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.

Family Entertainment and Copyright Act Legislation

[BandwidthHog]

Glad to see Congress is finally being a bit more honest about their backronyms.

"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.

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"?

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.

Great idea...

[Dr. Bent]

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?

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.

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

Fuck.

[cpt kangarooski]

Don't get me wrong -- the Orphan Works and new 110 exemption are both good, if very half-assed.

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 /. article is a huge misnomer.

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

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

[GreyWolf3000]

I sympathize with you, but look on the bright side...

We can finally watch Episode 1 without Jar Jar in it!

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

[troyboy]

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?!?).

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.