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

Questions, Please

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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"?

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