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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.
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...
my stereo should be illegal, it adds distortion to music in real time
-- OMFG = Oh My Floatse Goatse
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.
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...
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.
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.
...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.
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
"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.
... 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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
-----
5 people go into space, one by one they go missing then Ripley says "it's alright now, they've gone".
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
-----------------------
Gang of teenagers go into the woods. One comes out.
Deep Throat
-----------
Woman goes to the doctors. The End.
Pulp Fiction
------------
Two guys talk about fast food. Man & woman do a funny dance. Two guys drink coffee.
Jaws
----
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
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 Hollywood wins this, we might have to view all posts at -1.
ugh.
"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."
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
Too late...
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
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?"
Wah. Imagine making a shitty movie and having someone hit 'Stop' and watching something better. Would your perfect world allow directors to disable that button too, for fear that someone might not respect their artistic integrity?
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.
Once you sell something it becomes the property of the purchaser. The only thing copyright prevents is their making copies. You sell all control over everything else when you sell the work. If you insist people watch it your way, don't sell it, play it in carefully controlled environments.
"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 &
One of my favorite films I've recently watched was David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. At one point in the movie, I wanted to back up and watch a scene over. Imagine my horror when D.L.'s dedication to his art prevented me doing so! Apparently he had decided that random access to his work was an affront to his creative dignity and did not include scene indexes in the DVD. Nothing but the basic shuttle buttons worked. So, I had to go back to the beginning of the movie and FF back to where I was.
Note to Hollywood and David Lynch: I loved the film and I would have bought the DVD (I was watching a rental) but after these shenanigans, you can forget it. If all I'm going to get is the cinematic experience, I will see it in the cinema and your DVD can rot on the shelf...
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.