Slashdot Mirror
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."
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 Exactly when did private, deliberately unpublished, material become something to be preserved for future generations?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?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
Glad to see Congress is finally being a bit more honest about their backronyms.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
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.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
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"?
"Provided by the management for your protection."
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.
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.
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.
Th
Me: "Ok, so lets see if I can make a "clean" copy of this DVD..."
Software: HELLO, WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO FILTER?
[ ] Sexual Content
[ ] Violence
[ ] Adult Language
[X] FBI Copyright Warning
Me: Perfect! Just the way I want it. Anyone have a blank DVD?
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.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
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...
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
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
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
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.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
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.
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.
-- 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.
We can finally watch Episode 1 without Jar Jar in it!
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
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?!?).
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.
Digital Citizen
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.
-- 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.
culturally significant
;-)
Like the Paris Hilton video?
I think that qualifies as a "home movie"...
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX