Bush Signs a New Fair-Use Bill

BostonGunNut writes "Today President Bush signed a bill that gives legal protection to companies that provide software that can automatically filter specific content from DVDs for personal use. This bill, called the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, allows companies to provide filtering software without being sued into oblivion by Hollywood. The legislation also allows the Library of Congress to save and protect old movies and home videos that might otherwise be lost."

Comments

Misleading headline

[wizarddc]

This is the same legislation that make recording a movie in the theatre a felony with a potential three year jail sentence. I don't know how pro fair use it is. I don't think recording and pirating a movie like that should be legal, but it shouldn't warrant jail time.

How to pass a bill

[FidelCatsro]

1: write bill and pass it to freind in congress
2: name bill Family values & (for this example) Biological warfare program
3: Pay other freinds in congress to acuse people who do not support the bill of "Being Unamerican" and "not caring about the children"
4: pay off ramainder / lobby
5: celebrate your multi billion dollar contract

This bill may have some usefull atributes that could help you lot over in the states be allowed to crack the CSS restrictions which is no doubt good (if it ends up being ruled as such).
Though i do worry about how they can tack the magic "family values" on to everything and magicaly pass it with little trouble...

Fuck.

[cpt kangarooski]

Don't get me wrong -- the Orphan Works and new 110 exemption are both good, if very half-assed.

But this comes with significant new civil and criminal penalties that are just apalling.

Oh, and this has nothing whatsoever to do with fair use. The new 110 exemption is a statutory exemption. It applies regardless of fairness, if the criteria it sets forth are satisfied. The title of the /. article is a huge misnomer.

You can read it here.

The breakdown is basically:

Title I -- very very bad
Title II -- good, but not as good as it could be.
Title III -- meh
Title IV -- good for rather limited uses, but also not as good as it could be

Re:Questions, Please

[cpt kangarooski]

Obscenity isn't a factor. You can just filter out whatever you want, whatever you consider it to be, provided you otherwise comply with the exemption (or of course, some other exemption).

It does refer to 'limited portions' but given recent caselaw, presumably that can apply to a lot. ;)

Re:Wish these were rights I want, or could agree w

[cpt kangarooski]

Can we at least do the decent thing, and require that companies that provide such "filtering" solutions rename the films they edit, and take the makers of that film off the credits, if they so wish? This basic right would be afforded to the movie creators by a studio that forces edits upon a movie before release.

No, and IIRC, it actually takes care to avoid such a possibility arising. I'd have to poke around with the effects on federal trademark law and preemption of state laws. It hasn't been the part of the bill that I've been most concerned with, and I've been kind of busy as of late.

I'm curious to know if the editing of movies or the editing on moral grounds is the only thing allowed by the bill, or if the "right" to edit goes further.

Morality is not a factor. You can render imperceptable whatever you want. If you don't like the mushy parts of the latest star wars film, but like the fight scenes, you can make an appropriate EDL.

And no, it only applies to motion pictures (which includes TV, given the way the law is written). Not other kinds of works, like books or software, or whatever.

Although I don't see what's wrong with cutting out parts of books for one's own consumption, if that's how you get your kicks, or selling the same, if you're upfront about it. It's not as though the original artist is harmed or is unable to compete.

BTW, on the home movies thing, are they serious? Exactly when did private, deliberately unpublished, material become something to be preserved for future generations? Is this a poor write-up by the article submitter?

There's some funding for the National Film Preservation Board, or whatever it's called, but it's not as though they can march in and make you hand stuff over. They just get to buy things and preserve them. Maybe preserve deposit copies at the LoC too. You can probably calm down.

Re:Wish these were rights I want, or could agree w

[troyboy]

The law does not allow you to make or distribute a copy of the modified work with teh deleted scenes. It only allows you to sell and use technology that removes segments to create the modified work. So, it would be legal to distribute a device that transforms The Phantom Menace into The Phantom Edit, but not to distribute The Phantom Edit by itself. It seems to me that this would be tricky to accomplish with a DVD player unless it is specifically designed for it, but would be easier with software on a computer (but would DeCSS be required?!?).

Re:Directors rights and contracts

[LordNimon]

They just didn't have the money to fight this in court. They would have won had they continued. There are plenty of VCRs that have a commercial-skip feature, and none of those manufacturers were "sued into oblivion". In fact, Sony would have had to sue itself if commercial skipping technology were really illegal.