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

Wish these were rights I want, or could agree with

[squiggleslash]

Kind of makes sense: A form of fair use where, if you use it, you end up with less than you started, and you insult the artists who produced the content for you. We can have more freedom, as long as we're asking for the freedom to be restricted?

I'm not overly impressed by this, as you can probably tell. 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. Why shouldn't it apply to those selling edits of a film against those same artists' wishes?

I guess, if it's on Dubya's desk for signing right now, then the answer is "No. We don't want to do this because we hate artists, either because we're right wing pseudo-moralists, or certain types of technie freeloaders."

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. If it does, we may have a massive loophole that allows people to alter anything they can redistribute. Ship a GPL'd app, for example, and include proprietary "edits" to the binaries. *shudder*

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 Exactly when did private, deliberately unpublished, material become something to be preserved for future generations?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

Questions, Please

[4of12]

allows companies to provide filtering software

So of course this was done to permit commercial entities to provide filtering software to slice out "objectionable" parts of a copyrighted work before it gets passed to a viewer.

Will it protect individual citizens from doing the same thing - that is, providing filtering software - supposing that my criterion for obscenity includes what others call "advertisements"?

nice

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad to see that already in the first 5 posts we have people trying to reconcile their "OMG BUSH IS TEH EVIL!!11" 'opinions' with their pro-fair-use opinions.

No blood for oil, right guys?

I totally have no problem posting this, but the crack-abusing mods will mod me down within minutes for daring to suggest that perhaps Bush is, you know, not evil. Anonymous it is, then.

Directors rights and contracts

[metoc]

A number of directors have clauses in their contracts that prohibit edits, cropping, etc. of their films without their permission.

I wonder how the courts will view legislation that essentially overrules these clauses; and what the MPAA, Hollywood and the Directors Guild are going to do.

I have - and LIKE - ClearPlay

[crimethinker]

After much research, we bought one of the RCA players with "ClearPlay" functionality, and signed up for an annual membership. Don't tell me you've never seen a movie and said, "that was great except for ..." How about Kevin Costner's butt in Dances With Wolves, or Robin Hood, or any other movie he ever made. Did I need to see his pasty white cheeks? (No.)

My 2nd biggest complaint with ClearPlay is that you can't see a list of what was removed, i.e. "f*** at 23:20, brief nudity at 25:41" etc. My biggest complaint is that I can't make/modify my own filters, such as removing Hogarth's "guns are bad" speech from The Iron Giant. I love that movie (even though it's more a kids' movie), and I like to watch it with my kids, so I just hit the chapter skip button and poof - no more Hogarth railing about the evils of gun ownership. (And if guns are so bad, why did he take his BB gun with him when he went looking for the giant early in the movie?)

To sum it up, there's nothing wrong with ClearPlay. They're not forcing you to buy it, nor forcing you to use it. Much like proprietary vs. open-source, the issue is choice, or more specifically, do I have a choice at all?

-paul

Odd bedfellows--pro and anti-nudity unite.

[jbn-o]

Modulo any clauses I haven't read closely enough, I see this new law as possibly serving two audiences -- it can be used to allow hiding certain scenes in movies, be they scenes that contain nudity, foul language, violence, or anything else deemed objectionable. It can also be used to hide scenes that *do not* contain these things. So we have an odd bedfellows situation: both those who, for instance, want to keep views of women's breasts off of their TVs and those who only want to see women's breasts are served by the same law and the same list of indices describing where one can find such images.