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Auto-Censoring DVD Player
Gogl writes "Those clever folks at RCA have apparently designed a DVD player that automatically scans movies and censors them to make them kosher, as it were. That means none of the naughty bits and none of those bad words either. It will be sold by Walmart for the price of $79, and what with the recent Janet Jackson 'wardrobe malfunction' this product will likely be lauded by the FCC and moralists everywhere, though Hollywood is already complaining."
"So now we have to depend on the processor in a $79 piece of asiaware to correctly detect and 'bleep' or otherwise censor dirty words? Please. This reminds me of the so-called "web censoring software" that looked for images with sufficient pixels in the color range of human flesh, and 'decided' that it was pr0n. It had a false positive rate = false negative rate."
RTFA!!!! clearplay scan the films for you and I think it is downloaded to the dvd
SURELY NOT!!!!!
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
Why is this flamebait?
The parent was referring to modifying somebodies intellectual property without their permission. That is covered by the DMCA. Why do you think Hollywood hates the idea of these things? They consider themselves artists and artists don't like it when other people start changing their work. If you don't like it then don't look at it or watch it -- but don't change it.
The parent raises a valid point about how stupid the DMCA is too. It would cover this in theory. Overreaching law or good thing? His comment was not flamebait.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
You have a point. The Directors guild of America has a problem with third parties cashing in on edited versions of their films. They're still engaged in legal action against ClearPlay over this matter.
Editing a film is a way of creating a derivative work. It's an essential part of the art of movie making. Often, directors would rather not be pressured to make multiple versions of their film that cater to peoples varying conception of objectionable material.
Clearplay scans movies for dodgy content, and then programs that data into its system.
Subscribers can then watch standard copies of the 500-or-so films on its list, with the assurance that they will automatically skip over mute anything that children or the squeamish may not like.
Until now, Clearplay has only run through a PC.
It does not use a heuristic. Clearplay has already screened the movie previously for offensive content and preprogrammed actions (i.e. skipping or bleeping).
Personally I don't like the idea of people trusting other people's judgment on what their kids should or shouldn't see in a movie. Seems a little Big Brother'ish.
I'm sure many parents will love this though. Now they can just sit their kids in front of the tube and not worry their little heads over whether their kids are seeing inappropriate material.
It's partly the fault of societal pressures (i.e. monetary), but really, what's the point of having kids if you just ignore them after they reach age 4 (sometimes even earlier?).
As it uses a database of known "naughty parts" then it is useless against anything it does not know about. If however the JJ "incident" actually made it to commercial DVD, and someone updated the database with that particular part, then yes it would catch it.
The big question is how it will sell. If it sells really well then firstly I'll be surprised, and secondly frightened.
I'd also love to get my hands on that database...
So, if I cue up just the car chase in "Streets of San Fancisco," or maybe just the rescue of Morpheus in "The Matrix" without actually watching the movies in their entirety, am I violating the rights of the artistic creators?
;-)
If not, how is it any different if I'm a puritanical old biddy who wants to watch "Eyes Wide Shut" with a DVD player that automatically skips over the orgy scene?
Well, its different in the sense that you want to only watch the good bits and she's missing out on the only good bit...
You can't take the sky from me...
They only people for who it is illegal to sell the coverless books are the book stores who have signed an agreement with the book distributor that say instead of sending back the complete book they can send back just the front cover and they will destroy the book.
In the book themselves some just have a warning that if the book it is a missing the front cover it could of been illegally sold, and for the would-be purchases not to buy it. As a purchasers I am under no legal requirement, just a moral one.
I'm all for this product even though I'll never use it. I don't think that it will be quite as uncontraversial as you think however. The content producers will decry people modifying their works. I don't agree with it but I've seen it before when community generated lists of cuts to bowdlerize commercial works. They didn't distribute movies, they distributed instructions (to I believe a software player) that would result in a prudish version of a movie that would only work if you had your hands on the actual DVD.
So in this case playing the DVD wasn't illegal but the content producers complained that playing an altered version of the DVD was.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
In fact, anyone who read the article would have read this:
A Hollywood consortium, including some of Tinseltown's top directors, has sued Clearplay and others, arguing that they are abusing the films' artistic integrity.
By producing - without permission - altered versions of intellectual property, censors are effectively pirating directors' and studios' work, the lawsuit argues.
Clearplay hopes to escape through a loophole: instead of making new versions of films, it argues, its technology is simply another way of playing the existing movie - no more an abuse than a viewer fast-forwarding a tape in his own home.
The case is pending, but RCA has decided to press ahead regardless.
While the article does not mention exactly which statutes they are suing under, the fact that they are taking legal action ought to count towards something, here.
(It also seems possible that they actually are suing under the DMCA, but I don't have enough information to confidently conclude that.)
This would not be a derivative work as it is not saved.
It is merely "skipped", much like if you had pressed Fast-Forward at the appropriate times.
I think it is a great idea. Many people are taking this to the extreme. It of course is not meant for some movies. However many films have one-two scenes in it that a person may feel they do not want to see or language that they are not wanting to be subject to, this allows them to watch those films.
This is a feature of DVDs that should have been available from the beginning! Why is it that I can't select the "clean" or "edited for tv" version of a movie from the main dvd menu?
It is a feature of DVDs, it's just not on the menu. You can set the parental lock feature on your player, and the discs check that to either show an edited version or simply refuse to play.
The blurb tries to make it sound like they invented something magical, but they didn't. Basically, a company called ClearPlay has humans that watch popular movies, and makes a note of all the "bad" audio/video spots in the movie. They make a big censoring list, and the player IDs the movie against that list and skips the parts the ClearPlay guys said to skip. The database of movie titles is at about 500 so far, which is far, far short of the number of DVDs at your typical rental store. The mentioned Janet Jackson incident, which was live TV, and has nothing at all to do with cencsoring your DVDs.
11*43+456^2