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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."
Don't get me wrong -- the Orphan Works and new 110 exemption are both good, if very half-assed.
/. article is a huge misnomer.
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
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
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
The 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?!?).