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

There's a great idea...

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

Getting parents, who are less tech-savvy than their kids, to use technology in order to prevent their teens from viewing gratuitous scenes.

Here's a crazy idea, and it'll save you the hassle of learning how to set the DVD-player's clock: teach them right from wrong, y'know, as parents are supposed to do.

Yes, it sounds crazy, but it just might be crazy enough to work.

Re:There's a great idea...

[avi33]

Why do you assume it's the teens that need protection?

My kids are small (under 6) and I have hand edited music files to remove curse words, so they can listen to decent music without growing their vocabularies in unsavory ways (hint: not damn or hell). They should be exposed to great music, not Kidz Bop Volume 37. If .0007% of that music is inappropriate, I just scrubbed it out. Big apologies to the artist, but wtf, I'm not publishing it. It's time consuming and a little sloppy, so I don't do it to all of my music, just when I'm making a mix for them.

It's a little hypocritical when everyone gets all bent out of shape over the artist's rights in this case, when those rights get stomped everywhere else. When a music label publishes explicit and clean versions of music, it's accepted. When a movie is shown on TV, in most cases it's censored (unless it's saving Private Ryan). Plus, it's censored by some archaic standard where "damn" is ok, but "god damn" is not, and who knows what criteria they use for violence or sex these days. Wouldn't you rather control your own media? There are a bunch of movies that I think my kids should see, but I just don't want them to hear a handful of words.

In some video games (SoF comes to mind), you can pre-install the level of gore (you need a password to see the 'explicit' versions). Why can't I do that with media? I'd like to put a filtered CD player in my kids' rooms, and give them access to all of my music, knowing that clean versions would come out the speakers. Sure, it would sound a little ridiculous in spots, but so do 'clean' versions of music, and censored movies on TV. I'm not going to run every bit of media through a G-rated transmogrifyer and expect it to keep them doe-eyed and naive for the next 10 years.

I don't pretend that I can shelter them from language (or anything else) forever, I think that they should be exposed to cool movies and music, and I should be the one with my finger on the censorship button, for now at least. I realize that by the age of ten, they'll probably figure out how to deactiviate it anyway.

I don't think that one company should be the benefactor for a special law, but maybe other hardware manufacturers can make this a little more achievable.

I think last time this came up on /. I got some flame similar to the post above, like 'be a parent and teach them right from wrong' or 'watch/listen with them and explain why' but little kids don't work like that.

"family values"

[Zork the Almighty]

It seems like you can get anything done if you make it sound like a Christian issue. All this time we have been whining about the DMCA, the freedom to reverse engineer, etc. and nothing was done until this. If we framed the fair-use issue in terms of a personal right to censor the vile bile spewed by atheist Hollywood we would have won. Prehaps the Bible endorses file sharing. Someone should look.

Re:"family values"

[meringuoid]

Prehaps the Bible endorses file sharing. Someone should look.

Feeding of the five thousand.

Your man Jesus has attracted a massive crowd of fans, admirers, hangers-on, bystanders, people with nothing better to do, and general riff-raff, none of whom have apparently bothered to bring lunch. He finds a kid who has brought some food, a small quantity of fish and bread. He proceeds to copy the fish and bread and redistribute it to all these thousands of people.

I'm sure the local bakers, fishermen, hot dog salesmen and related tradesmen were fucking livid. He was infringing on their intellectual property - had he paid for a license for that bread recipe? No! - and undermining their business model. Thousands of people were employed in the food industry, after all. Wheat farmers, millers, bakers... all depend on the business, and all their livelihoods are threatened once Jesus starts duplicating loaves and fishes on a massive scale and freely distributing his pirate food.

So remember: when you follow Jesus, you're supporting COMMUNISM!

Re:DeCSS

[dpilot]

You're absolutely right. As someone else mentioned, it's really sick that we've been groaning for years about erosion of fair use, and here comes a fair use expansion riding on the coattails of "family values." I'm sure any true fair use expansion is targeted, minimal, and accidental. But hey, whatever we can get.

Now we just need a buzzterm for it. Mining, Datamining, ????mining?

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

[david duncan scott]

Exactly when did private, deliberately unpublished, material become something to be preserved for future generations?

The day that historians found useful and interesting material in things like diaries and letters, that's when.

As for "deliberately unpublished", well, I would imagine that most people just never really thought about it one way or the other.

Picture this: you find an 8mm movie in the attic of an old house. None of the people are identified, and the previous owners, who bought the house in 1965, don't know anything about it. The movies show interesting glimpses of life on the home front during WW II -- Rosie the Riveter at the company picnic, recruits doing the Lindy Hop before they ship out. At the time, this wasn't history, it was just life, and seemed interesting only to those involved, and even they put it away and forgot about it. Now it might be fascinating, but wait -- who holds copyright? Under the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act , the answer was, of course, Walt Disney, but now perhaps that's changed, and for the better.

Of course, now that I've actually read the article, it looks like all it does is fund the LoC's efforts to preserve and restore old images, a good thing but not a copyright issue at all.

Re:Directors rights and contracts

[metoc]

The clauses discuss the presentation to the end user. If the end user wants wear an eye patch and ear plugs while hanging upside down well to each his own.

Re:DeCSS

[nelsonal]

That's the way politics almost always works. Things don't happen politically because they are the best ideas, they happen because some bright person adds them to a popular issue. Elected officals maximize votes, so they only care about popular issues (except in the rare case of an of an official who has a passionate pet issue). If you want to get something done politically, you have to play the game and find a more powerful ally to support your issue. The geeks just are not a large enough voting bloc to win support on a national issue by ourselves, so working with "strange bedfellows" will likely be how anything is acomplished.

Re:Fuck.

[cpt kangarooski]

No.

The new 18 USC 2319B makes it an offense to, in pertinent part, knowingly use or attempt to use, a camera. Possession of one is a factor that can be looked at, but the statute actually says that mere possession of a camera isn't enough to support a conviction.

So if you bring one in, with the intent to use it, that's enough. But if you bring one in, and don't use or attempt to use it, that's not enough.

The trick is in how we determine your intent, if you get caught at an early stage. It's easy if you've set it up on a tripod, patched it into the sound system, and have your finger on the record button. It's harder earlier, but still possible.

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

[cpt kangarooski]

Doing so for yourself is entirely different to doing so for other people. I don't have a problem with most personal uses of copyrighted-by-other's material, but when it comes to saying "Hey everyone, do you want to watch a cleaned up version of XYZ?", and selling edits and presenting the film as a merely sanatized version of the original that's fundamentally the same only without the material-it-would-be-morally-wrong-to-even-view, then, yes, I have a big problem with it. I think it's misrepresenting the original artist to put, under their name, something that clearly they wouldn't say represents what they were trying to do and say at all.

So would you object to it, so long as it was clear that the edits were Alice's Edits of Bob's Movie? Just because Alice has made an EDL doesn't totally divorce it from Bob. Now they're both involved. So long as everyone is clear and up front about it, I don't see a big problem. Alice is not putting it forward as entirely her own work, and Bob is not having it put forward as entirely his either. Frankly, for Bob to disassociate himself from it would be misleading -- he is associated with it to some degree.

Importantly though, I don't give a crap about artistic integrity. I just don't want the audience to be confused or misled about what it is that they're buying or watching. If they're fully informed, I'm happy.

And looking through the relevant part of the law, it appears that 1) there are no federal trademark remedies against the 110 editors, 2) they do have to include a conspicious notice as to the fact that it's edited, 3) I'd still have to investigate as to state causes of action, but I think that Congress' intent is fairly clear.