going back to the original tape, I don't see why this shouldn't be legal either.
If I buy a book, I OWN it just like I OWN that Linux CD I burned. Yes the contents is in both cases limited by copyright, but I can still do whatever the hell I want to MY copy*. You see, that "all rights reserved" is "all rights (that can be reserved under copyright law) reserved".
*Not counting DMCA violations in the US...
Which is among other things that I do not have the right to make additional copies (copyright, remember?) or to make public performances of it. In fact even that is limited as I can use extracts under fair use, and I can transfer ownership under first sale. And I don't know about you in the US, but I got the legal right to make a backup copy too.
The viewing you refer to would be a public performance of it, and requires a separate licence, which he may or may not grant. If I showed that cut edition to a group of my friends (for which I need no additional licence), Spielberg could say whatever he wanted, but he couldn't do anything to stop it.
Sheesh. What an amazing misconception of copyright law.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The vote choices are lame. They are not the reasons i would vote for or against this, so i'm not voting at all. :) Neither reflects my view.
What the MPAA fails to realize: if someone is determined enough to avoid offensive material that they would want to buy one of these players, that if the MPAA forces these players off the market, the consumers in question will simply not purchase DVDs. And they certainly won't go to the theaters, eithers.
Basically, the use of this player is the only way that the MPAA will capture revenue from a certain demographic of consumer--this demographic would much rather do without this content than be forced to view it without the filter in place. The MPAA is purposely alienating a consumer demographic--and one that is taking the high road, at that? Plain stupid.
--
$tar -xvf
hollywood cant tell you what you can and cannot do.
the filter dvdplayers can buy thier dvd license like everyone else. there is no "we reserve the right to refuse service" sign on licenses, you have to sell to whoever for the price you set.
eat it.
Next Hollywood will be saying that the price you pay for a DVD isn't to purchase it, you are simply 'buying the rights to view said media'. You don't actually own it. Then they'll try to impose all kind of nastiness on us, the humble consumer.
~.Evanrude
ok, while i don't agree with censorship of the movies in anyway, and i have posted that view all over this thread, I've come to the conclusion that more options are better than no options. I do not agree with the altering of the movie. I will not buy the DVD Player. I will not watch altered versions (on tv or on someone elses player). But it came down to my opinion on many other issues where I believe in a persons right to make a choice and exercise their free will. For that reason I belive that there is no reason this technology should not be released, and I have voted so on the poll. I believe, as with any issue, there are positive and negative sides... If given the choice between *another* law or no law, i choose no law.
My mother doesn't like to see blood. It makes her nautious (sp?) but there are a lot of great movies with great plots. If simple things like replacing the bloody scenes out of movies could be done by flipping a switch why not?
I mean, it's not like everyone would be forced to watch it the way one person sets it up.
Geez people. I mean this is about the equivalent of me ripping the DVD and editing it to my tastes before showing it only it saves me hours of work.
It's not about learning. This is no different than wal-mart selling albums with the cuss words taken out. It's the consumers right to buy it that way if they choose.
The things that I'd want to remove are things that I know all about. Doesn't mean I want to watch them.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
While it is sad to see this, you have to look at the big picture. The first ammendment is more importand than fair use. While this does set is precident, I would rather see issues with DVDs than my ability to b*tch and moan (free speech)
The ZDNet article is a repeat of a Playboy article last month.
Playboy has quite a few good articles themed along the same lines as Wired or EFF posts... yet I rarely see references to it on slashdot. Don't you read the articles?
Hmm... as I read the majority of responses, people are piping up saying it's a freedom of speech issue. Though it will become clear that IANAL, allow me the liberty of playing devil's advocate, if you will.
It is a free speech issue. I recall several stories about companies in Utah cutting DVD's and VHS tapes to remove "questionable" material, and then selling those cuts as "family-safe" versions of the movie. I remember a lot of people saying that such cutting shouldn't be allowed, because it interfered with freedom of speech, and because it delegated the burden of protecting our families.
Why, then, are those same people saying that preventing this sort of cutting is bad? I don't really view stifling this technology as a machine for censorship, but as a machine against censorship.
What's to keep the government from mandating such a control feature in the DVD player? The US is already starting to look far too Orwellian since 9/11, and I would not put such a mandate past your government. In the interests of "protecting" the people from "terrorists", mind you.
Face it. We are better off without some technologies.
On another note.... A lot of people have a v-chip in their TV, but how many can honestly tell me they use it?
If you're not using the v-chip in your TV, why on earth would you want one in your DVD? If anything, a DVD would be easier to censor: I don't want my kid watching Terminator 2, so I keep that DVD in the locked part of the cabinet. There is no risk of the kid channel surfing and finding himself watching a porno DVD (check the audio commentary track!), so such a device would, in the end, be quite useless.
While I don't agree with the RIAA or MPAA in most cases, I do think that they've made a good decision on this one. I doubt that anybody with half a brain would need such a DVD player to prevent their kids from viewing questionable DVD's. By that same token, I have no doubt that adding a "v-chip" to my DVD player would raise the price for a new player by 50 bucks or more, just like the v-chips did to TV. And frankly, the implication of allowing such a device in a 1984 society scares me.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
"The viewer is not making those choices for themselves. And yes, it is the same as when a network chops up a film for TV broadcast. I don't happen to agree with that either."
How exactly are the viewers not making choices for themselves? They chose to get the DVD player that will automatically skip certain parts of the movie. When the network chops up a film for TV broadcast, it's not the viewers choice, which is why they have to get permission from the owners of the film.
Here is my two cents.
When you purchase a DVD, you are purchasing the right to view the movie (this case has been made for years, it is why CDs cost $16+ instead of the dime it costs to make them, same with software). Once you do that, what you do, in the privacy of your own home, _should_ be legal. If you want to watch it while hanging upside down on monkey bars, whatever. You paid the $20 to feed the poor, starving artists, you can do whatever you want, as long as it's not infringing upon their rights.
This is not censorship; parents have the right to decide what their kids watch, and how they watch it. If they want their kids to watch the movie Jaws, but spare them from the underwater part (in the cage), sure. Who cares? So the kids don't pester for months about nightmares, but they still get to see a pretty decent movie.
All of these fucks who are posting things like "my friend is a amatuer film director" and "you are obstructing the artists original view of the image." WELL GUESS WHAT BITCH! I am a patron of your art; you would not be making any money if not for patrons of your art. These patrons can do whatever they want; essentially, if you want any money at all, the Patrons tell YOU what to make (due to demand). If the patron wants to buy a book, and burn it, that's fine. A bit barbaric, but 100% legally and just. If a patron wants to buy one of the original Mona Lisas, and I want to rub shit all over it. Guess what! I sure can! (Well, maybe not the Mona Lisa, that might be protected).
Copyrights were not invented for this purpose. This is just another example of Hollywood stifling technological advance, while reaping all benefits they possibly can from it. It's dispicable, and it's always going to happen. Hollywood has every right to wish to protect the stuff it has copyrights on. However, this falls out of their domain.
One thing that gripes me are the supposed onslaught of ads. I own 50+ DVDs, and only about 4 of them (all Universal) have "Trailers-" the stupid universal theme song, followed by images of other movies. There's still the matter of in-movie advertising (a car smashing into a coke truck, or Apple computers in ID4, cigarette advertising, etc), then the previews and actual television commercials before the feature in theeaters. I would rather continue paying $20, maybe a bit more, to keep commercials out of these. I just want to sit back, and watch the movies, not fast foward through crap.
If you created your own filter program and used it on hardware you devised, that would be fair use, and Hollywood wouldn't have a case.
However, the people who create the software and sell the players do not have the right to alter whole copyright works for redistribution (which is what selling the player and filter is, even if you buy the movie from someone else, and even if the filters are free).
So Hollywood has a case, and a good one.
Maybe somebody else remembers this, but back when DVD players were first coming into the consumer marketplace, one the selling points was that there would be a system in place to do exactly this! At the beginning of the movie you could decide if you wanted to watch a R, PG-13, or whatever version. I remember being quite excited at the time because then I would finally be able to convince my parents to let me watch all those big bad R-rated films. I never actually saw a DVD with this system, but I do dostinctly remember the makers touting it.
its always about
...:)
1. Abuse consumers Rights
2. ????
3. Profit
Thats my first ever 3 step profit post...I feel so ashamed
--meh--
... watch WTBS or TNT versions of movies, because they'll be virtually devoid of offensive language (nevermind the fact that the dubbed substitutions are hilarious unto themselves). I don't see how this could be any different, or why The Machine should have any qualms about it. They're sure to make more money from additional sales...
-oZ
They already have.
You can't fast forward through the FBI warning and I have seen a few DVDs (Disney I think) that FORCE you to watch the previews by disabling FF during them.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
And as I recall, we're "stealing" from spammers when we filter spam out of our email, too.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Some may remember the Slashdot story about CleanFlicks getting sued by the the Director's Guild of America. It turns out that they are suing 15 other companies in addition to CleanFlicks, including MovieMask, ClearPlay, and Family Shield Technologies, which all offer real-time editing of DVD content during playback.
What happens when Open Source projects start offering this kind of functionality? Will the lead maintainers or distributors of these projects be sued also? If commercial entities are getting sued for offering certain (seemingly benign) features in their systems, will that discourage Open Source developers from contributing to projects for fear of legal retaliation? Some companies may have the legal firepower to defend themselves, but some kid in college certainly won't have the resources to protect himself from a malicious lawsuit along these lines.
It's not censorship if you do it to yourself. Geez!
It's not censorship if I choose to rent "The Matrix" instead of "Vampires Vixens From Venus". It is censorship if the government does not allow the video store to carry the latter, or for me to choose it.
Filtering on DVD players is not even close to censorship.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
get over the sony/betamax case.
drm is the sony/betamax case revisited. They are simply trying to win a case they already lost.
Now with this anti editing of swearing, anti fast forwarding of commercials, anti...anti...anti...
The mpaa are trying to remove the fast forward and mute buttons of the vcr of the current generation. It can't be any simpler than that.
It's nice to have a DVD player that gives Hollyweird the finger...hit PBC a couple of times, hit Play, and you're taken straight to the movie.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Certainly the courts would not rule as illegal any of the following acts:
NONE of these acts are any different from programming a DVD player to skip offensive portions of a movie you've purchased!
Either these acts are all illegal or the aren't. It's as simple as that! DVD's don't deserve special treatment.
If the courts rule in favor of Hollywood on this one, it will set a dangerous precendent...
Why so complex and now turn around the painting ?
and if you turn more paintings you can even see more paintings around you on-their head
(disclaimer: this is a joke)
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
This is just like dumb fucks who can't stand words like fuck and has to censor music before they can listen to it. Censoring words on TV and Radio is a very dangerous practise, what is next in line? Freedom of speech is a joke guys.
But even worse are those that just *HAS* to see the movie, or listen to the CD, even though they don't want certain parts of it. Isn't it enough that PG-13 is slaughtering movies to the left and right already? How much damage can a kid get from seeing a boob after all. And how much damage can a kid get from seing people getting "killed" left and right, but never ever see blood, or the consequences of killing. But it is the blood that is dangerous for them, jupp, yeah.
This filtering idiocity is just another christian idiocity, and their typical way of imposing their mad beliefs on the rest of the world. Wake up and smell science ppl!
then having someone remove the language, sex, and violence from it.
now that would be sweet: opening credits with that nerve-cell-flyby stuff out of the pores until JUST BEFORE the camera gets pulled back over the gun, then cut directly to the closing credits.
but hey, at least this way we can claim that we THINK OF THE CHILDREN!! (TM)
Free as in mason.
Can I use it in reverse? Get only the dirty parts ;)
I thought that was what this was for? Guess not apparently. Or maybe I should come out from under the rock I've been living under for the last couple years and do a little bit of research... :P
What a bunch of muddy funsters. They can soak my cake.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Missed a part? Start it over. Got to pee really bad? Start it over. How dare we, the consumer, get in the way of the director's pristine vision of the movie.
Actually, if Hollywood gets it's way, it would be
"Missed a part? pay for it again. Got to pee really bad? pay for it again..." How dare we, the consumer, get in the way of the executives pristine bottom-line?
I think this idea is rubbish!! if parents want this DVD Player that allows the removal of adult scene's form a film then not onlt are they breaking the law about age Certificates on films but they are also crap parents. No I don't care about any copyright stuff, hey must of my games and film are illegal but film ratings are there for a reason to protect the younger audience. It the parents job to pick sutible films and not let the DVD do it for them!
p.s E-mail = bartm2811@bridgwater.ac.uk
(cant't be bothered about acccounts)
Hey I got an account so I'll re-post this and bet score. I think this idea is rubbish!! if parents want this DVD Player that allows the removal of adult scene's form a film then not onlt are they breaking the law about age Certificates on films but they are also crap parents. No I don't care about any copyright stuff, hey must of my games and film are illegal but film ratings are there for a reason to protect the younger audience. It the parents job to pick sutible films and not let the DVD do it for them! Matac
Forget about filtering dirty words. Who cares. That's for bible thumpers with thin skins.
What I want to be able to do is get rid of previews, advertisements, FBI warnings, and 30 second long fancy animations at the menu screens.
When I sit down to watch a movie I want to see exactly what parts I want to watch, and not a bunch of crap some pencil pushing, jack booted, MPAA producer thinks I should be required to see.
-Michael
Threshold RPG
What amazes me most is that Lucas and Co. give a shit as long as the sell more copies, and that they can say "artistic integrity" with a straight face.
The above statement from the article, summarises what I think very nicely. And I fail to see how Hollywood cares about what people do with their DVD's at home once they've bought them anyway.
If these kind of basic rights are removed from us, god knows what's comming next. Subscribtion-based DVD's w/ plentiful DRM anyone (how about Product Activation for DVD's) ?
OK, so you have to watch all of it, including the ads. The next logical step in protecting corporate revenue streams is mandatory purchase of popcorn when you rent a video. It makes perfect sense - how else do they get compensated for you hiring it once and you crowding all your mates into your living room to watch it ?
Slashdot readers who make their own popcorn will be the first to be sued.
If people don't want to see someone say 'Fuck' in a movie, then they shouldn't watch the fucking movie!
If people don't want to see tits in a movie, then they shouldn't watch the fucking movie!
If people don't want to see violence in a movie, then they shouldn't watch the fucking movie!
If I was a moviemaker, I'd be pretty pissed off at the idea that people can bowdlerise my movie any which way they like.
Hollywood are right on the ball here, and I support them wholeheartedly.
Mr Bowdler was WRONG, people! His name is remembered as an verb of wrong-headedness.
It's just as evil and fuckheaded to take all the 'fuck' out of 'Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back' as it was to give King Lear a happy ending.
Only a stupid right wing pigfucker would want one of these creations of evil, and Hollywood is perfectly right to want them stopped.
"Information wants to be paid"
The Finnish Board of Film Classification censors movies (incl. DVDs) that are distributed in Finland. Shouldn't the Directors Guild of America sue them too?
if I were a director who had put out my artistic "masterpiece", I'd personally be offended by the implication that I put scenes and events in my film that are completely extraneous to the cohesive whole of my vision, and thus can be removed.
i'm not for legal restrictions on what you can do with a product you have purchased, but I can completely understand why directors would find said editing insulting.
If you aren't making copies of the edited version, you can mix and match the scenes however you want. If somebody wants to buy the sexed-up DVD player you made, they should be able to do so, as long as they are informed that the player isn't playing the original content 100%.
Why? Why should someone be able to modify someone else's copyrighted movie and then resell it? If you truly believe that's a legal and moral right, then I hope that your life's story is released as a movie some day. I'd love to use CGI to add in some scenes of you molesting the family dog. Don't worry. I'd include a notice that "the player isn't playing the original content 100%." That wouldn't bother you, I'm sure.
If somebody personally doesn't want to see the horrors of war in Schindler's List, they should be free to do so, as long as they're not preventing anybody else from seeing the full thing.
If you don't want to see that, then you need to skip the movie.
That said, fair use means that you have a right to skip any scene that you want in the privacy of your own home. What you don't have a right to do is resell a derivative work without the permission of the copyright holders. (Whether you sell it as a DVD or as a player/service that mangles the existing DVD is simply a technicality.) The only people that should maintain artistic control of a movie are the artists involved (and those to whom they have assigned rights).
I don't get it. I mean why would you want to cut out violent/sex filled parts of the movie? Isn't that censorship? Also when did Hollywood ever claim to be a babysitter for lazy parents? I dunno; the fact that anyone would ask for such a thing seems stupid. I'm with Hollywood on this.
How far will we let them go?
The article didn't mention even the slightest hint that the Wood wants to prevent people from fast forwarding. ...they don't want their films edited.
Again...what the hell are you talking about?
You have no idea if it's my first, or fifteenth time watching a movie. Maybe I want to skip to a certain scene to see a specific actor, or show a friend something. Maybe I want to come in where I left off the week before. Maybe I'm simply smarter than you and your hideous mangling of a movie makes it painful for me to watch some parts that you think are high art. Or, maybe, like the people developing the player, I have decided for my own reasons that I don't like some parts of the movie and I want to watch *my* movie in the way that I want.
I would rent MORE DVD's knowing that I could block out the dirt. Hollywood will never get the fact that rentals will increase to families. In all fairness, they have finally discovered that families are more likely to bring the entire family to a PG13 movie. That is why we're seeing less R movies at the theaters.
Why not have different versions of movies?
The US Gov't has different version of reality. Some say liberation some say invasion, potato pahtahto.
We'll all be so confused that we won't even know what is is.
Kids will be able to watch "back door sluts 9" and tell their mom they saw a film about people who wanted to fix other peoples cable tv.
People, We already have the the power we need. If you can't handle something in the film, don't watch the film.
advertising and paid product placement. What if the scene skipped over has a Coke, Pepsi, or *insert product here* logo prominently displayed?
It's nice to have a DVD player [nerd-out.com] that gives Hollyweird the finger...hit PBC a couple of times, hit Play, and you're taken straight to the movie.
Interesting. (It appears they were slashdotted, took a while to get to it.)
While that is a solution (perhaps not the easiest, but a solution) the real problem is the mindset of the movie industry. "You WILL watch this movie the way we say". They obviously feel we have no fair use rights either. Case in point.
I would get more offended by the absolute monopoly that they enjoy, and the lack of concern they show for consumers, but my anger is tempered by the fact that no matter how many millions they spend to secure access to their movies, there will always be plenty of underpaid geeks that will figure a crack, just because its fun to do it.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
"Oh bother," said Pooh, as he hid Piglet's mangled corpse. dbishop
Jesus, with a sig like that this guy is complaining about "gory violence" in movies!
nohup rm -rf ~/. >& zen &
It sounds to me like even if you buy the DVD player, you would still need to subscribe to a service to get updates for new DVDs that come out. Maybe the MPAA is concerned that someone else might be siphoning off 0.000000000000000000000001% of the revenue stream generated by DVD sales and rentals?
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
If you answered yes to any of that, go fist yourself! In Soviet Russia... Please don't continue to make that joke ironic here in America!
* I think that is a great scene in Pulp-Fiction. Two guys trying to kill each other, and one simply can't leave the other to be raped. The experience makes their dispute seem petty. I just can't stand to watch it again...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Seems many "artists" these days forget this so it bears repeating here: The right to free speech does not give you the right to be heard.
You are free to produce and sell movies. That does not compel people to watch them as you intended. You may intend for a person to see your movie on a large screen with a DD 5.1 sound mix, watched start to finish with no interruptions. If you release it on DVD, people are perfectly free to buy that DVD, watch it on a shitty TV with 2-track sound, decide it sucsk, fastforward through it looking for nudiy, and then rip it out and skeet shoot it (throw it in the air and shoot it with a shotgun). This certianly is not what you want them to see, but it isn't your right to dictate that.
A person can stand in a park and preach all day long, but they can't force you to allow them into your home so they can preach to you all the time.
If you don't want any edited versions of your work going around, then you better keep them to yourself.
If you don't, you risk having that guy a few posts up getting drunk, laughing and making fun of you.
That's not censorship. That's freedom of choice.
What next, spammers saying their "art" must be distributed intact and unfiltered?
This IS a consumer driven system they're talking about. There's no push for legislation or regulation etc. If nobody buys the stuff they go bust. If someone comes up with a popular set of filters they make money.
Sure you may get sick in your stomach with the thought that people might actually buy such stuff. But people should have a choice whether to delegate movie editing/distortion/destruction to cleanflicks/Moviemask/etc or not.
Hollywood is the one who wants to force everyone to watch stuff the way Hollywood likes it. That sure doesn't sound consumer driven at all.
That's the real thing that makes me disgusted. They aren't consumer driven, then they don't make enough money, then they blame everyone else and successfully push through terrible laws.
First they came for the DeCSS nerds, and I did not speak out - because I was not a nerd.
Then they came for the modchippers, and I did not speak out - because I was not a modchipper.
Then they came for the Tivo/Replay users, and I did not speak out - because I didn't have one.
Then they came for the people who skipped parts of movies, and I did not speak out because I didn't watch movies.
Then they came for those who didn't want to watch the movie at all.
And by that time there was no one left to speak out for me.
Censorship is forced it is not something you choose. If I choose to not see content that is a right, it is not the loss of rights as censorship implies. By not allowing you to choose what you do or do not wish to see, the disallowment of a device such as this to be released on the market is the true censorship.
I don't think there is much decided law about the status of the edit lists themselves. I know that there is precident for the idea that legal publishers own the "page and section numbering" even for case law books where all the the underlying material is in the public domain. Citing a couple of cases would clearly be under fair use, but what about cross referenced indexes that refer you back via these page and section numbers? It seems to me that a court could easily decide that the edit lists themselves are indeed a derivitive work requiring the agreement of the copyright holder.
IANAL, and even if I was, the law here is probably not decided yet. I would expect that the courts would give a lot of leeway to individuals and non-profits producing and exchanging cue lists, but once you start to sell it the court will probably find for the copyright holder.
It goes without saying that trying to restrict people from doing this is going to be bad for sales, but we already have plenty of example cases where the content industry is being stupid by trying to control everything and extract every last possible drop of revenue.
I took the movie Beetlejuice and ripped it from the dvd, pulled the audio apart, edited out the F word and re-mastered the dvd and burned it back to a DVD-R so my kids could watch it. Screw the industry telling me how to treat what what I buy.
Karma means nothing to me, so suck it...
There is not, and should not, be anything wrong with this, DMCA notwithstanding. If you purchase, or are freely given, a copy of copyrighted code/text/art, you can fold/spindle/mutilate it to your heart's content. You can make a million-billion copies of it, you can tell everyone who will listen how much it blows. The only thing you cannot do with a copyrighted work is give a copy to someone else.
That is, until the DMCA came along and said that somehow digitized information is somehow magical and is more important to protect than the U.S. constitution.
-Ryan C.
-Ryan C.
Vehicle body designers are artists in an even bigger money business than Hollywood. When a customizer does their job, not only are they changing the original artist's vision, they frequently make their living off of reselling it. In fact, this isn't a onesy and twosy garage shop type thing, there are corporations that have this as their direct or indirect (suppliers of customizing equipment) business. Some businesses even specialize in making complete from scratch reproductions of originals that use ZERO ORIGINAL PARTS!!! There is NO DIFFERENCE between these practices and what Hollywood is complaining about other than the cost of the product which I believe leads to the fact that people would be a lot more loudly ticked off if they couldn't change and resale their $20,000 vehicle than if they can't change their $20 movie.
Why is it that a vehicle manufacturer can see this as flattering but Hollywood can't?
Since when do DVDs include ads...?
And it seems like you need to read what I wrote again, because you still haven't go it. Redo from start at line 0.
RMN
~~~
You might as well say that if you decide to install a cracked version of Windows XP it's nobody else's business but your own. Microsoft (and the FBI, and few other law enforcement entities) might disagree, though. And as much as I dislike them, I have to agree with their point of view.
Please note that it's irrelevant if you paid for it or not. Reverse-engineering, cracking or altering it is forbidden by the license agreement, regardless of whether you paid for it or not.
Re-editing a movie without the authors' / producers' consent is also illegal. A (legal) "automatic censor" would only be able to operate on movies that it has been licensed to operate on. Which is essentially the same as releasing a censored version of the movie (most US movies are already censored - compared to the European versions - and some are even released in a "Spanish Inquisition" version with even more cuts and sound edits; what I call the "freaking heck" syndrome).
Personally, I think that anyone who supports censorship in any form "for the good of society" has a serious flaw in their logic circuits. If you want to change society, let other people know what you think; don't just accept things as they are and then hide the parts you don't like.
But as I said, that's not the issue here. The issue is IP. Any automatic editing of a work (be it a movie or a book, a software application, etc.), needs to be authorised by whoever owns the rights. If you want the jewels, you have to take the crap. You're absolutely free to reject both and go on looking.
RMN
~~~
You can express your personal legal opinions all day, but the legality or illegality of the "automatic censor" (as you put it) is the issue under litigation and will be decided by the court. (Or be left undecided, should the defendant cave in and give up when confronted by the plaintiff's financial and legal resources.)
Similarly, the issue of the validity of software license provisions which aren't disclosed and agreed to prior to the sale has never been definitively decided by courts.
You apparently don't understand the difference between censorship by some official authority which is done without my consent, and pre-screening which is done under my direction and with my consent for my own personal use.
I alone am the judge of the type of content I choose to view/hear, whether it be all, none, or part of that which is offered.
You are not being offered parts. You are being offered a whole. Don't like it? Don't buy it. Or if you already bought it, simply return it.
Imagine you create a website about World War II, where you describe how the Nazis killed millions of people and were then defeated by the allies. The site is public but the copyright belongs to you. One day, someone with a slightly peculiar view of History decides that all the bad things you wrote about the Nazis were lies, and writes a plug-in (that he distributes to the public in general) that removes those "offensive" parts. In other words, people seeing your page in a computer with his plug-in installed see only references to the great buildings of the 3rd Reich, the bombing of Dresden, the killing of Nazis, etc.
Do you still think that person has the right to develop and distribute that plug-in without your consent?
This is exactly the same situation as a software crack that removes the protection (or unlocks features, etc.) of another program. It's irrelevant that you find that protection "offensive". You don't get to pick parts. You can keep the "crap" with the jewels, or you can reject them both. In a society (or a relationship), you need to respect other people's freedom. If the author gives you the option of picking which parts you want to keep, fine. If not, your only choice (a perfectly free choice) is between "yes" and "no".
RMN
~~~
In short:
You claim that I have to take all or nothing. I claim to be the sole judge of what I'll accept, whether it's all, nothing, or part.
The discussion has been interesting, but we're at loggerheads and will just have to agree to disagree.
Oh, I'm not stating my opinion I'm simply telling you what international copyright law says. You (or I, or anyone else) can disagree with it, but that's just the way it is. And unlike what you seem to think, it is quite clear. Without permission from the owner of the rights, any sort of editing is a breach of copyright. Doesn't matter if it's then distributed to a million people or just to you, in your home. They probably wouldn't go after you (the end user), but they would almost certainly go after the company making the "censorware" (either to forbid them or - more likely, if there was any market - to charge them a fee).
RMN
~~~
As to house maintenance, does it involve problem solfing? If so,
your hacker can safely be left to deall with the panning (for the
musement value, if nothering ese).
-- Telsa Gwynne
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