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Cutting out the Naughty Bits Ruled Illegal
An anonymous reader writes "Some of you may recall the lawsuit brought by several Hollywood directors against companies which edit movies for sex, language, and violence. The companies would trade consumers an off-the-shelf DVD for an edited one. Well, the CBC is reporting that Judge Richard P. Matsch has found that this practice violates U.S. copyright law, and 'decreed on Thursday in Denver, Colo., that sanitizing movies to delete content that may offend some people is an "illegitimate business." [...] The judge also praised the motives of the Hollywood studios and directors behind the suit, ordering the companies that provide the service to hand over their inventories.'''
I didn't think there was any way that this would work out, but it did. I remember the first time I bought a cd from wal-mart, only to return it later because it was missing a couple of tracks.
WANNAWIKI Wannawiki WannaWiki WANNAWIKI!
What I'm interested to know is how this affects parents who use their DVR's to achieve the same purpose to sanitize movies for their children. Hollywood has expressed anger over THAT practice, too, which seems to me wholly unfair.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
This reminds me of the classic question of what happens to all the donut holes...
They aren't selling the results. They also aren't promoting their practise to spread the results around. Seems totally different to me.
Being quick to take offense is not a virtue.
Parents don't use DVR's to produce commercially sold edited copies of content published by another party.
To allow the uber-religious folk to watch movies with the bad parts cut out. Of course, this made Pulp Fiction about 30 seconds long, but oh well.
Regardless, soon we'll hear from (R)s (and some D's like Clinton and Lieberman) about activist judges and restoring something of something.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Wow. Much as I approve of this slap to the boobies-are-icky types, this is really another example of the ways copyright is going crazy. Why SHOULD a director have this so-called right to dictate that others view the precise film he made? I buy a book or film and read / watch what I choose. If I want to be able to automatically skip certain types of content, and someone is willing to sell me a means to do so, why is it anyone else's business? I mean, am I at least allowed to manually fast-forward through the naughty bits, or would that offend the MPAA's sensitivities as well? Why shouldn't someone auto fastforward for me if I'm willing?
I think the difference there is that you're not distributing your edited copy to the public.
The film companies are still getting their money. Someone who wants a "scrubbed" version still must buy one at retail. So how is this harming film companies? What right have they to say that someone can't take sex out of films so that children can see it, or so that people who would otherwise be offended can watch and enjoy? If someone buys a DVD, that person should have the right to do as he or she sees fit as long as it's not to make money at the espense of the film companies. True, it can be said that the scrubbing companies buy them and make money, but they aren't making copies for sale. They are selling the service of cleaning them, and for each one sold, the film companies are still getting the cost of a full sale.
It's a girl!
Nothing disgusts me more then watching or reading something I know has been censored. People should be free to consume whatever media they want to, as long as it isn't hurting anybody no one should have the right to tell me what I can and can't see. Furthermore if I created a work of art I would find it supremely offensive to have some clensing squad go over it and take out the stuff that might offend people, chances are if it offends someone it was put there for that reason. This is with the possible exception of old works that have become offensive, but in that case they should be left as they are and taken in the context that they were created.
Parents aren't reselling their 'version' to anyone else. No different that a parent tearing out pages of a book they find unsuitable for their children, but not the same as someone else doing so and reselling that version as a 'clean' version of the title.
Creative uses of our own content. If I own the DVD can't I cut out the parts that I don't want? Or pay someone to do it for me? Oh wait, no it is censorship... Can't... pick... a... side...
Anyway, the directors let this happen on TV, but here they only get paid once for the movie, so there is no way they are going to be for it.
From what I understand from this ruling, it would be illegal for me to buy a book, tear out every other page, and sell it to someone else. That's a pretty close analogy, seeing as both my actions and Cleanflicks' third-party video cutting are not authorized by the copyright holder.
Something tells me the MPAA has an ideal court case for extending their powers, here. I mean, 99% of the population would glance at this case and declare: "Cutting the naughty bits out of movies is bad!" or "Hur hur hur, take dat you stupid rednecks!"
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Consumers sued for skipping scenes they don't like, violating copyright and "artistic integrety"...
To boldly use to and too two times and get it right too! They're not gonna believe their eyes when they see it there!
No matter how naughty someone's bits are, you can't just cut them off.
I did RTFA, but it didn't mention how the practice violated copyright law. I understand the concerns of the people producing the original works. However:
1) The works weren't sold in stores, so the only people who had them were people who intentionally wanted them. It's not like selling a ripoff or counterfeit.
2) Doesn't this count as fair use. Does this mean that I can't take a song from a CD I bought and remove sections of it? Or it it because the companies were making a profit off of the derviation that it violated the law?
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
Something tells me that the director's "artistic vision" for example didn't include Bruce Willis saying ""Yippee-ki-yay Mister Falcon." in Die Hard, or "This is what happens whey you find a stranger in the Alps!" in the Big Lebowski: how is that different from what these companies were/are doing? Or is it simply a case of "censoring is ok, as long as the studio does it? The "These films carry our name and reflect our reputations. So we have great passion about protecting our work ... against unauthorized editing," line sounds a bit hypocritical, especially if the companies in question did put some sort of disclaimer (cleaned by cleanflix, whatever) at the movie beginning.
-- the cake is a lie
What I'm interested to know is how this affects parents who use their DVR's to achieve the same purpose to sanitize movies for their children. Hollywood has expressed anger over THAT practice, too, which seems to me wholly unfair.
This is also similar to the issue of fast-forwarding TV, if we equate nudity with advertising.
But I think the issue of parents using their own DVRs should be covered under fair use provisions of copyright law. After all, the parents are "using" the product for personal use. They are not selling it to their children.
Time shifting for home use is perfectly legal under the Betamax ruling. Hollywood can legally go screw. This ruling is designed strictly to stop non-copyright holders from adjusting content and reselling it without the agreement of the copyright holders. If a studio wants to partner with a censoring company, or do the censoring of the films themselves (which I'm fairly certain they do), they may do so.
RW
Instead of suing the world willy-nilly Hollywood should have seen this as a huge business opportunity. On the other side of this metaphorical coin, companies creating altered revisions of protected work should have worked with the owners' of said copyrighted work to fill this niche.
I imagine there might be a market for the content-conscientious consumer; although as some fark submitter pointed out a 16-minute edition of Pulp Fiction might not be very interesting.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Now wouldn't it be cool if you could apply this decision to Lucas for having Greedo shoot first - now that's offensive!
And from the DGA President:
These are supposed to show the reason behind the decision. Following the logic of the first, censorship of any sort of art would be copyright infringement. The second quote isn't even relevant. The company clearly states that the DVDs are edited; that's the whole point of someone trading an unedited one for their version!
If the company is doing something else that's infringing, I could understand the suit, but that's not what the suers are talking about.
Reselling altered copyrighted material is an interesting proposition legally. On the other hand, if I buy a DVD or video, I should have to right to view it however I want, and I think I should also have to right to pay someone else to edit it to my liking if I want; it's my DVD after all. Despite everything (no matter which side you take), copyright holders do not have a right to force me to view it the way they want me to. The hard part is that in order to change the DVD, I have to copy it first, which is now a felony. And I think that's the part where these companies have gotten tripped up.
Taking this ruling farther, is it illegal if I publish an MPlayer EDL list for editing out naughty bits of a DVD? I believe Hollywood would want to make it so. On the other hand, when the DVD format was created, it was intended all along that the DVD player could apply edit codes to the video to alter the rating, supply alternate soundtracks, etc. Very little of this has ever been used in the production of DVDs, as Hollywood is the one making them in the first place.
How about because you can't tell the difference between the consumer and a middleman. What you do is one thing. What a middleman does is something else. Got any other questions you want me to Google?
It always good to hear that the Fascists/"Taliban" aren't in total control in the USA - yet. Will the Fascists/"Taliban" appeal? We'll see. I wonder what the impact will be on State/Government censorship? In Ontario, Canada - until recently, all films were censored by a government appointed censorship board. Naturally they had their scissors busy chopping anything, everything - not unusual that 10 minutes had been chopped from a film. Who chaired the above censorship board? The chair of the board just happened to be the chair of the Candian Catholic Womens League.! Ha Ha Ha
The smart thing to do is for the EFF and other orgs to make a temp alliance with the 'pro-family' groups to have copyright laws rewritten.
This is a chance to get more people involved in rolling back the increased rights granted to copyright holders these past few years.
Result in a nutshell: If I own a DVD, I cannot pay someone to make a copy of that movie for me sans parts I might find offensive. It's not censorship, because *I'm the one asking him to do it for me*. But in yet another defeat for personal freedom (and another win for the moneyed interests), the courts have found that this is a violation of copyright law.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
The only difference I can think of is (possibly) that the censored versions shown on TV are approved by the owners of the film. That's not the argument they're using, though, if the article's telling the whole story.
I am, for one, glad this 'clean films' movement has been knocked out. I think that anytime these self appointed censors alters a person's art to sheld someone's sensitivities, they slap the face of those who created the art in question and insult the intelligence of those who do not mind what is being objected to. Recently, I brought James Blunt's debut album, Back to Bedlam. Opinion about the quality of the work aside, I noticed there was the dirty version and the clean version. After comparing both versions in terms of artwork and music, I found that there were only three words of difference in three different songs between the two versions of the same album. This left me to wonder why a clean version was produced in the first place; if they didn't want to hear the four-letter words, they should have left it alone. In short, when will we grow a thick skin and not pander to the 'family-friendly' minority?
Support the Chagossians
At,
Least in the USA we are "relatively" free to innovate.
What somebody needs to do is to devise a DVD player that can read a file delineating where the objectionable parts are on the particular DVD. Once the bad parts are known to the player the player simply skips them.
People who want to view the unedited version are happy and those that don't desire to see whatever content can be happy as well.
The original content on the original DVD is not altered in any manner. Copyright is protected.
Religious groups could then produce the "files" to correspond to their own needs and distribute these files via the Internet. The files are uploaded to the special DVD player...
It's basically the same as having Adblock installed in Firefox. You simply delineate what you don't want to see and Firefox delivers what you do want to see. No one is sueing Firefox for eliminating advertisements.
Should be the same for objectionable DVD content.
Caution: Contents under pressure
The Court also handed down several companion rulings:
First, that closing one's eyes or looking away during commercials, previews, gratuitous violence, sex, or nudity is an abridgement of copyright as it results in a derivative work without the consent of the copyright holders.
Secondly, that because going to the bathroom during the boring parts (and the court in no way implies that there are boring parts in Hollywood movies) also results in the creation of a derivative work, it is also forbidden by law.
Thirdly, that because some persons have been known to talk over or about the soundtrack, dialog, or events of movies, thus creating an unauthorized derivative combination of commentary and the original cinematic release in violation of copyright, movies may only be watched by persons without mouths.
I'm sorry, this is abuse. You want room 12A just along the corridor. Stupid git.
Apologies to spun (1352)
It's not OK to remove violence or obscenities from home movies, but airlines are free to remove anything they find commercially offensive from in-flight movies.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
To be clear, this is NOT a ruling against censorship in any way. This is a ruling that one cannot use the motives of private censorship to in any way go against copyright laws. They'll have to sell their 'services' to the (mostly) corporate owners of the rights to works, rather than directly to customers or retailers.
A fairly appropriate ruling, in the context. But this does mean that when a more automatic method of censorship comes around, then new forms of censorship shouldn't face these same legal barriers. They just have to be blind to which naughty bits and sounds they're covering up, fresh each time, so they're not producing a 'derrivative work' in a saleable form.
Ryan Fenton
I wonder what this ruling will do for clear play? I guess having the DVD player skip over scenes of mute the volume doesn't techincally count as altering the media. Anybody have any ideas?
btw, it's 'Infringe', not 'Violate'. The damage can be easily undone with an appropriate agreement, and we can transform this from an illegitimate business to one with a perfectly respectable mother-and-father with a little money changing hands.
I've got to say I'm pretty surprised by the number of voices saying here that there is a problem with this decision. This sounds like a perfectly sound interpretation of the law to me. The bowdlerizing companies are taking a copyrighted work, altering it in small ways, and then selling or renting the new work in a commercial enterprise. Even if the studios are paid, that does not mean that the buyer has a right to change and re-distribute the work, if the original owner does not permit that. Copyright gives the owner substantial control over his or her works. In the same way, the GPL allows me to copy and change source code, but does not allow me to do so without restriction, because the owner of the copyrights have assigned a license to that effect.
...that flights will be 1% less awful with uncut films, or will we just be reduced to watching films like the Pink Panther because all the others are deemed too rude?
Think of the Children; Sleep with your Sister
Any now for your viewing pleasure. Some naughty bits.
B*m
T*ts
Kn*ckers
Semprini
The reason we have all these bad "what ifs..." here is because most people don't even have rudimentary understanding* of intellectual property.
*Not corner cases, or gray areas but the basics.
Fuck any censorship or any piece of shit that wants to limit the information that we have access to. Fuck them to the 9th gate of hell. Cocksuckers.
I just had one thought. Don't these editing companies have to bypass the encryption of the DVD to extract the content prior to them cutting out the "nasty" parts? Doesn't that bring them into violation of the DCMA? Do they encrypt the edited version when they burn their DVD? If not, haven't they now released a non-protected version of the film?
Sounds like pirates without all the looting, womanizing and drinking.
Anyone for tea and scones? I guess in Utah it would be a root beer and a donut.
Cause I can't stand it when free tv cuts something so that they can fit in more advertisements. And in the case of free tv the consumer doesn't want the amount of entertainment to be trimmed down in favor of advertising material.
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
Additionally, Canada's copyright law draws from "contintental" (aka French) law much more than American copyright law does. The French have the concept of "Moral Rights" (which are distinct from 'property rights' and generally can not be assigned) - one of the moral rights of the author is the "right to the respect of the work" (droit au respect de l'intégrité de l'oeuvre) which boils down to the author being able to prevent any changes to the work that he believes conflict with his original artistic vision.
My guess is that the judge in Canada made his ruling based primarily on that particular moral right.
FWIW, I am going to have agree with the right-wing moralists here - this ruling is censorship plain and simple. This judgement has the government indirectly dictating how the films must be viewed. It reduces the artistic works available to the public. If hollywood had a brain, they would be making their own versions (like they do for in-flight movies) for the terminally fragile of heart because there is obviously a market for that kind of product.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
As much as I'm all for people's rights to do so, I'm just wondering in what cases do you decide that "Hey, I like what this movie is saying to my kids... well all except for that bit of maiming half way through. If I could only cut that out."
What movies/shows are there which are good for kids other than one little bit? Surely it's an all or nothing approach. If it's coming down to a case of they say "Shit" at one stage or a boob is flashed, then come on, that's a bit ridiculous.
As far as I can tell, this ruling would not apply to physically editing a tape. The problem (for the censor service) is that you can't cut-n-paste a DVD, but you CAN cut-n-splice a tape. There would not be a problem with that - no copy of the tape has been made, only fair use of the owned media.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
As a child, my parents didnt disalow me from watching R rated films, filter my internet and such. And yet, some how, im just as normal and sane as next person (and I never shot up my school or anything!). I fail to understand why parents want to censor what their children want to see....
Don't approve of this action just because you think it only hurts a bunch of "right-wing Christian zealots". Remember fair use! There was a one-to-one copy sold with each of these DVDs---the original and the edited. The filmmakers did not lose one dime, and in fact made money with each copy sold.
So if we are to argue that, if you bought something you have the legal right to do whatever you want to it (Fast Forward through commercials, play on a Linux box, rip to a hard drive), then you cannot allow Hollywood to start acquiring new rights for their so-called "artistic vision". Otherwise, you will find yourself unable to fast forward through scenes (or commercials) because that would violate the "artistic vision" of Hollywood.
Remember folks---it is all about control. Hollywood wants all the control. We cannot surrender even the smallest bit of it, because as soon as we do it establishes legal precedence.
And as for their pure "artistic vision", they regularly violate it when they make full-screen movies, TV versions, and rereleases of the same movie every 10 years.
This doesn't effect places like Walmart.
The records they carry are sanitized by the copyright holders... the labels. This suit refers to those who edit content without holding a copyright.
For the most part, this suit effects religious nuts who have been white washing rentals.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Your comments on the Family Movie act are interesting, but you missed a major point. This was a US court in Denver making the decision, the submitter just referenced a CBC story on it.
MIA: "Fox, as in we're a bunch of foxy chicks. Force, as in we're a force to be reckoned with. Five, as in there's one... two... three... four... five of us. There was a blonde one, Sommerset O'Neal from that show "Baton Rouge", she was the leader. A Japanese one, a black one, a French one and a brunette one, me. We all had special skills. Sommerset had a photographic memory, the Japanese fox was a kung fu master, the black girl was a demolition expert, the French fox's speciality was sex^H^H^H bible study"
Name: Mr. Anon E Mouse; SSN: 555-55-5555
Although I know it's not exactly the same thing, it brings up some interesting questions about the rights of the creator of the work vs. the right of the viewer of the work.
For example, I have a TV Guardian, which is basically a little box that sits in front of your TV and mutes the volume when profanity comes on, displaying the closed caption with a tamed-down version of the word. I, personally, don't like to hear profanity (nor do I like my young daughter to hear it), so I love it. Is this also "illegal" along the same lines?
What about me using something like Adblock or Greasemonkey to change or filter content I'd rather not see? I've got a Greasemonkey script that replaces most profanity in web pages with *'s. Am I violating the rights of the author of the web page?
While IANAL and I understand there are laws in place to keep people from changing and reselling copyrighted work, I do see where these "rednecks," as another post called them, are coming from. Personally, I think it's more than just "rednecks" who are interested in something like that, but to each his own.
This actually might be good news over the next few years. A large and key bloc of Republican voters (the Christian right) is going to be very, very annoyed about this ruling. If they start supporting copyright reform in a big way because of this, substantial changes might be possible for once.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
I was curious to see if TFA mentioned ClearPlay, a company we heard about on /. a while ago that markets custom DVD players that read not only the DVD but also a database that categorizes the content on popular movies, allowing you to program the player to skip scenes of sex or violence or whatever bothers you. The company seems to still be in business, but apparently they're not popular enough to keep these custom DVDs out of the market. The effect is the same, but without the copyright concerns.
/. comments at the time being fairly negative, but to me it seemed like a pretty good idea. I don't really like censorship in any form, but it's hard to argue with something as voluntary as buying a whole separate DVD player to keep your kids from seeing the naughty bits, if that's what gets your goat.
I seem to recall the
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
And I wonder if it will be considered illegal for airlines or TV broadcasters to edit movies to show on flights?
That's really what customers of these services want anyway--the same cuts shown on TV or on airlines.
and the producers also...
i can just see them lighting fat cigars with hundred dollar bills, wide obscene grins on their chubby faces as they expound upon the protection of artistic visions...
So is an original Monty Python DVD legal or not?
All the naughty bits were removed.
Yes, I've already responded once here, but actually looked at the meat of this post again. The law that you cited would only appear to affect technologies that allow individual users to change the work at their own home. It specifically does not cover the actions in this case. In particular, this act allows the use of technologies to alter the content of videos, but does not allow the creation of a new copy, nor does it appear to allow redistribution of the altered work.
As a representative of the aforementioned uber-religious, fascist, etc., I'm kind of sad to hear this. Up until two months ago, I didn't know such companies existed. My brother's fiancé bought him a copy of Vanilla Sky from a company called CleanFlicks. I was visiting him and I watched it. They do a really good job of dubbing and scrubbing, much better than is done on tv (the audio sync is really good, the editing doesn't seem like it was done on the first try).
I probably wouldn't have watched the film otherwise, and I really enjoyed it. You can say what you want about that being stupid, naive, sheltered, etc., but for the moment, this is still the U.S. and it's considered a right to choose what you watch or don't watch. Anyway, I went to their website after reading this, and it looks like they've also been renting edited movies. Their site didn't mention the court case, but they were mentioned and quoted in the article. Despite their corny quote about the situation, I'm happy these types of companies exist.
My main question is, what does hollywood have to gain from this? I never heard anyone freaking out about MST3K editing movies, but maybe this is a bit different. Still, it seems hollywood actually gains revenue from sales they might not get otherwise. I'd love to know their real motivation.
And that is the reselling or more importantly, the re-distribution. That is the same argument that is used against the music/movie downloaders. These ppl are not so much downloading, but uploading. Even if they give away free, they would simply be re-distributing.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
They can only do this editing using deCSS (which is illegal - thank you DMCA).
Using the same methods, they could also remove the adverts at the beginning of the DVD - clearly Hollywood doesn't want this to happen.
As some other posters have noted, this is nothing but a power-grab on the part of Hollywood - in the disguise of artistic integrity.
This is one step towards a DVD (or movie) player that can't FF or RW at all, just plays straight through from beginning to end. Of course, such a media will have commercial breaks - to get a copy without commercials one has to shell out for the premium version.
The service they ruled to be illegal was one that made modifications to a copyrighted work for those who owned a copy of it.
This ruling limits the ways in which a person can enjoy content they've legitimately purchased. Now, I know that some people are against this because it censors the movies, but I think this is bad because it gives the copyright holders too much power. Sure, this time it's the naughty bits and maybe they're just prudes not to watch it, but the same logic could, in theory, be extended to say that you can't "censor" the advertisements from your TV recordings.
You may well think that they're wrong for wanting to do that to the work, but I say that it's their right to appreciate it in any damn way they please, and if the author doesn't like that, too bad--as far as I'm concerned, they can take their "art" and shove it up their ass (knowing Holleywood, that's where they pulled it from in the first place).
I just started a company editing out offensive religous content and adding in obscenities and nude scenes. I guess this ruling would apply to us as well. Call me old fashion but It's A Wonderful Life just isn't the same to me without the scene in the strip club we added. I mean the film should show what's wonderful about life.
...I happen to be a theatre major as well as a Computer Science Major (yes, and odd combination, I know)...but speaking as an artist, I would not want someone else to take something I've written and re-edit it, removing things they didn't like.
Believe it or not, every detail of every scene in the movie is very intentional. If someone were to delete anything, espically an entire scene, that could destroy the entire central image I was going for.
For this reason, I support the decision.
That said, I'm not a huge fan of "naughty bits" myself, particularly in front of children. As an artist, however, I would rather the parents say "we're not going to watch this movie" and not buy it than for them to re-edit it themselves.
Removal of a whole song on a CD is different... i would view that as "we're not going to listen to this song", rather than "We're going to change this persons art."
Quote from article: "a U.S. judge." Quote under picture: "U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch." US District judges usually make judgments on US law. Notice the judge was in a Denver Colorado (a US city; you can check Google if you don't believe me).
This is the US. The companies quoted are all in the US.
Please read - even Slashdot dingos should try reading and UNDERSTANDING once in a while before posting rubbish.
You see, for the people who don't really care - hollywood is more than happy to sell them the regular priced crap. But for the people who do, hollywood wants to force them into a higher priced market. That way they can not only bilk the people who have any particular niche, but they also can drive up profit by making the most offesnive or annoying content they can - and shoveling it out there. So yes, copyrights do provide an incentive, they incentivize hollywood to make overhyped crap.
I am a huge fair use rights supporter, but this is clearly not a fair use issue. Fair use doctrine certainly does not allow a company to take a huge portion of the original work, re-purpose it and redistribute it with their own changes. You as an individual are (or should) still allowed to edit to your hearts content, and I am certainly free to take parts of the work for critical or other purposes, but this is not what the companies in question are doing. They are taking a copyrighted work, altering it, and redistributing it in a commercial enterprise without permission of the rights holder.
From the Judge: ... is to stop the infringement because of its irreparable injury to the creative artistic expression in the copyrighted movies," the judge wrote. "There is a public interest in providing such protection."
... against unauthorized editing," said Apted in a statement on the guild's website.
"Their objective
From the Directors:
'Audiences can now be assured that the films they buy or rent are the vision of the filmmakers who made them and not the arbitrary choices of a third-party editor.'-Michael Apted, the president of the Directors Guild of America
"These films carry our name and reflect our reputations. So we have great passion about protecting our work
Basically, it's a creativity thing. If you made a film or a book or a piece of music, and you felt passionately about it, and the message in it, you would not like some non-artistic rednecks coming in and chopping out bits that they found offensive with no regard for how that changed the feel/meaning or message of the work.
In a larger picture. Imagine if there were a movie that had huge mass-market appeal, but also said a few things against the current ruling political party. Then imagine if the largest retail distributer paid a company to make an edit of said film without the political message... how is that right? A host of people would end up seeing the movie without an intended message/point of view intact.
Present company included?
Do you realise that you're on Slashdot? That's not exactly saying much, is it?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
A bit inconsistent, isn't it? You can cut out the parts you don't want to see (or for your kids to see) on your own copy and that's perfectly legal. You pay someone else to take your copy, do the work for you, and send it back (which is what these folks were doing, in essence - you sent them your copy, they sent you back a "fixed" copy) and they get sued. And lose.
Now, I don't have much sympathy for the urge to begin with. I have a feeling their customers were, in large part, the same folks that consistently vote in meatheads that want to censor what *I* see to fit the standards they find appropriate for their children, and to that extent I would count them as enemies in the full meaning of the word. But if I want my rights I have to allow them theirs. And I honestly can't see how the ruling in this case is in any way just.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Okay, please tell me how these differ from standard bits?
Do they combine to make "naughty bytes"?
And if they really are that naughty, does it take more or fewer bits to make a bite? Or does that depend on their exact kind of naughtiness?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Canada? Go back and RTFA again. The article may be on a Canadian website, but it's most definitely a ruling by a US judge, in a US court, in the US.
Also, the Family Movie Act just legalizes the use of software in the player to edit in real-time an unedited copy you already own. It does not legalize the creation of derivative works and the sale thereof.
If memory serves, when networks broadcast movies on television, they take out the naughty bits. Since Hollywood is anxious to preserve the artistic integrity of its product, they'll no doubt take this court ruling to the television networks and forbid them from censoring said naughty bits. Right?
"Why SHOULD a director have this so-called right to dictate that others view the precise film he made?"
Why should Eric Raymond mind if I take The Cathedral and the Bazaar and sanitize it for people that don't like open source? I could change the conclusions around so proprietary developers won't be offended or embarrassed by it.
Obviously the reason in both cases is that the artist (writer, director etc) has their name and reputation on the line.
Rather than cut and paste the content from the original DVD to a new, derivative work, use the digital nature of a DVD to create a skip script and modify the player circuitry to apply a skip script (if supplied) to any content played. Think of it as supplying digital airbrushing to simply skip over the "naughty bits." The original work is not altered and its not illegal since its not illegal to hit the fast forward button or mute button. Companies such as those who lost in the ruling become "added value" content creators for those who don't want to see or hear the naughty bits.
It probably wouldn't be that hard to create a version of an open source player such as XMMS to do this. It would read the skip list and play to the first skip and then skips ahead to where the content should resume, read to the next skip, etc. It should also be possible to just mute the sound for any given interval so the same folks don't have to listen to what they don't want to hear.
Cheers,
Dave
P.S. As an added benefit, the hypocrites who claim they don't watch "that kind of stuff" can publicly buy the skip edits but then watch the entire movie. Sort of like everyone says they don't watch/look at pr0n.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
You forgot Kn*ckers.
Semprini?
Wal-mart only censors music, not movies. And it's not Wal-mart doing the censorship; the tracks on a CD you'd buy at Wal-mart are the ones you'd hear on the radio. They are made by the record companies. And I don't know for sure, but I'd guess that one of the big reasons Wal-mart doesn't carry 'explicit lyrics' versions of CDs is because of liability. Selling one of those to a minor will get you fired just as quickly as selling them beer.
I've commented a lot here already, but one thing I've alluded to with little response is the issue of redistribution and licensing. IANAL or serious license junkie, but isn't the whole idea of licenses like the GPL that they gain their force from copyright? While various licenses have their own particularities, the underlying strength of them comes from copyright and the ability to control your work's reproduction. Without the underlying force of copyright the licenses would have no power to restrict your use and redistribution. One of the common themes below for those who oppose this decision is that if the original rights owner is getting paid, then they are not harmed by the redistribution of the altered work. Obviously if you apply the same logic to free software, you would find the licenses unenforceable, because even though money is not involved, the underlying strength of the license comes from the owners ability to control the distribution and alteration of their work without permission.
is that there are certain movies that I would absolutely love for my 11 year old brother to watch, but I won't let him because there is one scene in the movie with a lot of un-needed nudity or excess gore. A prime example of classic sci-fi that fits in to this category is Starship Troopers.
Wouldn't it be nice for parents/family to be able to take the copy of the film or show to a shop that specializes in removing selected scenes from their copy? This is easier to do with a VCR, as all that needs to be done is splice the media, but with DVDs it is easier to simply copy the movie to a hard drive and use software to remove the selected scene(s). If movie companies would create copies of their media that they could sell for this purpose, I could see a need for this ruling. Then again, people would start to encounter the 'Walmart problem' of selected tracks being removed or censored for 'family reasons' and just get pissed off and return their 'defective' copy.
Yeah, I'm overly protective of my brother, but so what. It's my choice to make, not yours.
-E Cory
the objection is to them passing out the edited versions.
What if I send them one that I paid for (do I own it this week, I forget what the current belief is...?), and pay them for the service of editing it, to send it back to me?
I mean, if I bought the film, I should be able to NOT watch certain content, mayn't I? Or am I going to get sued if I blink at the wrong time, and ruin the 'original artistic vision' of the picture?
-Styopa
As much as I hate the religious right trying this kind of crap, I don't believe in copyright law. This ruling once again limits what someone can do with a copyrighted work. Pretty soon modifying for parody will be illegal too.
I understand where the movie companies are coming from in terms of copyright... they don't want people taking a DVD, adding additional clips/features/menus/etc, and selling that for a profit. Then again, I don't really understand why they have an issue with that. They're getting just as much money from each DVD sale, so it's not like they're losing any business. In fact, they're probably gaining business from those people who wouldn't normally buy a certain movie due to violent/sexual/etc content, but will if they get an edited version of the movie.
;)
As for the directors and producers that claim their artistic vision was impeded upon, they sure don't have an issue with those movies being modified in the exact same way for broadcast on network tv. All they care about is the large amount of money the networks give them.
So, what this really comes down to is the movie studios wanting complete control over their works, which I'm surprised to see much of the Slashdot crowd backing up. Seems it's better to hate "the red states" than to hate the MPAA.
Now that that those are taken care of, where do Microsoft, the Kansas Board of Education, America, Republicans, sports, and current music stars fit in?
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
copyright vs censorship, talk about a condundrum. all kidding aside, i can understand the initial gut reaction "if i want to view it with my kids, it's my right to watch it clean" or file it under fair use. but my big worry is "edited" may lead to "altered". if walmart doesn't like some off hand remarks about them in a movie, they may choose to stock only copies that omits this (kind of like what airlines do). if enough places decide to stock only "approved" versions of movies/music/books, it does end up being censorship. i would rather someone sell a dvd player with a network connection that can go online and check a database to figure out which parts to skip. or hollywood could take advantage of features in dvds such as the ability for branching, diff angles, and alternate audio. of course they would rather stuff it with ads and trailers. there are solutions that don't require censoring the content.
As others have already stated, this has absolutely nothing to do with Walmart. This applies to services such as CleanFlix, which are very popular in Utah and Idaho. I am a Mormon, and I frequent Cleanflix often. Some movies are very enjoyable, but contain bits that I don't wish to see. If the mainstream want to see those bits, fine, go ahead; these services are not for them. If I don't want to see it, how does it affect you? Cleanflix allows me to rent movies that I would not otherwise rent, they are now turning away a potential customer. This does not hurt the copyright holder, they still receive the full purchase price for all the movies that Cleanflix uses. Their revenue is not altered in any way by this editing.
I remember reading about the clearplay player quite some time ago and then it failed to show up in stores when originally announced. Come to find out that the MPAA (and others) were fighting tooth and nail to get this shut down too. It's nice to see that they survived the onslaught. I now know what my next purchase will be.
Sounds like they are afraid the cleaned up versions would be more desirable than the original version.
In that case, to compete, they'd also have to clean up their own version. That would be admitting there was a problem in the first place.
Personally, I think there are a lot of movies that have great stories, even without being presented with the naughty bits. (Also my kids don't need to be learning to curse or how to do naughty things.)
This is the reason why you cannot skip the advertisements on some DVDs now. If you've already purchased the movie, you shouldn't have to watch advertisements about it. Movie companies should take a page from computer software: "Purchase the full version to remove this ad." If you've bought something, you own it. If I want to use my copy of Top Gun to take baked potatos out of the oven, that's my prerogative.
Blank front page, except the words George W Bush, scattered randomly about the page.
Slashdot....
"Human Genes Still Evolving" http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/0 8/0247257 becomes ..... BEEEEEEEEP....
"Study Explains Evolution's Molecular Advance" ....BEEEP BEEP BEEEEEEEP (with angry overtones).... (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/04/ 08/1749225
Even this seemingly innocuous one: "Evolving ODF Environment: Spotlight on SoftMaker" http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/05/20 15243 becomes- "Intelligently designing the new SoftMaker", with a soundtrack directly from a B-karate movie: (lips moving, gesturing, now speech: "New SoftMaker, Good" now more lips moving, nods, scene ends.)
The "film sanitization" business probably doesn't directly harm the movie industry, but allowing them to exist means the movie industry loses ground in some areas. It would legitimize cracking the DVD code, and using software copy edit tools. And it is technically a derivative work.
Perhaps the company could sell a patching script and patching equipment, which would bypass any derivative work concerns, but no doubt the movie industry will hate this also.
How did this get +5 Insightful?
First you talk about how parents who want to control the information that their children consume as if they are nutcases, ready to destroy their children.
Then the last sentence is a rant about how parents should control the information that their children consume. WTF?
So, basically, if I want to limit my children's viewing for reasons that you agree with, then it's okay, but as soon as I do it for a reason that you don't like, I'm a bible-thumping ultra-religious type? Nice.
I just watched Apollo 13 with my young children. The movie was great, my kids loved it (the boys are on a "Space flight" jag right now). I would have preferred that a few cuss words not be there.
So, how about I "take control of the information that [my] chilren consume" by playing the parts of it that I want them to see, and not playing the parts that I don't want them to see? Why not let me buy a version of the movie that already comes like that rather than making me pre-watch the movie with a pen and pencil to jot down timestamps?
What a contradictory mess of a +5 Informative. Try getting your opinions internally consistent.
And:
Truth is, I expect every one of these restrictions to reduce overall DVD buying. At least the Clean DVD people were buying original DVD's to offset the cleaned-up copies they were selling.
Interesting question, however, were the cleaned up DVD's properly CSS encoded and region locked? If so, how did they get a license to use that technology?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
this is a blow to morality and is a blow to people's inalianable right to watch what he wants and how he wants it. this post is anonymous coz i know ppl will say stupid things like "if u dont like the vulgar language or the sex scenes, dont watch it" and to those idiots while you may like to watch porn someone ppl dont like to be near anything that has a micro skirt in it!
OK, let's get down to cases:
How do you "scrub" a video of George Carlin's show that contains "The Seven Dirty Words" routine without totally destroying the message? How do you capture the insightful humor in his description of the word "fuck"'s role in the English language without rendering it meaningless? (The word or the routine about it...)
I would hope that most any creative individual with a spine would think to include some clause in any contracts regarding his/her works that gives him/her final say over just how the original work may be modified and how altered versions must be labelled to indicate what has been changed and that they are derivatives.
I am all for the notion that movies, music, literature, etc. ought to be distributed "as is" by default, with any variations subject to approval from all sources of creative input unless they've relinquished that right by contract.
Just look at all the politically correct versions of classic nursery rhymes, for god's sake! How do you expect A Clockwork Orange to be sanitized without destroying the message the cut scenes were meant help to convey?
"You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens." -- Angelina Jolie
I think you're begging the question:
You assume the distribution of the edited films was a violation of copyright. This may seem obvious to you, but the law is rarely black and white. This was surely one of the questions of the case. The judge's explanation of his decision in terms of "irreparable injury to . . . creative artistic expression" indicates a specific reason why he was inclined to find that way.
I am no lawyer, but this looks to me like an expansion of copyright. "Reading in" protections like this (a practice disparagingly called judicial activism when folks don't like the results) has tremendously expanded the scope of copyright over the years. From a law originally based on the economic motivation of promoting the production of creative works, it has been transformed into a right of exclusive control over expression and culture.
Personally, I think Hollywood's stance is transparently hypocritical. It's absurd to argue that films produced by many people at great cost are somehow a pure form of creative expression (were such a thing even possible). At every level they are designed as profit-making vehicles. Hollywood is, in effect, claiming that they have the right to allow market forces to influence their works, but no-one else does.
James Boyle provides an explanation in Shamans, Software and Spleens: he argues that rulings like this can be understood in terms of the myth of the original author who creates great works ex nihilo. Judge Matsch's comments certainly fit the theory. It's too bad. Myths, even when there's some truth in them, shouldn't make law.
Would he mind if i buy his book and then ask you to edit it for me in a way you know will suit my ideals or values?
This is whats going on. The artist already made thier reputation, my opinion of it is that i don't want certain portions of that reputation influencing me. So I buy the book, ask you to remove the references to open source and then you give it back to me. I guess i will compensate you for the time it took you to do this and the black markers you used.
Why do you need to edit out the material? DVD players offer a "parental lock" facility already (for appropriately encoded discs): scenes (chapters?) and/or the disc won't play if its classification exceeds that set in the parental lock.
In pre-DVD days, such a feature was called a parent... Apparently kids don't have those any more?
Of course it's illegal.... actually, your use of the word Hollywood is illegal.
...And I hope you enjoy this comment because I'm sure Hollywood will be sending me a bill for royalties in using their name twice.
I'm sure people will celebrate just because they hate those "family video" type places-- I'm seeing people in various places doing so already-- but this decision is really bad in the long run. This strengthens the restrictions on what can be done with sampling and fair use rights, and ultimately restricts what is possible in the realm of art.
Voluntary censorship, like these editing services comprise, can be a bad thing, since creeping nonvoluntary censorship is possible even through entirely voluntary mechanisms. There is a free speech issue with allowing these service to stay open; if someone in a small bible belt town finds that they can no longer rent uncensored videos because so many of the locals demand censored videos that that's all the market can bear, then it won't matter to the person who wants to watch uncensored videos whether the reason why they can't do so is government censorship (technically not allowed by the first amendment) or censorship by market forces (technically allowed by the first amendment).
But it simply isn't worth it to take steps against these editing services, even if you're virulently anti-censorship. By doing so you lose more right to expression than you protect. If the law limits someone's ability to voluntarily self-censor copyrighted material, it naturally in the process limits what they are allowed to do with copyrighted material period. The inordinate power the government has already granted to "intellectual property" holders increases, and somewhere Negativland sheds a single tear.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Quote
"This ruling limits the ways in which a person can enjoy content they've legitimately purchased"
No, that is not the ruling at all. The ruling is that you can't edit the original work, and then resell, rent, or otherwise profit on said editing.
No one said anything about editing it yourself and keeping it to yourself, or fast-forwarding, or distributing a computer program to edit or skip the "bits" for you.
Some works of art or (more importantly) fact should not be edited. If someone wants to watch, for instance, Schindlers List http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108052/ or Gallipolli http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082432/, they should damn well not have it sanitised for them. If they do then they will not learn the lessons that the writer/directors are intending for the audience to see. Dying horribly in a war cannot be 'cleaned up' for the audience. I mention these two films because they wer shown to me at school as part of our History Lessons, when I was around 15 I think. The school did not cut anything out, because to do so would have been tantamount to editing history. Some lessons are harsh and can shock and upset, but if that happens then the viewer has simply paid a worthwhile cost for understanding some of the most important events in our history.
However I should point out, I not sure I have so much of a problem with people cutting out the swearing in something like The Terminator. Here in the UK films such as action films shown on terrestrial TV are often dubbed. It spoils them, but doesn't neccesarily make the film unenjoyable and you cannot claim to me that hearing Bruce Willis in Die Hard saying "Yippie Kai-Aie" instead of "Bastard", destroys the directors vision, even if it is obviously edited.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
I think I'm about to overdose on the stench of hypocrisy emanating from the DGA. These clowns have no problem with distributors and television networks hacking their masterpieces into kibble, to fit in more commercials and eliminate the naughty bits, but if someone in Utah does it, it's an attack on their so-called "artistic integrity"? To mutilate an old joke, we know they are whores, they are just haggling over the price.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
It would be illegal even if you were to buy a book for each copy you sold. It may seem silly to many, but that's how copyright works. You would be creating and distributing a derivitive work, and you need the copyright holder's permission to do that, no matter what. Just because you bought their stuff doesn't give you that right.
In the end, it's important that it remains that way for OSS, becuase that's what gives the GPL legal force. If you were allowed to sell s distributed work without permission, provided you legally obtained and destroyed a copy for each work you distributed, GPL software would lack any enforcement ability. People could simply get your software for free legally, and then distribute modified versions. They might have to go through the cermonial process of downloading a copy for each one they sold and deleting it, but it would all be legal.
However, they don't have that right. Even though you give your work away for free, they still ahve to respect your copyright. Via the GPL you give them the right to distribute derivitve works, but only if they agree to some conditions (like opening their code). That they got the copy legally or paid you isn't relivant, copyright mandidates they can't distribute derivitives without permission, and your price on that permission is spelled out in the GPL.
Because without this, the GPL would have no teeth. Here's why:
What the censors were arguing is that if you obtain a legal copy of something, you've got the right to make and distribute a derivitve work from it. They said it was legal, so long as for every derivitive version, you obtained a legal orignal and destroyed it.
Ok so perhaps you think that's fair but now let's take the fantasy world where that's the case. I'm form EvilCorp and I want to use Linux for my product but I don't want to hand out my modifications. No problem, what I do is for every product I make, I download the source and then destroy it. Or maybe, just to make sure that there's money involved I buy a legal copy form one of those places that sells CDs cheap. I'm 100% legit at this point. The law says I can distribute a derivitive for every orignal I legally obtain and destroy, and I'm doing just that. The GPL loses all it's teeth.
What makes the GPL work is precisley what this ruling found: Buying a copy of something doesn't give you the right to make and distribute a derivitive work. Just because you chose to give someone your source code, doesn't mean they can jsut go make their own versions of your software. Copyright still applys. They need your permission to do that. The GPL then gives that permission, but in exchange for agreement to limits on what they must do. Doesn't matter how many copies of your product they buy/downlaod, they agree to the GPL or they don't get to distribute.
So this ruling is not only legally correct with the intent of copyright, but is also very important to the GPL.
If I can edit the copy I have purchased rights to, why can't I pay someone else to do this?
Let's presume you could buy a movie in a 16mm reel version. You then pay someone to go through and cut and splice all the parts out you don't want.
This service is really no different than that. You take them an original DVD, and they space-shift it onto a new DVD. In the process, they cut out parts you've asked them to.
It would be different, however, if someone wants to run a video store with these modified movies. But why shouldn't individuals be able to pay for this service?
The judge definitely got it wrong in this case. Next thing you know, it will be illegal to pay someone make a CD out of your old 45's.
The problem was not as far as I can tell that somebody was cutting content out of the film, the problem was that they were redistributing it without the agreement of the copyright holder. Which is a big no-no. I am pretty sure that, if private person bought a video, and asked to edit out the content, and got back their video edited, without any kind of distribution happenning, then this would have been OK.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I'm not American so this is news to me.
Does Wal-Mart really censor stuff? I'd have thought it was none of their beeswax what was on a CD or DVD (or book even) as long as it did not contravene Federal or State law and had the necessary age restrictions in place. Hurray for Mr Judge Whatshisname and his astute legal brain.
I imagine that the Wal-Mart version of Sin City must be very very short.
Travelling forward in time at a rate of 1 second per second.
[Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, the following are not infringements of copyright:]
[...]
(11) the making imperceptible, by or at the direction of a member of a private household, of limited portions of audio or video content of a motion picture, during a performance in or transmitted to that household for private home viewing, from an authorized copy of the motion picture, or the creation or provision of a computer program or other technology that enables such making imperceptible and that is designed and marketed to be used, at the direction of a member of a private household, for such making imperceptible, if no fixed copy of the altered version of the motion picture is created by such computer program or other technology.; and
Stop whining. These people are not trying to change your life. They are not going to come to your home and replace your movie collection with edited discs. They are not going to buy out Blockbuster and only rent you "G" movies.
There are some people in this world who don't enjoy the same things in their movies that other people do. These people might want to still share in the experience of the film, just minus what they consider the "naughty bits" as the summary calls it. This company realized that these people would pay money to get the movies that have been edited especially for them. The company then took advantage of this business opportunity and made some money on it.
Do not blame them for trying to make money. Obviously they do not want to make every movie censored, as they would then be out of business. The "naughty bits" are good for business. Stop being a paranoid whiny idiot.
The fiscal rights of the Hollywood studios were not hurt. They got to sell exactly that many original printed DVDs. You had to bring your genuine copy to private "clean-watch" companies, who took the original and gave a burned, shortened DVD in exchange. Of course you had to pay a fee for this service.
All this is fair and creative in the best capitalist sense. If there was no interest in morallly elevated DVD versions, nobody would bring their genuine DVDs for sanitized replacement and the said companies would go bankrupt. But they do not, because there is need for their services. Their services do not hurt public moral or public order or the health of the society, therefore cannot be criminalized or banned.
Otherwise, the idea of injuction is alien to anglo-saxon law and very evil. It was only invented in the 18th century due to reign of corrupt kings and cromwellian anarchy. The only right naturally invested in courts is to award fitting damages, they have no right to ban people to do anything. The judge could only rule that the clean-watch enterprises owe a percent of their income to Hollywood studios, but not ban them. Bans are only possible via legislative action, otherwise the separation of powers is violated.
The SCOTUS will crush the circuit ruling because it hurts the 1st amendment balance between feeedom of speech and freedom of religion. In fact, cave paintings show the prehistoric men already had supernatural beliefs before they were able to speak, therefore freedom of religion is more basic than freedom of speech and shall enjoy stronger protection.
Finally, we need to face the fact that most Hollywood moguls and music brasses are homosexual anal penetrators and / or paedophils. They also abuse controlled substances, participate in sex orgies and bilge drinking. Seeing all this immorality, no wonder film moguls hate the mormon people of Utah, who practice christianity according to strict regulations. Any time they see a latter day saint, they are reminded of their sins and the fate they will face in hell. They want christians to disappear so they can indulge without worry. But it is not the job of a judge to fulfill that dirty desire.
The idea of a DVD player that filters on the fly is explicitly allowed under the Familiy Movie Act of 2004. The law was enacted to support ClearPlay, which implements such a system. They trick is to make sure that no fixed copy is made of the redacted version (to comply with US copyright law), and that the filtering information is distributed independently of the movie (to satisfy the DVD Copy Control Association).
Don't approve of this action just because you think it only hurts a bunch of "right-wing Christian zealots". Remember fair use! There was a one-to-one copy sold with each of these DVDs---the original and the edited. The filmmakers did not lose one dime, and in fact made money with each copy sold.
Fair use would be you making a backup copy, puting the one you bought into storage, and using the backup. This is fair use. Heck, even taking a film that you own, making a copy and cutting out scenes you don't like... that is also fair use.
What's not fair use is making a copy, cutting scenes, and selling it as a new version without any consent. This is not a one to one copy as there are scenes cut. Money is beside the point... a copyright holder has every right to choose how a work is distributed. This would include not wanting some bozo cutting scenes on a work that took time to create. Any flaws, mistakes, anything which affects the overall presentation can damage the reputation of the respective studio and artists that created the work. It's like taking spray paint to a piece of fine art and going over the bits one finds offencive, this affects the quality of the piece and the viewer might assume the artist is sloppy dolt or doesn't have the technical skill or is too reserved to make a winkle.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Why are mod points only allocated when I don't want them?
The "I don't want someone censoring my movies" rants that completely miss the point are getting rated 5:Insightful, while anyone with a sensible response is stuck around 2.
I agree the judge was probably technically right, but this ruling doesn't help the industry. Pity it's only scene cutting. I'd like to see a few movies have less profanities, but that's hard to change after the fact without ruining continuity. Would be much easier when the script is written.
I know other people don't mind the language, but it's rarely necessary.
-- All your bass are below two Hz
Ok, now let's say, hypothetically that I did. Purely hypothetical, of course. Would that make me a bad parent?
Also, swears don't mean anything to most of us these days I don't think. They are just words; I think we are very near the day when fuck is perfectly acceptable as way to emphasize something as opposed to doing a voice change (or both).
Either way, I disagree that this did not affect Hollywood's revenue, like I really care, but regardless. I guess if I were a moviemaker, and someone was profitting from making edited bootlegs, I would get pretty pissed off. I could care less that they edited; I would care only that they copied enough of the content so it's not fair use, and automatically fair use is out the window when there is a dollar sign attached to their actions. Even if it's a trade-in, the end result is a copy, which would not be legit since it is not that same one that's at that licensed business place. Is CleanFilms a licensed business? I seriously doubt it.
I think these companies deserve what they are getting in the end, even if everyone hates the MPAA on just the fact they got money and we don't. I really think that these companies did what they did because they probably did minimal advertising, using little to no ads (I never heard of them), relied on word of mouth, and thought they were so small that the MPAA would never see them, especially out of the other bunch of editing companies out there across the country.
In the end they got caught. I bet only now they are just starting to remember there is a law called the DMCA... they are fucked for removing "fuck." I'd laugh at them if I were in the courtroom.
I have seen works butchered by censorship, e.g., the cut of the movie Brazil with the ending cut off. No, really, it was shown that way on American television. I am comfortable with a copyright law that gives, at the start, the creator of Brazil (or the future owner of those 'rights') the ability to prevent such atrocities without their consent.
I'm a nature photographer.
Whether he minds or not has nothing to do with whether he should be able to prevent you from doing so.
I think that as long as you identify that a modified version you produce is not the original version of the work, you should legally be able to do so and distribute it (though you can't with the current state of the law...), whether or not the original creator approves of the changes you've made. Since you've identified it as a modified version, issues with defaming the author go away, and whats left is the question: do you think a creator of some information should have the right to control that information once other people have obtained it? As for me, I answer 'no'.
Nuts, now the MPAA has gotten the airlines on their side. Before long we'll all have to take long-haul flights with out kids just so they can safely watch these movies!
a copyright holder has every right to choose how a work is distributed
Wow I'd like to see you satte this here in a DRM discussion, then the collective wisdom of slashdot will tell you that is not the case...
Wait, I'm confused; Is this evil or not?
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
My son is a Star Wars fanatic and had seen all the movies except Episode III which I thought was too dark for him. After endless begging and pleading, I edited Episode III a bit to bring it closer in line with the other episodes. I removed a beheading, Anking slautering the "younglings" and the bits where Anakin is smoldering and crawling out of the lava. I know my son very well, thank you very much, and I know that these scenes (totaling about 30 seconds) were beyond his maturity level. Sue me for being a good parent.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
Duh! WalMart's agenda is the complete sanitization and control of the marketplace and therefore of anything that get between it and said agenda it's a view so heavily invest in a very peculiar fiction that real things (whodda thunk naughty bits in movies would qualify) are dangerous. erzats all the way is the only way for them.
Wow, that is fricking **KINKY**!
Certainly, my right to punch ends at my nose. But, how does getting an abortion physically harm you? How does it "punch you in the nose" so to speak?
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
It's called America, as in America, FUCK YEAH.
Derka derka.
I thought the DVD specification included from the outset the ability to age-restrict material on a scene-by-scene basis. Every DVD player I've ever owned has a parental control setting which allows the player to skip certain scenes. By default it is set to the most permissive level, and I've never felt the need to change it ..... unlike the region setting, which I change to ANY straight away.
..... if I can't reach that, I just look in a different direction or shut my eyes.
I confess to never having used the parental control feature, because I'm old enough already, so I don't know how well supported it is {if at all} by discs. And all my DVD players have a "fast forward" button on the remote
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
...this is just plain stupid. A decision such as this should be applicable to all copyright work so try the mental exercise of applying it to a book as it is the oldest form of copyrighted media. You buy a book and a pen. You scribble out a few words and perhaps write in a couple of your own sentences. You sell the book on. Have you breached copyright? Perhaps, if you claimed that the whole work was produced by you but I didn't hear anyone saying they wrote the book / film whatever. Yeah they defaced the work and sold it on but that's a totally different matter and not something for the courts to be involved in.
Going back to the book example. What if your kid scribbled on the pages? What if your dog ate part of the book (that happened to me once while at school)? As far as I am concerned the copyright holder gets to sell the work to you once. What you do with it after that is you own concern.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
I do approve of the decision though as it means that it's one less hurdle directors have to avoid to get the film they intended out to the masses.
The filmmakers may have not lost any money but those who view the edited movie are not being presented with the intended cut. Movies should not be sanatized by a 3rd party, distributor or studio.
As strange as it may seem to you, most directors don't make films just for the $$$.
I can see what your point is but your argument is suggesting that that the average slashdot reader agrees with "the legal right to do whatever" AND that "artistic vision" is a valid excuse studios and distributors can use. I think most will agree with the former but very few with the latter.
If the director wants to apply his or her "artistic vision" to the DVD release then that's fine with me - I may not like it but at least it's how they intended it. One example of this is David Lynch not releasing his DVD's with chapter points - it pisses me off but if he wants it that way, then fine.
Hollywood is too broad a term to use here - the STUDIO HEADS want control because they believe control (through DRM or whatever) will get them more $$$. The FILMMAKERS want control for reasons of artistic vision and when it comes to true artistic vision and getting their film out the door the way they want it to be seen then more power to them!
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
Short? They even changed the name to "City"
That's because TFA is insanely poorly written and poorly researched. The precedent is Gilliam v. ABC, which was incorporated into the 1978 Copyright Revision Act.
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's
This isn't fair use because the company is illegally distributing the DVDs.
If this company had been allowed to continue then the GPL would be dead. I want to sell a version of Linux, I just ask my client to bring in a CD with Ubuntu on it, burn (literally) the CD and sell them my copy.
It is not fair use because this company is making money from derivative works by distributing them before the end of the copyright term.
I will now talk about what rights I think you have, not what rights you have under law. You have a right to make a derivative work and not distribute it. You have a right to pay someone else to make a derivative work and not distribute it. You do not have the right to make a derivative work and distribute it.
So if I make a custom modification for a company, and they pay me to. Thats fine so long as they keep all of the work that went into the modification and I don't copy the modification again for another client. If I did, then I would have to GPL the code (or rather, convince my previous employer to GPL the code).
While it won't affect me, the person wanting to watch a movie, it does affect the person who made it. They had some idea on their mind, a story, a plot that the movie should tell. When you now remove scenes from the movie, you can alter the story quite a bit. Now, this does not apply to many movies, where the gore scenes are little more than eye catchers that don't really tell anything about the story itself, but sometimes it can be very important.
Let's try a drastic example. And yes, I'm gonna stereotype to the extreme.
Let's take a movie, set in the southeast of America in the beginning 20th century. A black human rights activist does not "get" the messages some white power dickheads give him, so they go to his house while he's not there and slaughters his family. Cruelly. Be as graphic as you can imagine, up to the point where babies get eaten. In short: No questions remaining as to who's the bad guy.
Now, he comes home, finds his family murdered in the most cruel way and decides to go on a revenge spree. He knows who they are, and he kills them one by one in the most creative way possible. Police is puzzling for a long while what's going on, can't find out for a long, long time who might be doing it 'til they catch on, now of course they're all-white too and rather anti-black, and finally they find out who it is and they hunt him as he kills the last few ones, killing him just after he finished his revenge run.
The difference, when you cut out the gory scenes about his family, is that he has no reason for the killing spree. So the story alters dramatically.
Story with gore scenes: A black man, trying to fight for his right, takes revenge on the white power assholes that ripped his family apart, hunted by the white power police and still manages to get his revenge.
Story without gore scenes: A black human rights activist going insane and killing white people, while the police tries its best to bring him to justice.
Altering content has the power to change the movie completely. You can tell a completely different story when you cut away this, switch those scenes and so on. And this is where the danger lies in that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Your desire to make medical decisions for other people, but especially frightened and disenfranchised people, for your own emotional convenience is counterbalanced by *MY* desire to make medical decisions for tyrants. Be advised it's emotionally convenient for me to have tyrants die in a fire. Preferably with people who are like them, such as their families.
Freedom saves lives.
Apart from the whole "creative" aspect (the integrity of a creative product it is an inalienable right of the creator), what about the simple fact that we're talking about third party copies of copyrighted material. This isn't about the buyers doing what they want with the content they purchased, this is about a third party making copies of content they don't own. Which is clearly (and obviously) prohibited by copyright law.
If these companies were to make special media players which could skip the naughty bits without altering the physical movie (think "automated goto-button"), they might stand a better chance. Even though the integrity of the work is still protected, it would be harder to demonstrate the integrity has been damaged. Especially if such media players would allow uncensored viewing (using a passcode or such).
They just made the mistake of blatently violating the most fundamental part of copyright law; you can't copy what you don't own.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
The Family Entertainment and Copyright act of 2005 specifically addressed the issue of 'on the fly' edits. It exempts businesses and individuals from copyright violation for creating, selling and operating technology which allows a person to "make imperceptible" portions of a copyrighted work with the consent of the viewer. The exemption is void if a hard copy of the altered work is created. It also requires a disclaimer to be shown before the work to inform the viewers that the work is altered from the original.
This covers DVRs and also 'clean' DVD players and services that automatically censor content based on the user's criteria. However, services like Cleanflix are not covered because of the hard copy exception.
No, it would simply make you a seller of illegal DVDs.
The "reform" they'd most likely call for is to ban "naughty" movies or at the very least "naughty" parts in normal movies. Instead of fighting the copyright issue, they'd tackle the subject much more directly.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No, but under current copyright law it would make you a criminal, the punishment for which includes fines, prison time or both. It could be argued that exposing yourself to that risk unnecessarily would make you a bad parent.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
a copyright holder has every right to choose how a work is distributed
Wow I'd like to see you satte this here in a DRM discussion, then the collective wisdom of slashdot will tell you that is not the case...
Or, a GNU discussion?
I'm not going to say I like DRM. But if a studio wishes to release a flick in only windows media HD format you can't for example copy it to HDdvd, sell it, and call it fair use. If they want to only release something in Windows Media, they have every right to do so. You could in theory copy it your self, and that would be fair use. It does become interesting because DRM tends to restrict if not prevent fair use, and you are right I should have selected my words more carefuly. But my point still stands... fair use ends when when you make a copy and give it to someone else.
As far as DRM goes, I would not buy into it, let your dollars vote for what you find acceptable.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Don't get me wrong, I agree woth you :-)
I'm happy to see there is a few poeple left on slashdot that understand the value of your point (being the underpinning priciple of things like GNU).
I'm not sure about DRM, I end to look at the deal I'm getting, if I think a product is value for money, that's fine with me, if it is not, well I take my Euros somewhere else.
What would remain? A plumber going to the house of a young lady... next scene he goes home. A traffic cop pulling a young lady over... next scene she drives on.
I can already see the ad for it: 100 of the best porn movies on one DVD!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't like people who "scrub" movies, but I still think this ruling is bad. For millennia, art has progressed and evolved by taking some prior artist's work and modifying it, often in ways that the original artist didn't agree with. Except for possibly receiving financial compensation for a limited time for each copy created, artists should not have the power to control what happens to their creations after they have released them to the public.
If you're for this ruling, you're against the legality of aftermarket modification of anything you've paid for.
The mental image I have is of a Hollywood director or script writer fighting for a vision of a film and being overruled on the grounds of marketability. This kind of thing happens all the time. But then Hollywood turns around and tells everyone else, "don't you dare touch our creative vision!"
I don't think we're in disagreement here. I am not suggesting that Hollywood's work be devalued. I'm arguing that the judge's comment about protecting the creative expression of the film makers elevates their creativity above that of the folks who edit the videos. Both are creative works, and - this is critical - both are based on prior sources. There is no such thing as pure original creation. The creative work involved in editing is much less, but - as you say - it's very difficult to base copyright protection on the quality of the work.
My other point is about the expansion of copyright law. You say that the law protects creators from "derivative works that the creator may not feel puts their work in its best light". This is the domain of moral rights, which are much stronger in Canada and Europe. This was not the original purpose of copyright in the U.S. Quite the opposite: copyright was intended to encourage the creation of new works by 1) granting limited monopolies and 2) expanding the public domain as the basis of new works. Perhaps this case is a pure and simple one of copyright violation, but by arguing as he does it seems to me the judge may be expanding the scope of the law and limiting the creation of new works - which is, in fact, the effect of this decision.
Let's hope at the scrubbing companies at least had a patent on this idea. That way they can make their money back ten fold when the movie industry offers the same service 6 months from now.
My only concern is that if edited versions are not available, and the only version available is the purely unedited version, might that cause DVD producers to be more conservative with what they put in, in the first place? (It's a vague parallel to the rebate story posted earlier on SlashDot; if there isn't breakage [unfiled rebates], then the overall amount of rebates will likely drop. Sometimes by purifying and simplifying the process, you can cause unintended effects.)
In general, I applaud the ruling, but worry it might reduce the quality of the original distributions.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Movies... Movies.
What they should do is sell DVD players that can download a separate track from the internet containing information about which parts of the movie to skip. Then they could charge people for the DVD players and the filtering service.
I see a lot of potential for a slippery slope here. "Distributing music in lossy formats is bad! Use FLAC or go to jail!"
The what ifs come from trying to "prove" that having loads of pirated material is allright because someone once payed for a copy...
(Possibly some other reasoning, but it's all about justifying pirating musec and movies).
Never, ever rent "Catch 22" from Blockbuster.
I have never seen a movie so completely ruined by a scene cut. Totally spolied the ending, most of the meaning of the movie was lost.
I've never rented a movie from those Mormons since. Anyone slashing movies like that should be shot and pissed on.
In itself that is a perfectly rational reason for such a service. The problem is that networks/distributors will decide that it is easier to show toned down versions of all "controversial" movies, to avoid controversy and cover as big a market as possible, why have too versions when one version will be acceptable to all. You easily end up with wholesale censorship where everyone are forced to see the same clean version. Imo, it is much better when it is the studio/original editor that does the editing of a "clean" version. That way the movie has a much better chance of maintaining the original plot/point.
cuts out all the "bad" stuff...thats OK but this isnt?
Satelite TV in South-Afrcia offers clean sound tracks for all movies. My parents wont watch any movie if they knew how much swearing was going on. Also, why is removing part of the movie a violation of copyright law? Does that mean I'm violating copyright law by closing my eyes and covering my ears with my hands when I watch a movie?
This is my sig.
The player's owners just download the scripts and can safely watch any movie.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Blockbuster Video has been doing this for at least 15 years. I DNRTFA. Is this in there?
And here I thought America was the continent North america... Central america.. South america
I was flying on Singapore Airlines when the spoof movie HotShots came out; they removed quite a lot of the flying scenes especially the plane crashes; made large parts of the movie incomprehensible as the plot no longer worked!
Cleanflix, at one point, offered a "sanitized" version of Enemy at the Gates. (I can't confirm if they still do, as their site is slashdotted.)
So, by them, it's okay for kids to see guys getting mown down crossing a river, blown to pieces by artillery shells, and executed by Red Army commissars -- but God forbid they should be exposed to a couple minutes of filthy sniper sex.
What a fucking backwards country.
At one time make a DVD player that could be set to skip over objectionable material in realtime as you watched a movie?
I'm sure that what happens is that the players "created a derivitive work" in realtime, but since the derivitive work was generated on the fly and not distributed to anyone else this ruling might not apply.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
At first, I thought they were talking about the evil bit.
Does this mean that George Lucas is now no longer legally able to fuck up his own movies?
Would a software player skiping undesired scenes violate some other absurd law?
What about if I buy a dvd and carefully blackout the relevent tracks?
Does this affect the ClearPlay DVD player, or just companies that manufacture DVDs? It seems to me that the player should be in the clear since the alterations happen at the persons home on their own copy and since they must select for them to happen. So there is no distribution of the derivitive work.
Which trimester or week are you talking about?
you bought the dvd/vhs movie you can do with it what you want? I did NOT RTFA but the headline makes it sound like you can "trade" your pristine copy for an edited one. That sounds fine, to me. Now if Walmart or some other chain is selling edited movies that would be a strict no no. But if I want to edit my dvds/vhs tapes or have someone else do it, thats my own damn business provided I'm not selling it as a new piece of art.
/captcha liberty... hrm.
If anyone were allowed to change movies, then why can't I add my own bits to a movie also?
I mean, if I'm allowed to substitute silence or "Golly!" for a naughty word, can I use computer graphics to add more blood and gore to a fight scene? Can I use computer graphics to add more fatal car crashes?
When the movie starts to drag a little, can I just throw in a fatal pedestrian accident in the background? While we're at it, can I change the ending? (Didn't Terry Gilliam already sue the studios for this over the ending of "Brazil"?)
Can I insert EXTRA porn shots, to make the movie a bit more explicit? I mean, there's nothing more annoying than those "dissolve" or "Fade-out" bits when you know they're supposed to be going at it... The actors can't complain, as long as the packaging makes it clear that it's digital stand-ins, and they didn't actually do the performance (and you can't insert their "likeness" or face into an explicit shot they didn't actually do...)
Let's add some bits - can I swap an old three stooges movie and Star Wars III and substitute Curly and Moe for R2D2 and C3PIO, and Larry for Jar-Jar? That would probably increase sales...
Being gay happens when there is over population. It's a way to limit breeding. It's not normal in the fact that it goes against what we are here to do -reproduce. But it is normal in that it's a way to control population naturally.
They didn't think of it first.
The GPL is an example of a license that permits derivate works to be created. This same interpretation and outcome is what gives power to the part of the GPL requiring derivative works to also be licensed under the GPL. Any different outcome for this case would have had very wide implications indeed.
This is just another instance of Hollyweird going berserk. This is in NO WAY harming the movie studios or consumers. Actually, its HELPING the movie studios because copies of a movie are being purchased that otherwise wouldnt be. This is just another area where the studios are close minded and show their lack of a good education. I mean you have a state like Utah, full of mormons. They see a movie like Spiderman, but dissaprove of a few scenes in the movie. 2500 of them want to buy it but wont because of that. So scrubbing company XYZ goes out and buys 2500 copies of the movie, cuts out the "bad" parts and the mormons pay a small fee for it. No loss to the studios they got the same amount of money they would have if any one of us bought the movie. NOW, they will LOOSE those 2500 copies because they WONT be bought and of course will probably blame that 2500 on pirates, arrrggghhhhh! Simple math, I guess they just dont see the real $$ picture here. Hollywood can kiss my red blooded herterosexual southern breed white REAR END! Im confused, I thought the studios were all about money, guess not...they are just STUPID! ON a POSITIVE note, I guess now I can see naked chicks on ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox because it is illegal to edit movies....COOL!
... Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)
If an artist painted a picture of a bunch of naked dogs playing cards. It was then replicated and sold worldwide. *(Except the states where there can be no nakedness in games/movies or anywhere that might give kids the impression that people BESIDES brothers and sisters ever grow up and reproduce) I but a copy while I'm a single guy and hang it for years. All is well. ...years go by
I now have a wife and am about to have a kid and decide I like the picture but it isn't "family" appropriate.
I take this to another artist and say "here is $$$ put some clothes on the dogs please".
I hang the new picture in my house.
Has this now been outlawed because it hurts the artist's vision for the naked dogs or is the entire reason they were told to stop because of the stupid you can't decrypt a dvd law? The article doesn't say anything about that... .... guess i better repaint the Guns into all the pictures that I paid an artist to replace with walkie talkies when I decided guns were offensive!
Yes, and I'm convinced that if he was doing it today rather than in the 80s when colorization technology was primative, that fewer people would care. Look at the hack job that George Lucas has done to his classic Star Wars movies. But they are the copyright holders, so we can't legally stop them from re-editing their movies. Personally, I think what Lucas did to Star Wars is far worse than some bible-thumper removing a few seconds of Kate Winslet's boobs from Titanic. At least the original, un-edited version is still available for those that want it (unlike Star Wars).
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
...that inserts nude scenes that weren't previously in the movie?
...cuts out the stupid scenes. Of course many movies would be completely eliminated.
If you're just too squeamish for the movie then go watch something else. Problem solved.
If you find the content "offensive" then why would you pay for a sanitized version? Ultimately that money goes to the original creator and obviously you disagree with their morals or you wouldn't be offended by their content.
The whole thing sounds to me like a thinly veiled excuse to pirate movies and sell them below market value.
That's right I'm white and almost spelled the N word. If you don't like it, don't read Tom Sawyer. If you want to read the classic book and the very word, even in context offends you, tough, don't republish the work with editing, it's just plain heathen. I also don't want to find a copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales with happy endings, or a version of the Da Vinci Code that's acceptable to the Vatican. You don't have to like it all, in fact you don't have to pick it up at all, but you really can't change the work to suit you if it isn't your work, and it's a VERY slipery slope.
Well, in fairness, there are two points. First, pretty much every movie ends up being a compromise that both parties try to be happy with. Directors can, and often do, have their names removed from movies they're not happy with.
The second is that it wasn't the studios that went against Cleanflix, it was the Director's Guild. So it was the right body to be defending the moral rights of artists. We're not talking about the MPAA suing.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
It started out as a service.
Bob's your uncle, and he knows how to rip a DVD, edit it, and burn a copy. So, you buy a copy of StripTease, and he edits it for you. Other than the DCMA non-sense, (which all you people seem to disagree with) is Bob as evil as CleanFlix?
You all act like CleanFlix is selling movies, but really they are just selling a service, wholesale.
Some people have mentioned books. If CleanFlix was about books, and you brought your book in, and they tore the pages out for you...is that as bad as if they exchanged a pre-torn book for your un-torn one? Now, if they had a stack of books (legitimately purchased) that they pre-tore for people to buy? (Sort of like some poor quality used book store?)
This seems really stupid to me. Hollywood doesn't care about the 'artistic quality' of their movies. That's obvious just from the movies themselves. What they care about is controlling your viewing habits. They don't like this practice because it gives the viewers an alternative.
A parallel would be if someone took the nicotene out of cigarettes. You bring them a pack of cigarettes, and they give you a pack of non-addictive cigarettes. The cigarette companies would all cry foul. Not because they were losing money on the sale, but because they were losing control. They were facing the prospect of people having a real choice, and that's not something they can afford.
I do not have to be a fanatic zealot to believe in something.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
In related news, MPAA president Jack Valenti was quoted as saying 'Every time a parent fast-forwards past sex and violence, they are committing a crime.'
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
laws only recognize adults men. Recently adult men have been added. More recently, children have begun to lose rights.
It's not that simple, is it?
Blar.
So you're obviously opposed to birth control, computers (except strictly as a work tool), all forms of entertainment, and anything people do that doesn't directly support having a child or raising a child. Wait, why're you on Slashdot anyway? I highly doubt (all jokes aside, even) that'll help you reproduce.
The biological drive to procreate isn't about 'making a baby', it's about fucking. When you feel that drive you don't think "Man, I'd like to have a woman birth a child and raise it", you think "I'd like to put my hoo-hoo-dilly in her cha-cha!".
Using computers as a substitute for social interaction is different than supressing the desire for social interaction, which is a biological drive.
Again...the drive is not the have the baby...the drive is to FUCK.
Believe your hocus-pocus supersticion all you want...but please don't delude yourself that it can be defended with logical and rigorous though.
Blar.
Censorship of censorship becomes illegal.
I find this a poor decision by the courts. And before all of you retort against censorship being illegal. That refers to "government censorship". Any citizen has the right to censor anything they want to. They also have the right to pay another person to do it for them.
So fuck you hollywood. I think you just create a great market for "censored downloads". I mean, if you're going to make cleaning up a movie for one's children "illegal" (OH MY GOD - TELEVISION has done this for years). Than I guess, if we're already criminals we might as well steal your movies too.
Growing up I was raised as a member of one of the religious groups that promotes companies like Cleanflix (Netflix minus the naughty bits). My parents had a very strict PG rule. Anything higher than that was not allowed in our home until the advent of services that clean the film for you. So on the one hand I think filmmakers are cutting off a valid revenue stream from the religious right.
That said, I believe if I were an artist and found people chopping up my work because they found it offensive I too would be upset. Maybe it is because I have outgrown my "Rush Limbaugh talks to God and the Bible is not a fairy tale" phase but I think no one has any business defacing another's art. I remember as a kid having my mom look through a history book of mine on the Renissance and use a black marker over Michaelangelo's anatomically correct statue of David. She also tried to prevent my reading of "The Outsiders" and "Lord of the Flies" because of naughty words and violent topics. The topper was when I found my copy of "Slaughterhouse 5" I was reading for Honors AP English with entire chapters ripped out. Censorship is WRONG. If you want to see a movie, do it. If you are offended by mere words or the act which has propigated our species since the dawn of time don't watch movies where that is part of the story. Disney is probably more your flavor anyway.
No animals were harmed in the making of this sig.
Well, there was that one puppy, but he is all better now.
That's the real question here, conveniently ignored. If there is so much demand for interesting but clean movies, why not get some investors together and make them? I have yet to hear a good answer to this question.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
OK, so instead of me selling you a version of the book that I have cleaned. (Using a marker, I would need finer grained control than "page ripper outing" would allow!) Which you seem to think should be illegal. How about you hire me as an employee and I clean all the books in your library for you and your family. (Obviously not you, but someone who would want their books cleaned.)
In all honesty, copyright need to be reigned in. Not allowed to run free and cause greater and greater harm which seems to be the trend.
What if they now try to shut down p2p trading of anything of perfect copies as this impacts on t he artistic creativity of t he artists? (Rock, Hard Place, Slashdot.)
How would you take a person selling edit decision lists?
all the best,
drew
(da idea man)
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
While I think the copyright holders should have some say in the form in which their material is redistributed (that's how GPL works). At the same time I think Hollywood is missing the ball here by giving these guys a hard time. The financial big wigs are getting their money's worth. Leave them alone.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
That's kind of the point of copyright--not everyone is going to "get" what everyone else is trying to do. I mean since when do you get to rule on my artistic integrity?? Who appointed you the judge of all art? Luckily our society recognizes that and protects original creation. Otherwise all the aspects of culture would be smeared out into a thin, boring gruel by the masses of opposing opinions. You get to make choices for your own life only. Don't want to hear Bruce Willis swear? Don't buy the movie!
Which gets to my main point in this entire stupid debate...if you don't like the movies that are out there, make your own movies. Nobody is saying you can't make a movie that would make you happy. They're just saying that you can't leech off someone's else's creation without their permission.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Now if only they'd apply the same ruling to broadcast TV. There's nothing worse than a good movie on a crappy cable channel once it's been edited. I can deal with commercials but this time and content editing bullshit is for the birds. Ever watch "Scarface" on TBS? How about "Blazing Saddles" on ABC Family? How many minutes and lines do you think were edited out of "Die Hard" before TNT aired it?
we're talking about about third party copies of copyrighted material.
No, we're talking about them purchasing one copy, modifying it, and then on-selling the one modified version.
The essence of a free market.
This judgement is just one example of how broken copyright law currently is.
---
DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
What a bunch of idiots. These Hollywood folks, MPAA, don't even realize the money they will lose by shutting this down. There are many people out there that buy R rated DVDs that have been sanitized so that they can enjoy the movie's story without having to sit through the gratuitous sex and violence. Now these people won't be buying the R movies and Hollywood will lose out on that income.
Duuhhh!!
Idiots!
It's called porn.
... then maybe yes :-)
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Sex before marriage seems stupid to me [...] willfully engaging in behavior contrary to basic biological drives (reproduction) indicates something seriously wrong with an individual.
Marriage is contrary to the basic biological drive of fucking every attractive members of the opposite sex you can find.
You can't take the sky from me...
Well put and effective.
Then I'd hire some of the folks from those companies who work for me. Apparently there is quite a market for sanitized versions of movies. So maybe if they offered a clean version of such and such critically acclaimed R rated movies they might be able to sell more DVDs.
This kind of reminds me of iTunes where they offer the unedited and clean radio versions of many songs.
~= scwizard =~
The bit you quoted says it all. Most of the content in question relates to a profit generating enterprise. In order to maximize that profit, the film has to be protected so as to promote a consistant image. For instance, if a francise has made money showing teats, then editing out those bits can do damage to the franchise. In spite of any warnings, the movie is still beng advertised as the original movie, and the editing company is still using the good reputation of the filmmaker to generate a profit for themselves.
And here is where the hypocrasy comes about, and all the whining fails. These editing companies are taking succesful films and reediting them arbitrarily. These editing company then are selling the movies primarily based on the repetation of the film producers and actors, and only secondarily on the basis of the editing. In effect by rediting the films instead of producing original content, these editors are acknowledging the good reputation of the filmmaker, and pocketing a pretty penny in the process.The only hipocrites here are the film editors that deny a reputation with one hand, while banking the profits of the reputation on the other.
Again it comes down to the fact that we own our own toys. If cleanflix or whoever wants to make the clean movies, the technology is there and it is no longer extremely expensive. Some like little home on the praire could be done for a very modest amount.
Looking over at cleanflix I just noticed something else. There is not even enough damand for them to make a DVD. They only sell semi-legal DVRs. Probably make nothing on the legal DVDs, but the china-grade DVRs are probably nearly all profit. Oops. I just notice that the orginal movies they sell are used. There you go. Making a killing off someone elses work. It should be a Dilbert strip.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I think everyone agreed that DVD copying and reselling was on pretty shaky ground, as there was real copying going on. Allowing this might have the effect you imply, as it would allow derivative works of GPL programs.
However, the less shaky ground, and the part that I need access to the ruling to understand, is what about edited VHS tapes. From what I remember, one of the services would take your VHS tape, LITERALLY cut out the naughty parts, splice the remainder back together and return it to you. In that case, they are ONLY altering the physical item, and there is CLEARLY no copying going on.
Allowing physical edits should be no problem for the GPL. It does get a little murky if someone receives a tape with a GPL work on it, splices their edits into the physical tape, and then returns them to the sender, but I'm comfortable allowing that, as anything important added would probably already be a derivative work of the original, and subject to the terms of the GPL. Either way the paying user would have no right to redistribute the altered version, beyond selling the physical media.
Removing scenes that contain sex, violence, nudes and more and then renting that movie seems like a bad idea. Why would I want to rent a movie that has maybe one two minute scene that means nothing and then the credits. I still do not see the harm what harm is done when people are renting these knowing what they are renting.
-- A computer without Windoze is like a choclate cake without mustard
Moral issues aside, willfully engaging in behavior contrary to basic biological drives (reproduction) indicates something seriously wrong with an individual. It's a trait which, if present in all members of a species, would result in the death of said species very quickly. There are obviously benefits to marriage - if there weren't, homosexuals (presumably) wouldn't seek it. Given that marriage is an artificial construct created by society, why should society provide such advantages to behavior which it finds to be detrimental to it?
Wow. This is so ridiculous that I suspect you're trolling, but just in case somebody believes this stuff, let's try a few facts.
One, that something is natural does not make it right. Violence (in particular, male violence) is clearly natural; see Wrangham's Demonic Males for a good summary and pointers to the research. The next time I hear somebody spout the naturallistic fallacy at me, I'm going to give 'em one in the snoot. Pow! My anger will be entirely natural, so I'm sure they'll be fine with it.
Two, there appears to be no risk that everybody will suddenly turn gay and stop having kids if we allow civil unions, so the end-of-the-species argument makes no sense. Is the ability to get married all that keeps you chasing pussy? I hope not, but if so, find a therapist and ask about projection.
Third, if behavior contrary to basic biological drives indicates pathology, then you have much bigger problems than homosexuals. 98 percent of US women who have had sex have used contreception. And god knows how many people have had oral sex, gone on a diet, or worked third shift.
Fourth, if marriage without children is a problem, why not start with the straight childless couples? There are a lot more of them. And shouldn't you be a lot more worried about organizations that promote a child-free lifestyle for straights?
Fifth, homosexuals have kids. I know that fundies are often a little confused by this, but think of it this way: if artificial insemination was good enough for Baby Jesus, it can work for others. And gosh golly, some families with kids would like to get married. Why stop them?
No, no, no. You can't actually edit his post, just like Cleanfix can't edit the original. What Cleanfix can do is what you actually did. You provided an edited copy, that everyone can clearly see is not the original, without altering the original. Some people may prefer your version, but they will never be confused as to who wrote what.
It comes down to fair use. It saddens me that anyone would be such a prissy little prude as to want such a thing, but I support the rights of prissy little prudes to be prissy little prudes, just as I support the rights of other 'artists' to take a copy of the Bible and alter it by smearing it with shit. You buy it, you can do whatever the fuck you want with it.
I may be a socialist, but I'm no communist and I'd hope that in this country private property still means exactly that. In the end, this means commercial skipping is just as illegal.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Now that Cleanflix has proven the market, the court decision is irrelevant. Another technology will rise up and make it possible to skip the 'objectionable' portions, just like you can almost skip commercials with Tivo.
Or is it simply a case of "censoring is ok, as long as the studio does it?"
It's a case of "distributing a derivative of a copyrighted work is ok, as long as the copyright holder approves of it."
And buying a gun is a process that takes several weeks and has to be approved by a store manager.
Umm, yeah, not the one time I bought a gun there. Anyway, here are my amusing Walmart/gun anecdotes.
I go into Walmart and pick up a box of .22 bullets. The clerk asks me, "Is that for a pistol or a rifle" (.22 rounds are common in a variety of firearms). I say, "well, both." The cashier tells me he can't sell me the bullets unless I promise not to use them in a pistol, since by store policy (nothing to do with the laws) they won't sell pistol rounds to people under 21. Does this make any sense to anyone? You can only shoot people with rifles or something?
Story number two:
My brother goes in to pick up a .22 rifle he plans to modify. He also buys a box of shells. They give him the shells, but tell him they have to walk him out of the store with the rifle rather than handing it to him "for security reasons." So as they walk out of the store my brother says, "so what is the point? I mean, how does walking me out of the store inhibit me from slapping a clip into it now and walking right back in and shooting everyone?" They demand he stand right where he is and call the cops (he has the gun and ammo at this point). My brother complies and the cops show up. The clerk tells them what he said and the cops go aver and chat with my brother trying to figure out what crime he thinks was committed. I imagine they might have been a little more concerned had my brother not been a cop and known all of the officers that arrived. Still, it is all pointless PR. These ineffective "security" measures do nothing but try to cover their asses should they get hauled into court in a civil suit but is enforced by morons that don't even understand how pointless what they are doing is. It reminds me of the airport.
1. Buy the original.
2. Copy and modify it (assuming they haven't invented a way of modifying the original, physical media).
3. Sell the copy.
Steps 1 and 2 are legal.
Step 3 isn't, even if they also provide the original disc.
If they do not provide the original, it's quite clear; selling of a copy.
If they do provide the original with the copy, you should remember that a copy MUST be made by the owner for it to be legal. Selling both the original and copy means the new owner now posesses the original and a copy he did NOT copy himself and is thus illegal.
If copyright law worked the way you say it does, other parts of copyright law (the parts that give owners the right to make backups) would essentially make the entire copyright law moot.
You might not agree with how the copyright system works, but this is how it works.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Yes, they did get it: the pizza with the cleaner pizza was part of a scene and were smiling at each other and cheese.
My brain is overly lubricated
How hard would it be to put a kid friendly audio track in the languages menu?
-JM
This article kind of insinuates that somehow these video companies are doing something shadly (like those other nasty pirates) by distributing movies without permission. Basically, they're offering a professional editing service.
There are many movies I can't watch as long as I try to uphold some moral principles. If I buy a copy of "Die Hard", (which is a great movie with very offensive language), why shouldn't I be able to take that copy and have a professional editing service remove/replace the language so that I can bring in into my home? The original copy I paid for is not re-distributed, it's destroyed, the editied copy is destined for private broadcast in my home, and I've paid a few extra bucks to alter the product to my specifications. It's like buying a car and paying a local garage to add the ubiquitous rear-spoiler and chrome muffler.
Apparently, removing swear words and nudity, (which is routinely done for television) violates the "artistic integrity" of the piece, and is a violation of copyright. This is very interesting, since both Television and Hollywood have stated that they will be moving to include more product-placement type ads in the future. Imagine the next summer's big blockbuster comes out, and has scenes like this:
scene: Heat-waves shimmer on a parched desert. Two people are walking slowly across it.
hero: "I'm sorry, it was my arrogance that brought us to this. Our chances of survival are poor, and getting smaller. Maybe we should have had a Pepsi from that little roadside stand a few miles back."
heroine: "Oh Rhet, I would rather perish from thirst, and have my lovely body consumed by ants than drink a nasty Pepsi. I'm a Coca-Cola girl, and I'll abide by my priciples or die in the attempt!"
scene: Camera pans far left, where a distant, grungy, illumninated "Pepsi" sign glows over a shabby gas station. Camera slowly pans right, past the stumbling couple, continuing on to a glitzy night club with a huge "Coca-Cola" sign.
Voiceover: "It's always been coke or nothing".
Now, when I buy the dvd, do I have to watch this drivel, or can I edit it out? Since most people aren't technically savvy enough to edit a dvd and burn a new copy, shouldn't they be allowed to pay someone else to remove this kind of dreck? This ruling says "no" -- goodbye fair use, welcome to a world where advertising is thrown at you from all directions, and shutting your eyes is a crime.
I serve on a Board of Education, and we were working on the procedures for showing R rated films in a school setting. The issues are complex and vexing to a great degree, because we have to balance the need to respect parent's rights for their children NOT to see R rated content, vs. the need, in some cases, to use media that is R rated.
The policy was contraversial, difficult to interpret, and was going to be problematic at best...
Enter CleanFlicks - they scrub the film, and we now can use the R rated film in public school without having to worry about offending students/parents... It was the perfect solution - our policy became, very simply, if you want to use R rated material in class, you have to get it from CleanFlix...
Now that is all up in the air again... I'm not excited about sharing this judgement with the Principal... he's going to have to go back to work on that darned policy again.
Thanks Hollywood!
FZ> Think of Ayn Rand's novels, The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. If those were edited for content by many of today's far-Left nitwits, they would not convey the same message.
Pb> Yeah, they might actually make sense.
One often has to dumb things down for clueless Lefties...to the least common denominator -- it is usually safe to assume they have a pulse. But even their dead often vote often in some locales, just not wisely.
Ayn Rand's novels are meant to convey some very strong, obviously controversial messages. They also happen to be really good works of fiction that have been turned into feature films and could be made into great modern movies now that Hollywierd has the ability to handle the FX and is better able to deal with the SciFi format (see "Gattaca", "The Matrix", "Independence Day", etc.) I suspect the trustees of Ayn Rand's estate would not let you buy a million copies of one of her novels, edit them down for safe consumption by mindless socialists, and sell them as cheap thrillers. I hope not, anyway. The problem is, that could be done. You could take the message out of either of those novels and still have a great book or movie.
Just hacking out words or scenes to suit prissy people's sensibilities is taking the original creators' images and ideas out of context. Do you want me republishing things you post and quoting YOU out of context while crediting you as the author? Trust me, the results would be entertaining...but probably not for you.
I have no problem with the notion of you selling parodies of someone else's work, labelled as such if it isn't glaringly obvious (think "Bored of the Rings"). Even buying a zillion copies and bowdlerizing them for your drooling kiddies and overly sensitive friends, as long as you do not redistribute them for profit or given them away as being anything like the original works is fine by me. Taking such actions and distributing the results widely (especially for profit) to people who might not realize they are not reading the original, without the author's or artist's permission seems like plagiarism and/or fraud to me.
Copyrighted works can be kept out of the public domain until long after the creators' deaths. That is why you probably won't see George Orwell's "1984" or "Animal Farm" distorted and redistributed as pro-government propaganda pieces anytime soon, I think.
FractalZone http://esotriv.blogspot.com/
"You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens." -- Angelina Jolie
Ok, interesting, I wasn't aware of that one. Great.
I wonder how ABC feels about this, calling fast-forwarding through commercials 'theft'. Certainly seems to be a perfectly fair application of the quoted law, since it's 'at the direction of a member of a private household' and no fixed copy is ever created.
Too bad the courts will only see that issue the way they're told to see it and not the way that the law states or even actually makes sense.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
What say you?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Interesting point, but not really relevent. If I can edit a video for my own personal private viewing, why can't I pay someone to do that for me? Taking the judge's ruling to its logical conclusion is that it's illegal to modify a dvd for personal viewing.
Interesting little thought: a previous post pointed out that if a "cut the naughty bits" business became sucessful, it would argue in favor of a lot of stuff from Hollywood being "obscene" and therefore censorable by the government. My thought is, if you really did start Holy Donut Entertainment, and it was very sucessful, wouldn't this argue in the other direction? ie, that these movies aren't really obscene? I would personally love to see that, but then I'm one of those wacko anarcho-libertarian types that think that any restriction on speech is not Free Speech.
Nathan's blog
Clean Flicks (and possibly the other companies invovlved in the lawsuit) will let you pay them for an edited copy of a movie you already own. Is this illegal, too? If I edit my own movies in my own homes, is that illegal?
A DJ from a Salt Lake area radio station wrote a book about how censorship leads to anarchy and chaos, becuase in his fictional story, a fat guy who owns a video rental store starts editing movies, then customers start bringing in home movies to have ex-wives edited out, and somehow it turns into violence and craziness. I hate it when people make these stores out to be "censorship", when the only people who are subject to the censorship are the ones who want it to begin with. When people talk about the evil religious right pushing their censorship on the rest of the world in conjunction with these stores, they're no better for trying to get rid of the editing, than the people who are trying to censor the material to begin with. Both are trying to control what people are exposed to. At least in the case of the DVD editing, it's self-censorship instead of pushing it on everyone else.
Uhh... actually, it *is* illegal to modify a DVD for personal viewing, and was so long before this judge's ruling. This act would be referred to as creating a "derivative work", and is explicitely listed as one of the exlusive rights granted to the copyright holder (unless they grant that right via a licensing agreement) in section 106 of the United Stated Copyright Code. The difference, of course, is that this company was making a profit from creating derivative works (under the guise of a service), while an individual in their home is not, and thus is of little concern to copyright holders.
I must say it's quite hilarious that you spent all that time replying to my one liner.
Well put and effective.
Danke.
You can't take the sky from me...
I'm going to have to take issue with this.
Sure, if they are the average joe music/video producer just trying to make a living, they should make a "sanitized" version to gain bigger market share. It makes sense. But I'd like to see you argue that true artists and visionaries such as Stanely Kubrick should "clean up" "A Clockwork Orange" or even "The Shining". Some of these people do this stuff because they are driven to, and asking them to coddle people who can't stand the occasional "fuck" or fuck-scene is not only insulting, but a waste of their time and talent. If fundies don't want to see something "obscene", they should just change the bloody channel. Or buy a copy from a third party that "cleans" the movies for them. Note that I am *not* against self-censure, or people filtering what they watch; I'm against forcing people who make "offensive material" censor themselves.
Nathan's blog
That should teach you to think. Those other parts are wholly owned subsidiaries of America, Inc.
How is this hard to understand? The studio makes a movie, they own it, they copyright it. Only they have the legal authority to distribute it and edit it for content. Seriously is it hypocritical if I report my car stolen when someone steals it to go to the grocery store and when i get it back immediately drive it to the grocery store myself? Its my damn car I can do with it as I please if you want to make a clean movie by all means produce and make a movie without violence or swearing then sell it. But you cannot take mine and clean it up without my express permission.
I have to take issue with this; alcohol doesn't ruin peoples' lives, people do. There are probably literally billions of people who consume alcohol and never have a car accident, never beat their children, or yell at their wives or husbands, or any of the other horrendous things that are blamed on alcohol. Are there people more susceptible to having bad experiences with alcohol? Sure, just as there are some people who should never do drugs or handle a weapon because they would hurt themselves and others. I'm a big fan of "hate the sin, not the sinner", but at the same time alcohol is not a sin. It's a thing which many people enjoy responsibly and should not be punished for using properly.
Nathan's blog
How would these people feel if there was a company that hired similar looking actors to perform "bad acts" and edit them into the movies. I can picture a few scenes that I wouldn't have minded seeing extended. Think they would be ok with it if there were a couple family friendly Disney movies with some bestiality thrown in? I'm sure there is a market, just like the market for the Family friendly violent movies with the violence and sex removed. Suddenly it isn't quite as ok for them anymore is it?
I believe they will still be able to operate on the "edit your purchased copy" line of business, but they were also renting, and that seems to be the practice that they will have to stop.
The folks with the DVD player that auto-skips part of the DVD are still safe.
Cut down to basics, there are two sorts of people in the world.
1. Those with a top-down world view in which the few dominate the many. Examples include Nazism, Communism, the EU bureaucracy, US federal court judges who read their own views into the Constitution, and the parts of the mainstream media hostile to blogging or any criticism of themselves (i.e. the NY Times). Also in that group are the media monguls in Hollywood. They want to be able to dictate what we watch down to the finest detail. (Note how often your DVD player won't let you do something.) They are the Lords, we are the peasants. We are to do what they say.
Even where this group gives "choice" it's only in ways they choose and that suit their agenda. The USSR legalized abortion in 1920, at the same time it was killing millions of people who disagreed with its agenda. Nazi German legalized eugenic abortion in 1935, particularly for Jews, at the very time it was increasing its persecution of Jews. And it legalized abortion (and promoted porn) in Eastern Europe at the very time it was laying down plays to exterminate over 30 million Slavs. Ditto Cuba, where independent libraries are illegal, but where abortion is freely available. As one liberal professor and Planned Parenthood supporter told me as he pointed to a young black man nearby, "That's why we need legalized abortion." "Yeah, lots of abortions for poor blacks, that's what liberalism is really all about," I thought.
2. Those who believe a broad equality of the human race and a maximum of freedom consistent with the rights of others. These are the good guys. Vote for them, encourage them, support them.
This decision is not only of dubious value, it sets a very dangerous precedent. It conflicts with an old, well-established copyright principle that said that if you owned a record, you could copy it (or just the parts you like) to play on a cassette while you travel. And it today's context, it raises doubts whether you can legally copy a CD you own to your iPod, especially in situations where you don't copy all the songs in the very same order media company placed them in. And cases in the future concerning software that jumps over violent parts of movies, a similar decision will by implication mean that you or I can't listen to a CD on an iPod out of the order as published. Nor will we be able to skip commercials, but that's another story.
We should see this decision for what it is. The entertainment industry wants to dictate, in great detail, what we are able to watch and how we watch it. What we need is legislation that allows anyone with a DVD player to put it into a "do anything" mode that lets them skip anywhere and fast-forward anytime they choose. It's a right we've always had with any other entertainment device, including books. It's a right we should have with DVDs and similar technology.
If Hollywood doesn't like that, well they can always find a different line of work.
--Mike Perry, Seattle, author of Untangling Tolkien
I've always wondered how the CleanFlix folks justified this, since it sure feels like a copyright violation to resell a mildly modified version of someone else's work.
Still, as someone who avoids sex and violence in movies, it seemed like a really nice option. I've read through the Wikipedia entry for Donnie Darko, for example, and it seems like it's my kind of story, but the R rating turns me off. Getting an edited copy (if that would even make sense for that film) is inviting.
But that still leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth: by not seeing the sex and violence I'm voting with my wallet. Buying or renting an edited copy feels a little hypocritical. It's like someone who is a vegetarian by principle and who buys some McVeggie thing... sure, it's got no meat, but you're supporting the enemy.
Sam! If you will let me be,
I will try them.
You will see.
...you can ask him why his films are _already_ censored for cable tv. Does that also mean if I get up for a bathroom break during the 4 1/2 hour director's cut version of apocolypse now, I'm not respecting the integrity of the work? Oh, dear me. STFU.
So obviosly the networks will be sued by the movie studios(companies) for showing anything but uncut versions of movies! NOT.
Telecommuting! What about socialization?
"Indeed it is, you just can't sell nor rent copies of what you did to your copy."
Since when? Does doctrine of first sale go away if the item is not in pristine condition?
So much for used cars. The car no longer matches the vision of the manufacturer because it's worn out and doesn't run as well as it should. In fact, used car sales could hurt manufacturers because people will think they were intended to be that way!
It is now illegal to re-sell your original versions of Star Wars: A New Hope. I'm attempting to approach this entirely from the currently accepted U.S. legal standard: That consumers have no rights. But the central issue seems to be the fact that the modified version is created in hard-copy without permission. The core product is a convenient viewing list that suggests which content more selective customers may prefer to avoid. (Not illegal.) But the aspect that is apparently now illegal is that they created a modified hard copy of a conceptual work. But hard copies will soon be unnecessary - and what will the courts say then? Is it illegal for to sell an XML list publishing which scenes could be seen as offensive? Per the article, software to handle this already exists and is protected by law. But, in principle, it's the same thing - defacing the original copyright holder's work, and causing 'confusion'. And what about printed works? How do we ensure that consumers don't skip pages?
I must say it's quite hilarious that you spent all that time replying to my one liner.
/.
Some peeps are easily amused... It isn't as if that took me long to write. IP happens to be something that matters to me and others who enjoy critical thinking. I guess that is why I find discussions about it on
"You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens." -- Angelina Jolie
You can do want you want to your copy (singular) and sell it. You can't make copies and sell them.
You can't take the sky from me...
Hmm, I thought the whole reason for making movies was to MAKE MONEY! Since I don't attend 'R' rated films Hollywood gets $0 per year from me. You would think they would be overjoyed to sell me a 'PG-13' version of a previously 'R' rated flick BECAUSE THEN THEY COULD MAKE MONEY!!! Isn't that why they go after pirates, to make more money? I've always suspected the true purpose of Hollywood is simply to see how many people will buy CRAP looks like it's true!
Or is it simply a case of "censoring is ok, as long as the studio does it?
Legally OK?, yes. The studio owns the copyright, so they're the only ones who should be authorized to release a different version of the movie. You shouldn't be able to take someone elses copyrighted work, edit it, then re-release it as still being a product of the original studio or director (or of yourself for that matter). That's really the only salient point to this whole discussion.
From a practical standpoint, there also is a difference between the director producing a TV version, and Utah-company producing a video rental version. Directors know the movie is eventually going to be released on TV, so they create alternate dialogue, shoot less gory scenes, etc. Ultimately it's the directors, producers, actors, and writers names on the movie. Utah-company taking that work and editing it, then claiming it's the same movie is simply wrong. It'd be like taking Huckleberry Finn, editing out all the bad words in it, and re-publishing it as still a work of Mark Twain. (Oh.. but you buy a real copy of Huck-Finn for each copy you sell to satisfy the money guys).
If this were to be legal, then what's to stop anyone from taking the christian Veggie Tales series, change the dialogue to be satanic, then re-releasing the whole thing as still Veggie Tales? I don't know that these companies added in dialogue, but I don't really see any difference between that and removing dialogue or entire scenes.
AccountKiller
Not knowing the specific details of the case.
Can someone explain to me why it is illegal for me to edit a work of art that I have purposed in any way I choose before displaying it for myself and my children? Why is it illegal for me to pay someone else to do said mods and then destroy the original copy for me if that is what I want?
My suspicion is there are more details here then are being reported on.
I guess one of which seems relivant although only hinted at in the artilce is that these copies are being provided for rental stores.
The quote further demostrates my point:
"Audiences can now be assured that the films they buy or rent are the vision of the filmmakers who made them and not the arbitrary choices of a third-party editor."
Why would I want to be assured of watching someting I don't want to see?
I guessing that is the question of confusion is only applicable if they buy or rent something. i can understand that. On the other hand if the idividual consumer directly request said sanitation then it seems it should really be nobodies business.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
While a copy is technically made, it's a technicality that has no impact on anyone's actual bottom line. No innovation is stifled, no artistic expression is destroyed.
The original is included with purchase. The copy is a backup copy that happens to be selectively backed up.
The studios are uncomfortable with this because they don't control it. They're more then happy to steal ideas from other people, but heaven forbid someone else provide an editted version.
"Intellectual property" law has completely passed it's intended bounds and moved into the sphere of ridiculousness. 150 year copyright? Illegal to backup your DVD because it's encrypted? Patenting things like "one-click"?
It's insane. Our culture has completely forgotten the purpose of I.P. law (to foster innovation and art by providing reasonable monetary incentive) and moved waaaaaaay past and into the "MINE!" area.
I once watched 9 1/2 Weeks on TV. Not much point -- there was little left of the movie.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Not for long. When cleanflicks has gone out of business, Hollywood will have awakened the most powerful and well-connected human peer-to-peer network in human history--mormons with internet connections and a strong desire to share filtered content with family and friends. Heh.
Actually, according to existing law, step 2 is illegal as well since it requires them to bypass the encryption on the disc. That's illegal under the DMCA.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
That, and the fact that you aren't bypassing any security features in order to alter the content.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I suppose I'd have to change my service. I'd provide readers with a list of page #'s to tear out, or frames to skip. To enable that latter service, I'd sell a programmable video player that could be programmed to skip frames. That way, the customer would have the unedited disk which seems to be what is required. Unfortunately, the kids would still be able to watch it if they got ahold of it. If I only had the edite disk, I could leave it next to the player for the kids to watch at their convenience without me doing th editing mumblejumble.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
This is a win for big copyright and a loss for free culture. /.ers are only seeing censorship here when they should be seeing remixing and control of content that you've bought. /. has consistently been on the wrong side of this issue because of a lack of vision about what it represents. How /. can champion Free DVD software for Linux so that you can watch a movie on the OS of your choice but not favor this is a mystery to me. What if that Free player knew how to skip the booring bits (Jar Jar?) or replay the naughty bits in slow mo while leaving the original media untouched? All the /.ers would be lining up behind it! But if someone uses technology for a purpose that is seen as socially conservative all the idiots here go bonkers. Your fear of "censorship" has blinded you to a corporate power grab of your culture.
Lasers Controlled Games!
It seems to me that the main customers of the service in question are parents who are too damn lazy to do their jobs. If a movie has objectionable content, just don't watch it. The TV set is not a babysitter, and children under the age of 8 don't need to see more than 20-30 minutes of TV per day (more has a negative impact on brain formation because the scenes change much faster than real life), and children under the age of two shouldn't see any television at all. Sticking kids in front of the TV all the time teaches them to be more sedentary, decreases attention span, and increases probability of a learning disability.
I'm not just talking out of my ass here either, I have an eight-year-old half brother who already has major problems with learning, hyperactivity, attention span, attitude, shitting his pants, and diet because his mother is content to plop him in front of Cartoon Network or an R-rated movie at any time, and he spends hours a day watching. On the other hand, my three-year-old son is allowed to watch one 20-minute episode of The Simpsons per day with all of the commercials removed, and I watch it with him to ensure that everything that happens on the screen is explained in context. During the summer, he hardly ever gets to watch because he is usually playing outside, he sees TV maybe once or twice a week.
"Why don't you interface with my ass...by biting it!" -Bender B. Rodriguez
Or you could get over you fear of 'cuss' words and realize they really aren't any different than any other words.
As soon as the local school districts don't give detention when a child swears, then maybe parent's will "get over [their] fear of 'cuss' words." They're 'cuss' (swear, curse, whatever you want to call them) because various, influential parts of the public finds them offensive.
Because the owner of the copyright of said film doesn't want to sell a version like that, so you can take it or leave it.
Why wouldn't they? Edited version = more sales = more money. And money is what the entertainment industry (and any other business, for that matter, hence the term "for-profit") revolves around.
"As I said elsewhere in this thread, buy one of my photographs--no problem, paint a smiley face on it--no problem, sell the result in such a way that people will associate the result with me (inevitable if this is mostly a work I originally made)"
Sorry, but I just don't see the example / agument holding water...
1. The DVDs here are clearly not confused with the original work. If someone wants to see the original work they still have access to it.
2. The editing functions are REQUESTED by the consumer; there is a market segment that wants this. What are the other options here? The customer edits themselves, you edit, or the customer ignores the work.
3. The original work has been bought and paid for - one for one.
"...you're making money off of work I created *and* in doing so you're (possibly) harming my reputation--and that is a problem."
Damage reputation how? Via ignorance of the customer? People know what they are getting using these services.
Damage sales how?
1. Each movie is bought/sold one to one.
2. Are you referring to future sales of your work?
So let's say that editing your film leaves a movie that will not generate repeat business among this customer segment. One could argue that you wouldn't "get" that customer segment for future releases anyways based upon the content of the original work.
I guess I don't understand the argument as it applies to a "niche" market.
Ever read that Daniel Pinkwater book where the guy's father recognizes MacBeth from the Yiddish theater versions he saw as a kid, the ones with the happy ending?
I'm fully in support of artists releasing their work to be remixed, re-edited and otherwise messed with. But I'm also in full support of a relatively (20-year?) short period where they can control how their work is presented to the public. Otherwise, what's to stop an unscrupulous, or for that matter, a well-intentioned editor from flooding the market with distorted versions of the given work?
It's important, if we value the integrity of artistic expression, to let the "real" version predominate until such a time as it's established as the original.
On the other hand, if this had been a group of movie buffs whose intrests had been non-commercial, I'd side with the editors. It's totally your business what you do with your own stuff, incluing movies that you purchased yourself.
Very helpful link.
From reading the material on derivative works, it looks like the Ninth Circuit would consider adding stickers to an existing photograph to be an inappropriate creation of a derivative work, whereas the Seventh Circuit might decide the exact opposite.
If limited to splicing of purchased VHS tapes, the two courts might each decide the case differently, making even VHS splicing a murky legal choice, at best.
I would really like to see the full text of the Judge's ruling in this case, as that is the only way to know on what grounds he made the decision. From the little bit we get from the article, he seems more likely to mimic the Ninth Circuit ruling.
What they do, they do explicitly at the behest of someone who *does* own a copy of the work! And, as I recall from a past story, their "modifications" are nothing more than an edit list--a list of parts to skip or reorder (so that it still makes sense when chopped up). They don't add new content, they just cut out certain parts.
To be honest, though, I have absolutely no qualms about unauthorized sharing of copyrighted material, the creation of unauthorized derivative works, or much of anything else with regards to intellectual property law.
I do, however, have a very strong belief that it's my computer/product/whatever, and it's up to me and me alone to choose what I do with it.
Now, some complain that it might someday become mandatory. But if we have learned anything from the internet, no such law will ever be enforcable so long as people can make their computers do what they want them to. So long as we preserve that freedom, all the other freedoms you might worry about are preserved as a side-affect.
"a little congregate of cells is not a human being. You're not a human being until you're in my phone book."
-Bill Hicks
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
You can't alter a copy of a DVD and re-sell the altered version without making a copy of the DVD. That's what they're selling, and they have no right to make it, but that's not even the issue here
If you wrote a book and had it published with your name on it, would you be happy to find out that someone else has scanned in your book, edited the text to change the meaning of it (because they didn't care for part of it) and then printed and sold copies of it?
If you were a photographer and sold copies of your pictures through a distributor, would you be happy to find out that the distributor digitally altered all of the copies they were selling? If you don't care about your art, maybe you would be happy with that, but movie people get into the business to tell stories and take a lot of time to edit the movie to tell the story - not to have some jerk alter the details of their stories because they can't deal with a naked body or a fight scene.
Putting moderation advice in your
Since Hollywood won't give me what I want, and will sue any business into the ground that tries to, I am left with only one alternative: Download movies and edit them myself.
"Creativity is allowing ones self to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" - Scott Adams
Follow the money. If you arent charging your kids to watch it, then fine.
Where the artist's values come in are here. They dont care that you edit your copy of their movie, but they are upset and rightfully so that you still label it as being their movie. There's a reason "Alan Smithee" is still used as a director's credit- because that director no longer wants his name associated with the product, probably because he has no control over it. Now you are showing YOUR movie, but still keeping HIS name on it. That's all that really upsets people.
Geez, am I the only one who sees this? The services I read about allowed you to BUY AN ORIGINAL COPY of the movie, and then because you also opted to PAY for their services they would MAKE you an edited copy while sometimes preserving and returning the untouched original. The decision that it's not OK for a service to make a copy to suit a customer's needs in that case is another step towards "licensing" content instead of OWNING it.
Uhm, since when is charging someone money to make them a 2nd copy of a copywritten work fair use? That's the DEFINITION of copyright infringement! The 'service' paid for one copy of the movie and then sold two copies.
If I buy a DVD, and I make a copy of it that has portions removed for my personal use, that's fair use. If I give you a DVD and $X, and you give me back two DVDs, or I just pay you for one DVD and a little extra and you give me 2 DVDs, that's a $250,000 fine and 5 years in prison.
paintball
Eventually, almost all of these movies get "edited for content and duration" in order to go out on Broadcast and non-premium cable channels anyway. Why can't Cleanflix and the studios do a deal to have the studios accelerate that (presumably licensed) process and get the "broadcast" version of movies out on DVD?
Or is there going to be another lawsuit against the TV stations for editing content, too?
We are the 198 proof..
The difference, of course, is that this company was making a profit from creating derivative works (under the guise of a service), while an individual in their home is not, and thus is of little concern to copyright holders.
The other difference is that one of the tests used to determine if something is fair use is whether or not the use is commercial.
"I can't see where the law should have any say whatsoever here."
Well, I agree in a pragmatical sense that a system like the above, where you don't really edit anything, but one 'avoids' certain parts of the *representation* is very difficult to punish by law, let alone control it. It's like fast-forwarding the parts you don't want to see, sort of.
As a libertarian, I can also agree it's your business what you want to see (though, often, it's more for others you censor it, I presume - notably your kids).
Nevertheless, I don't agree with the principle. While one could claim it's only a commercial business, and typical Hollywood-products often give that impression, it's still a vision that is being created - gratuit violence or sex or not (and let's face it, how many would make the difference between 'gratuit' sex and 'non-gratuit' ones? Most parents who are prude enough to censor Hollywoodian movies (who usually are already pretty self-censored in this respect) will censor those issues whenever they pop up, and won't make an exeption of 'non-gratuit' sex - if they even can make the distinction to begin with.
I see movies as art. Sometimes It's bad art (typical hollywood-film, for instance), and sometimes it's good (foreign movies - though you have some very good USA ones too - who usually do contain a lot more of overt sexuality even in their main movies). But, it's art, and it's a vision of the director (and movie-industry to some extend, granted). If one deprive oneself, or even far worse, someone else from that vision to comform to ones' own prude standards (or let's call it 'moral' standards, because I don't want a debate about what's prude and what not, since this is a subjective issue)... well, then you are doing something..I don't know...wrong.
I mean, imagine you have parents that find nudity on itself offensive, and when their kid has an artbook from school, with a picture of, say, Michael angelo's David in it, and the parents 'blur' out the 'offensive' parts out of it with some device...then one can say just the same:
You only excise a small amount of the artbook, or even the picture. They are not essential to establishing the artbook, or even the genius of the one that created it. They aren't depriving anyone else (apart from those who they show it too, of course) to go see the statue. The law shouldn't have any say in it, etc.
All very true...yet, it wouldn't be right. Art is art; it is an integral part. You always deprive it of something, even if one does it to conform it to your standards. But that's just it: you conform it to your own standards. It's NOT Michael Angelos' David your showing to your kids; it's your own moralised version - a pervertion of the original, small and 'well-intended' as it may be - you created. It got warped in the image of your own wishes: something that may twist the original intent of the creator.
Which is why it are the movie-directors who sued, in TFA.
And it THAT which you show to others. I would rather say: OR you let it be shown as it really is, OR don't show it at all. If one really thinks ones' kids will be traumatised by the partial nudity one can see of the female character on 'Titanic' (as the article gives as an example), then wait untill they are a bit older, for gods' sake. But show it to them as the film/art/books/etc really is, not some corrupted version of it.
And no, it doesn't depend on 'how much': even a mere 5 minute (of what you consider 'offensive material') edit still makes an censored movie.
You know, *I* even find it sad I can't read every book in it's original language (War and Peace, for instance), because I know I'm lacking something, even if it may seem trivial to some. I have difficulties with people actively persuing censorship for themselves, let alone others. Yes, I know; it's in the name of 'education'; but I doubt kids are better educated by being shielded them of from reality. And if it's really that unsuited for their age, then wait untill they are old enough to see t
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
... Star Wars with Jar-jar Binks edited out? Off the top of my head, that's the only part of any movie I can remember that I found really offensive.
Here's another example. I promote my work as being 'accurate to the orginal scene." I don't want to get into a long discussion about what that means save to say that it is of value to the people who buy my work that I don't, for example, make substantial modifications to the images I produce. Producing derivative copies of my work that had the strong appearence of being manipulated, being sold with an implicit or explicit association with my name, would have a adverse effect on my reputation.
I'm a nature photographer.
eph the judge - there were no laws broken
I can accept there are two different drives to the same end. At 32 I still don't feel the desire to have a child to take care of...I'm still stuck on the act itself. :D
Blar.
It is mostly for creative/artistic reasons and preserving the integrity of the film as the creators intended it.
If the movie distributors don't want sanitized copies out there because it's something other than the creators intended it to be, then how do they get "edited for TV" things approved? Different channels/networks have different censorship guidelines. Different things will be removed or changed, and for different reasons. Some things are changed because of "bad words" or scenes which are too graphic either sexually or violently, some things are flat out removed for the same reason or just to make more time for advertizements and not because of any real complaint about the scene itself.
Do all permutations of these TV edits have to get approved? Or does a network get the rights to edit something as they wish to be compatible with their particular guidelines when they buy the rights to broadcast the movie?
If someone is giving approval, who is it? The director? The editor? The writer(s) of the screenplay? The author of the book(s) a screenplay is based on? Heck, the made-for-TV incarnation of EarthSea doesn't appear to come out as the creator of EarthSea intended at all. Do you have to get permission from a group of all these people who were involved with creating the final movie?
How do test audiences fit in? They're effectively telling the directors/producers to change certain things. "Waa, that ending was sad, make it a happy ending instead so I feel better". Things like that. Sometimes studio execs make demands that things be changed. Check out Army of Darkness's theatrical cut vs the director's cut, the endings are seriously different and the original (aka directors cut) ending is said to have been ordred changed by the studio.
I'd like to know exactly who's feelings are getting hurt if someone makes a remix of their movie, and why it matters to them if they've already been paid. I'd also like to know why their feelings are enough intact to allow TV broaadcasters to edit things as they see fit but their hurt feelings make life so bad they have to completely forbid the DVD equivalent of TV broadcast edits.
No. Copyright is for "promot[ing] the Progress of Science and useful Arts". How does restricting the ability of people to help parents display creative works according to guidelines set in their homes promote such Progress?
I have emphasized your misconception. Trademark law already does a decent job of associating products to their respective origins. In the hypothetical piratopia, "not sponsored or endorsed by the original author" is enough to disclaim all association between an author and a bowdlerized work.
It would also become legal to trade in commented disassemblies of works that have been taken proprietary.
"To my eye, it ruined the movie, had I not known that the movie had been altered from it's original form, I would have assuemd that what I percieved as a substandard work was..."
Again, you _did know_ it was altered, _same_ with the DVD service; no one is implying otherwise. Public critique is based upon the knowledge that the DVDs here are modified. You can't use public stupidity as reasoning.
"Producing derivative copies of my work that had the strong appearence of being manipulated, being sold with an implicit or explicit association with my name, would have a adverse effect on my reputation."
Again, no one is implying the end product is your unaltered work. What if you produced a song that was later included as a sample in a remix (covered by law)? What about paraody (covered by law)?
What about editorial review? Can people quote from the film within a review (fair use)?
Can someone edit the film at home, for example to show to their kids (fair use)?
The public has a right to modify works for their own use.
Artist "integrity" isn't the real reason this is in court, it's media corps. control of content.
Yes, and there is the problem. We can make things uplifting or crude. The editing you did to the aforementioned post made it crude
You missed the point, and replied with HORRIBLE logic.
Bad slashdotter, no cookie!
You can't take the sky from me...
"The entire point of Copyright is that the artists are compensated for their works."
That might be the point, but it's not the law.
For your argument to work, we need an objective definition for Art. Good luck with that.
Hollywood thinks they can force crude junk on us.
DONT!
WATCH!
THEIR!
MOVIES!!!
There are two sides to the culture wars, one which says anything goes and tries to force it on everybody, and one that says a certain amount of decency should be expected but who allow each his own.
The smut merchants are against freedom, the decent people are for it.
Oh, fuck you! Show me the lobbies that pushed for laws that force smut into every show.
I'll show you the ones that push to BAN it from every show.
There's one side that says people should be free to make content with or without smut, and one that says that all smut should be banned. Which one is against freedom? I'll tell you, because you don't seem to be able to understand this from the previous two posts: The side against freedom is the side that wants to ban the types of contents it doesn't like.
Not to mention that there's tons of smutt free movies. Go watch the Pixar movies, they're good.
You're not only using bad logic, you're exhibiting bad faith.
You can't take the sky from me...
Just to clarify:
While Mormonism has distinct differences from other Christian groups, I think we fit quite nicely the Wikipedia description of Christianity. Be aware that Christianity is defined much more broadly than the modern ecumenical evangelical movement that seems now to blur what were once fierce differences between Baptist, Lutheran, and other western denominations. Think not only Catholic, but Coptic Christian, Eastern Orthodox, and other non-protestant traditions. Differences have always existed among the denominations (that's why people kept starting new churches!). But there is always the shared commitment to following and studying the life of Christ, who we believe to be the Son of God. Hopefully the following breakdown is instructive (I apologize for the length):
1. Monotheism - CHECK
"But Mormons believe in more than one God!" This protest is based on our doctrine of eternal progression whereby those who are faithful disciples of Christ and endure to the end become "joint heirs with Christ" and progress in knowledge, intelligence, and righteousness throughout eternity. And yes, we believe the universe contains other intelligent beings with various degrees of power and authority, but all operate as authorized agents of God, who is our Father, the supreme ruler and governor of the universe and its operations, and the ONLY being we worship (along with the Son [Jehovah], who is our Advocate with the Father [Elohim]). Call these other beings I mentioned angels rather than gods (note: little "g") if that is more comfortable. I'm not sure of the difference myself. Personally, I feel that these doctrines of the ins and outs of celestial organization and divine operation get so much attention from those outside our faith since they are relatively unique to our church but also because they are very easy to caricature in bizarre ways. When I look up at the stars and contemplate galaxies and worlds without end, I think, "Man, it must be busy up there", but as far as my everyday faith goes, it doesn't weigh in very much. As a Church, we also don't claim to know the whole heavenly story either. We believe God has just pulled back the curtain a bit in the last days.
2. Christians identify Jesus as the Messiah - CHECK, DOUBLE CHECK
We believe He is the Messiah and the Savior and Redeemer of mankind. I don't believe that there is a need for lengthy explanation here, even though this is the most central aspect to our doctrine.
3. Jesus as God and Man - CHECK
4. Holy Trinity: **Most** Christians believe that God is one single eternal being who exists as three distinct, eternal, and indivisible persons. [emphasis added] - no check.
We believe in the Trinity as 3 separate beings: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. We do not believe that they exist together as a single entity, although they are one in purpose and action. This has been a debate that has existed for centuries among theologians (good summaries in the Wikipedia articles on Trinity and Nontrinitarianism), so if we're excluded based on this alone while the Catholics pray to saints and Mary while still being called Christians, then oh well. What can you do...
5. Salvation: Most Christians believe that salvation from "sin and death" is available through belief in the person and work of Jesus as savior (John 3:16; Romans 10:9) - CHECK.
Again, the whole faith and works debate is not a new one within Christianity (Read about religious revival movements in the 1800s. This is what a lot of them were about!) and in my humble opinion frankly based too much on semantics and intellectualizations that ignore the essence of Christ's message: "Come follow me" and "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the Father but by me." We begin by believing in Jesus, trying to follow Him like the apostles of old, and try to live His teachings the best we can. Only as we strive to become his disciples do we become His sheep for whom in His Father's house He has prepared many mansions.
6. Crucifixion and
I knew it was altered because I'd seen the movie before. The viewers who had not seen it before were warned that the movie was "adapted for television", but were not given information about the nature of the changes, were likely, well, perhaps you will find the word "misled" too strong, I don't, but let's not quibble on that point. The fact is that, as evidenced by many, many discussions after the first showing of Brazil on TV locally, it was clear that many viewers were in fact left confused.
I think the case of the parent post is a weaker example of this, but the principle still holds. Clearly the people who purchase the modified works are aware of the modifications. Nonetheless, there is nothing to prevent those modified works from being shown to other people, there is nothing to insure that the nature of the alterations being made is complete. Ergo, there is some potential damage to the economic value of the author, thus the existence of derivative works rules.
The public has a right to modify works for their own use.
You seem confused by two different tests that are both present in copyright law, both of which are not entirely black-and-white checkboxes. There is the question of whether you harm the economic interest of the author, which we've covered here so far. However, there is also the separate question of whether the personal doing the modification is doing it for "their own use", which is clearly *not* the case in the case of CleanFlix, CleanFlix clearly has a commercial interest of their own.
This brings me to another point. Let me put together another hypothetical. I create a new movie called "Hot Beer Dudes on the Run" or some such, and sell it. CleanFlix gets people to pay them for my version instead of theirs, without my permission. The idea that "it doesn't matter because CleanFlix bought a copy for each copy they sold" mitigates the possiblity that a cleaned up version of HBDR would actually be worth more than the original copy. Now, I will note that CleanFlix is in the business of making money. So, I will posit that they either make, or intend to make a profit. This means that the market value of the cleaned-up movies is in some circumstances greater than the value of the originals. CleanFlix these modified versions of the movies cuts into my right as the "fine art auteur" of HBDR to pimp my own cleaned-up modified versions of the movies.
Now, you might ask, why didn't I release a cleaned-up version of HBDR? Well, maybe I did. It's done all the time, television networks run the right to make cut versions of movies within some combination of economic return to the copyright holder and potentially some acceptance of the cuts by copyright holder. But if I never did, maybe it's because I've decided that it's in my long-term economic interest to never do that, that the damage that such a warm, wholesome cleaned-up version should not sully my pr0nalicious rep. Either way, I've got an interest in HBDR not coming in and cutting into my short-term or long-term economic interests, either way, CleanFlix takes my work and uses it in part to further their interests while decreasing mine.
I betcha a buck CleanFlix signs deals, just like the TV networks already do, to produce cleaned-up versions of flicks. The world will be kept safe from undedited versions of HBDR, but CleanFlix won't do it to their profit, at the expense of the copyright holder.
I'm a nature photographer.
Maude: The story is ludicrous. Lord, you can imagine where it goes from here.
Dude: He fixes the cable?
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
Strange, considering the topic. Lets try this again.
Original post title: Pilot to Bombardier
Never, ever rent "Catch 22" from Blockbuster. The critical scene at the end of the movie was cut completely, half of the meaning of the movie was lost. Absolutely brutal and merciless editing.
I could not believe someone would do that to a movie. I never rented from those Mormon bastards again.
Not in my original post: Try locating a copy of "The Last Temptation of Christ" to rent in your town or city. Not so easy. There is more than one way to edit...
See also: Prostitution v. adult films. You can take money for sex as long as you're not having sex with the same person that's giving you the money.
Web consulting +
This ruling limits the ways in which a person can enjoy content they've legitimately purchased.
Nope, since selling these edited copies is illegitimate. As per the ruling. They can enjoy their legitimatly purchased content all they want.
if the author doesn't like that, too bad--as far as I'm concerned, they can take their "art" and shove it up their ass (knowing Holleywood, that's where they pulled it from in the first place).
How hard is it to NOT BUY OR WATCH movies you don't want to see? I'm currently not buying hundreds of thousands of movies! Amazing!
If you don't like the art, leave it alone.
You can't take the sky from me...
Exactly, fair-use is how http://www.clearplay.com/ gets around it. You are just paying someone else to tell you how to "slice it up". (it's done by downloading the appriate filter to the special clearplay dvd player, which then skips the filtered parts). The orginal dvd is left intact.
I can see this ruling as a great precedent for other cases:
1st- If I was a big publisher like McGrawl-Hill or Prentice Hall, I would go out and sue all the used book stores I can find. If they sell any edited book, even if it's one little mark, I'd probably have a case. Of course, this means that poor college students can no longer buy used books...but that's more money for me! Why not, make it contriversial. A little student writes a comment next to a Biology section that says "Evolution is wrong!" and does it every time the book says the word evolution. This book bascially goes against the author's will. I mean, writing your class notes in a text book means you edited it. Selling it to the used book seller means they bought an edited copy. Buying that book means you bought an edited copy.
2nd- This is also great if I was a software company. If I sell an office application CD w/ lots of boat in it....let's make this fun...how about some spyware? Sure, we'll put a tiny disclaimer when they install it, but to use our software, they need to install the spyware. This precedent now makes it so that someone can no longer modify it (in addition to all the other interesting software laws) to take out that spyware and sell it even if I still get the same royalties. Yahoo!
3rd- Since future movie players are getting more fancy and stuff....I can see it now! Hollywood can put a little callback feature which tells them what time of day you watched the movie, which scenes you watched the most, and other fun little bits of info and we can't do a single thing about it! How to do it? By having a little thermometer in a movie scene which tells the temperature of Paris (or other far away city) in real time. The only way to figure that out is by having the movie player call back the studio. Make sure it's placed in between a climatic scene for artistic value. That way, no one can ever touch you.
Yahoo...but then again...no big company would ever do such a thing, would they?
Well... apparently the cop must've shared one of his glazed donuts with her. As she drove away she had a lot of the glaze all over her face. ;-)
Libertas in infinitum
In the US one has natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is sovereign individualism at its most basic level. After the first trimester of pregnancy the group of cells inside of a woman is a separate individual and not a part of the mother any longer. It has a heart beat and brainwaves. In other words, it can sustain life therefore has a right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. No one has the legal right to deprive the unborn child of those natural rights except in extreme cases (safety of the mother) after the first trimester.
I personally believe that abortions prior to the first trimester are wrong, however logically it is a grey area for those that do not share my personal beliefs. After the first trimester there is no logical, legal, or ethical excuse.
Libertas in infinitum
Protection against the unchecked distribution of derivative works is part of copyright law because of the desire to protect artists of any stripe from having poorer versions of their works in any way harm the artist's ability to extract value from their creations.
No. It's there because people were creating derivatives period. Quality wasn't a factor. The main one that did it was a German translation of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Since German isn't English, the court decided the original work wasn't copied, and that was the end of that. Congress had to create a derivative right.
I am comfortable with a copyright law that gives, at the start, the creator of Brazil (or the future owner of those 'rights') the ability to prevent such atrocities without their consent.
If authors will create works regardless, then they should not get those rights because it would be wasteful for them to have them. Given that we barely have reputational rights in the US at all, and that they're very new, and we had plenty of works before, I think it's clear that we should not have it.
Furthermore, copyright law has nothing to do with artistic merit. The crudest fingerpainting is protected just as much as the finest, most exquisite portrait. Derivatives such as you describe are exactly as important to copyright as the works upon which they are based. They are exactly as desirable to have, and we want to promote the creation of both. If we have to temporarily limit the derivatives in order to get many, many more originals, then that's one thing. But protection is never tolerable for its own sake. If it does not yield a greater public benefit -- bearing in mind that we want both works -- then that protection ought not to exist. Copyright is utilitarian. It's about results for the public. Not about artistic integrity or happy artists.
-- 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.
Please get this straight. It's so simple, and almost everyone gets it wrong. Life has existed as a continuum for millions of years. The question is not "When does this clump of cells become alive?" It is obviously alive and has been for some time. The proper question is "When does this clump of cells become an (individual) human being?"!
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
RTFA. Ok, since I suppose that's too much to ask, I'll just tell you. These companies aren't "claiming it's the same movie". The whole reason their customers shop there is because the movies are known and marked to be "edited". Additionally, some of these shops will edit your DVDs upon your request.
So tell me again how that constitutes passing off a modified version of the product as an original?
As per the subject...I say: "Live and let live!" when it comes to movies. Come on people! It's not like anybody is forcing you to buy a edited movie or CD. You can go to your local Blockbuster, Best (or Worst ;-) ) Buy, Circuit City or Amazon and grab any DVD or CD you want anytime you want. Don't agree with Wal-Mart? Don't buy there. Agree with Wal-Mart? Buy there. Let your wallet do the talking.
In fact, it seems like the studios would be ecstatic about this. Think about it -- possibly hundreds of thousands of religious folks seeing and buying a movie they wouldn't normally buy. The studios make tons of extra cash and families are happy too seeing a movie they way they want to. Hey, choice, it's a Beautiful Thing(TM)!
Seriously, really, nobody much sees it the way it is: this is just another attempt by Hollywood to force you to see things their way and only their way. Sorry, you can't rip CDs you legally bought. Sorry, you can't watch your HD-DVD or Blue-Ray disc unless you get a fancy new tube with content protection crud. Sorry, you can't play your legally downloaded tunes on more than one device. Sorry, you can't transfer your TiVo'd shows to your computer. Sorry, you can't watch that DVD you bought at a Big Box Mart on your iPod or PSP. Sorry, you can't watch the movie or listen to the CD the way you want to so you don't go against your or other's convictions. Sorry, you can't.... It's little wonder most people hate the RIAA (Racketeering Idiots Against Americans).
Sigh...I wish Hollywood was more like Burger King: "Have It YOUR Way!"
-pentapenguin
No, you misunderstand; I said, quite clearly, "This judgement is just one example of how broken copyright law currently is.". I know the law says this. The law is wrong.
As long as there is no misrepresentation of the modified copy it should be allowed. This ruling says no and that's wrong, in part because it breaks a normal free market principal (that of ownership by the customer to do as they please).
Don't be narrow minded and be trapped into assuming the current copyright law is the only possibility. That's just the RIAA's/MPAA's, the entrenched interests, fanatical self-serving point of view they are currently spamming to the world. Copright and patent law is a product of the mind and like software can be anything we want it to be. There are are huge number of ways that current law could be improved and these possibilities need to be discussed.
Allowing a person to have more than one copy of something, without selling it, would be a perfectly reasonable thing to allow since they can only watch one of them at a time anyway.
---
DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
I disagree, I have been stunned a few times by the level of religousity of the US. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a morality play rather then a monetary one. After all, the US is being run by radical fundementalist christians isn't it?
Here's the situation: it's been a busy day, everyone is tired, and Mina wants to watch a movie with her little boys. There's a big budget action movie that they could all enjoy, except for some scenes that would give the boys nightmares. Actually Mina doesn't want to see those parts either. Fortunately, we now have the solution: make your own movie! Yes, it's two hours before bedtime, so Mina can make her own movie! This could mean two things: (1) Literally make a big-budget action movie, which could be done in less than a year for $100 million, otherwise, it would take longer. That seems impractical. (2) Buy the original DVD, get a video editor, learn how to edit video, watch the uncensored movie, decide how to handle the cuts, record alternative dialog, and edit the movie. A professional (or a motivated teenager) could probably do a rough hack in a few hours. Maybe Mina could, too! But what would the kids do while she is editing the movie? The point was to relax for a couple of hours. Besides, there are some things that Mina doesn't even want to see herself (a dismemberment), which she would have to see in order to edit them out. Ultimately, she has more important things to do with her time, like make her own car!
"As a parent I have a duty to ensure my kids are brought up safely by guarding both their intellect, emaotinos and phyiscal form. The world can be a very nasty place, and I have must protect them for things that will do them harm, because children - particularly young children - do not have the capacity to protect themselves."
Yes, well, it's beyond me how a typical (already selfcensored) hollywoodfilm like Titanic (with PG-rating 13, I believe) would involve 'harming' children. I mean, what: it's a love story. If there is any nudity between people that love eachother shown, how is this exactly 'harmful'? And how exactly are children protected from the very 'nasty place that can be the world' by it? To give an analogy: if you protect someone from diseases by making him stay in a completely microbe-free clean-room his whole childhood, will he be better served by it when he walks into the real world, then if he happend to have encountered a bunch of microbes and built resistance to it?
But anyway, we've been over this, and indeed: it remains a subjective matter, and out of principle I regard the right to watch something you own the way you want it as being higher then almost any other consideration. However, *I* feel the integrity of the vision of the creator of the movie/book/etc. is worth something to...clearly other people have a different idea.
"I don't see it as a "show this or show nothing" choice - not in my own home."
Neither do I (it's a false dichotomy, there). I only say, it has importance that the vision is shown as it was meant to too and IF the kids are really too immature to handle the moderate nudity shown in films as Titanic (say, 6 years in your vision perhaps(?)), then they are to immature to comprehend the film at all. I would simply say: I'll let them watch it when they are a bit older. That way, they do get to see the film (contrary to what you claim), AND the integrity of the film is kept intact. You basically say: the integrity of the film isn't worth waiting a few years before showing it to my kids.
I do not agree, neither do the movie-directors, it would seem. You do have a choice, mind you, but it doesn't have to involve altering the vision they created with their film. Now, no-one can actually forbid viewing it like you want, neither should the law get involved in the viewing process (though, to some degree it does already), but it doesn't change the fact one takes a decision to alter their vision because one is purportedly to 'offensed' by parts of the film, but yet too impatient to wait untill ones' kids are old enough to see the film like it is supposed to be seen. I refute the notion that it's better to show a false impression of something, then wait until one can see it like it really was made.
At least one has to acknowledge it is THAT choice one makes.
But further debate about the viewing process is rather mute, as I said. Something entirely different, which I really focused on in my posts, is the fact that other companies DO NOT have the right to alter a movie itself, and then sell it under the name of the author. If I write a book, I can't decide how and if you want to read it, but I sure as hell can prohibit anyone from altering my book without my authorisation, and selling it as if it was mine. This is, because it isn't *my* story anymore, and thus it shouldn't carry my name. (And obviously, selling it under another name would be plagiatism).
For other examples and analogies, see my other posts.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
You might want to hit the books again if you're making statements like this: ...since the public equally values original works and derivative works...
Law is the embodiment of the public will, and the law says that original works are valued over derivative--that is what copyright is. If there were no copyright law then yes, perhaps the unfettered "marketplace of ideas" would invisible-hand the best artists to the top. But there are copyright laws, in the U.S. anyway.
God bless you for going to law school, we can never have enough of you guys around I guess. But please try harder to separate your opinion from what the law says. While you might believe that derivative works have value commensurate with original work, the law preferentially protects original works. This ruling is yet another of many that upholds that.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Those who like to RTFA might also like to RTFD (read the !%$#ing decision). You can find the judge's actual decision here:
7 /CleanFlicksDistCtOpinion.pdf
http://www.joegratz.net/wp-content/uploads/2006/0
Thanks to blogger Joe Gratz. I would be worried about overwhelming his server, but I don't think many Slashdotters are actually willing to do that much work.
This article has nothing to do with Wally World. Good ole Wal-MArt doesn't edit any of those albums them selves. They don't sell movies that they edited them selves. What they DO do is demand that these bits of media meet certain criteria before they are allowed on store shelves. This goes for video games, movies, and music. If it could be considered anything worse then PG-13, Wal-Mart won't carry it.
Wally World has the business to back these demands up too.
No, this judgement is in relation to these back water companies run by Bush loving nut jobs. These companies make illegal copies of movies, and EDIT the nasty bits out of the copies. Then, they ask their customers to send them a retail version of the disk and a bit of cash for the service, in exchange for this edited version. See, the interesting thing here is that if you or I did the same thing under the guise of ANYTHING but religious beliefs.....we would be in jail already for traficing bootleg materials.
God Bless America.
Of course this logically implies that marriage should not be a legal entity at all, which is the main problem here.
What is the problem with removing the legal entity of marriage?
Do you mean in terms of civil rights? (e.g. cannot be forced to testify against spouse?).
In most respects, we would probably be better off removing "marriage" from the lawbooks. Adultery is no longer a crime, so why is marriage a legal entity?
So does this mean that it's illegal for broadcast and cable stations to edit shows for content and length?
I think that is a bigger travesty. At least trading in your DVD was a voluntary act, being subjected to bleeps, blurs and horrible dubbed lines should be deemed illegal as well.
I know it won't happen and that parents will cry foul. For those people I say, learn to use your TVs parental controls.
This sucks. I was hoping someone would start a Dirtyflix...
These companies aren't "claiming it's the same movie".
Oh, so if they edited the movie "Fight Club", it wouldn't say "Fight Club" on it somewhere? Are you saying the movie doesn't have the names of the directors, actors, writers that produced the movie in the credits? If they had done that this lawsuit would never have gotten anywhere near as far as it did. You can't take Huck Finn, take out the parts you don't like and republish it as Blueberry Finn. That's clearly a derivative work. The issue isn't that the people buying the movie are confused and don't know it's edited, the issue is that the people editing the movie are creating a derivative work, but claiming that it's not.
AccountKiller
> And as for their pure "artistic vision", they regularly violate it when they make full-screen movies
s tian.movie.rating.ap/index.html
With the input of the original artists, not some random person redistributing their work with changes the creators didn't make.
> TV versions,
With the input of the original artists, not some random person redistributing their work with changes the creators didn't make.
> and rereleases of the same movie every 10 years.
With the input of the original artists, not some random person redistributing their work with changes the creators didn't make.
While this is a complex case, and there's definitely a need for dialogue on the subject, I think you now see my fundamental problem with this case. I sympathize with parents who want to shield their children from mature subject matter and support their efforts to do so, but I strongly object to someone re-releasing a film in this way. Yes, there's a certain grain of truth in the "OMFG! HOLLYW0oD IS ALL ABT TEH DRM N $$$!!!1!" bullshit that's being slung around in here, but believe it or not the credits on a film really do *mean* something.
If I see "Edited by Walter Murch" I want it to be a film cut by Walter Murch and not "Edited by Walter Murch and the ladies of the Salt Lake Third Ward Sewing Circle." If I see "Directed by David Lynch," I want it to mean just that and not "Directed by David Lynch, except for the part with the two women kissing because that's against God's will." Remember when ABC wanted "Saving Private Ryan" on network tv and Spielberg said "you can't cut it?" They said "you can't say 'fuck!' on primetime television and Spielberg said "Normandy wasn't Disneyland. Show it uncut or suck it." ABC showed it uncut, the blue-hairs lost their minds, and the world just kept right on turning. Yes, there are a lot of whores in Hollywood, but there are also a lot of people who stand behind what they did and what it says and don't want people leaving their name on art that they didn't create.
(And as an aside, did you see the firestorm that broke out when a movie with a strong Christian message was rated PG because the MPAA thought that parents might want to "shield their children from movies with mature themes?" Boy, dont'cha just hate it when some outside organization messes with your art because they're afraid of what it might do to the children? Dont'cha, Utah? Hm?)
http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/Movies/07/03/chri
The difference between a broadcast network showing of a movie, and it showing in a theatre and/or being sent along the cable company's wire is that broadcast networks are subject to censorship. Those naughty words and scenes have to be edited. And if the movie's run-time is over about 100 minutes, scenes will have to be edited out because ABC, CBS, NBC, and other boradcast networks are not usually interested in setting aside 3 hours to show it, and they need commercial breaks to pay for the broadcast.
I think the distinction is that in the case of changes made for broadcasting, the studios and the others on the production end are working with the broadcaster to come up with a version that will pass muster with the censors as well as fit in a certain amount of time suitable to the broadcaster's needs. It may not be their best version, but it's the best they can do with the limitations they are operating under.
And lest we put the cart before the horse, I'd be willing to bet that the studios and broadcasters are probably much bigger players in the movie making it to broadcast TV than the director, producer, or actors are. Sure it probably puts more cash in their bank accounts, but they probably view it as a necessary evil. It's the studios who are trying to cash in on the additional money they can make. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that many studios put clauses in director's and producer's contracts that they have to work on the broadcast version. And broadcasters have a stack of cash to make as well. (And not everyone has cable TV, so broadcaster's do provide a service in that rspect.)
In the end, showing a movie on TV is a collaborative effort between the broadcaster, the studio, and the director/producer. They all agree to the end product. With the companies editing out the bad bits, it's not collaborative.
PS- If a studio/director/producer wants to put together a cleaned-up version, it will cost them above and beyond what gets put on the DVD. So if someone is that picky that they want to have it edited, I see no reason why the studio shouldn't receive compensation for that. After all, it's not the studio's choice, it's the consumer asking for the naughty bits to be taken out. With all the movies available, surely you can find one that lacks what you want it to lack.
So the hotdog vendor should have a real tantrum if I decide to peel the skin off the hotdog before I eat it? Heck, I paid for it, and I should do as I please with it, if he agrees to sell it to me.
"This is the appropriate place to mention two wolves and five sheep trying to determine what should be for dinner. Yes the wolves are outnumbered, but they hold the power, and will end up with mutton for dinner 90% of the time."
:
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." Benjamin Franklin
I would agree with the vast majority of what you have said. I do not have any expectation that such a well reasoned society as you also wish will exist in my lifetime. I do believe that several of the founders, Jefferson and Franklin especially come to mind, came very close to such in their contributions and moderations of others in our nations charter. In fact the base attributes of human nature being as they are I see such as unlikely for hundreds if not thousands of years if ever. However I continue to try and use calm logic wherever I can to reason with the unreasonable. My base ideal on this is that through the steady and sustained efforts of those like ourselves we will make a contribution toward this end, and that such is an honorable and rewarding task.
I was raised as a Baptist though the best description for my faith of lack thereof now would be Agnostic. I have made several admittedly shallow investigations of organized religious faiths and always come away disillusioned with both the doctrine, the practice and most of the the practitioners, though the base messages were often of great value. What I find objectionable at a very base level in all religious faiths I have examined is the exclusivity. The insistence that one sheepishly or dogmatically accept that the particular faiths "truth" as the only possibility, the only path. I do not believe this is inherently true or necessary and believe such practices are simply tools of control. I have found a few common threads of belief and expectations of proper ideals and practices in various faiths and other philosophical musings that I accept as my personal set of ideals. They resolve down to these ten most basic sets of ideals
I. Be grateful for life, for having the experience of consciousness and physical form to enjoy the fascinating universe about me. Be especially thankful for my comparative good fortune, good health and easy life. I try and remember the many less fortune than myself, not the few with more. The fact that I or my children have not had to fight or actually have rats for our breakfast this morning means we are better off than millions are today. The fact that I am able to write this means I have lived to greater than six years old, which means I have already outlived untold billions of others less fortunate.
II. To do my best to be a positive force on all around me both other persons and the universe in general. To never intentionally harm anyone for any reason except in defense of myself or others from someone who doesn't care to uphold the same ideal. The term harm I define here as mental and spiritual as well as physical anguish. To remember that while words are important, very often my actions are the true measure of who I am in the eyes of others and myself. While not a vegetarian I try to honor and avoid cruelty to less fortunate forms of animal life where ever reasonable.
III. To actively develop my compassion for others and prevent the hardening of my heart. This includes trying to forgive, not forget, but forgive trespasses against myself and those closest to me. To be sensitive to the pain of others. This is possibly the most important of all quests and the one most often avoided. It is all too tempting and easy to harden ones heart against the harshness of life. There is no higher a calling or more rewarding a task than to heal a malignant hate, to provide comfort for an unrequited loss or to sweeten the bitterness of injustice searing another's soul.
IV. To seek within myself and in the works of others to define my life and ideals. Life without ideals has no center or focus. I strive to develop these ideals that define
This is why they have a producer - to get the content PRODUCED. This is why they release "director's cuts" - because the director was not happy with the original editing decision made by the producer.
.02
We are not talking about compelling organizations to edit content - this is about people who say - "I'd like the content to differ from the original in these ways" and having the freedom, after paying the people who created the content, to make that content differ in ways that please them.
Just as you don't feel people should be able to constrain the content that interests you by "clensing" it, I don't feel that people should be able to constrain the content that interests me by demanding that it contain parts I don't like.
Just my
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Why should Eric Raymond mind if I take The Cathedral and the Bazaar and sanitize it for people that don't like open source?
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
"Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the Open Publication License, version 2.0."
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
So the hotdog vendor should have a real tantrum if I decide to peel the skin off the hotdog before I eat it? Heck, I paid for it, and I should do as I please with it, if he agrees to sell it to me.
A hotdog is phyical property, it's not a copyrighted work. You can stuff it up your nose if you like, wear it as a hat. You can dice it up and put it in your mac and cheese if that's your fancy, you can mix it up with ramen, roast it over a camp fire, and if you want duct tape it to your chest (don't ask), you can do that too. You could even, even carve them into little tikies. While there are chefs who would throw a fit if you put ketchup on your burgundy chicken, once you pay for it it's your property. Hotdogs are not protected by copyright law for they them selves are not a copyrighted work. Chuck them into a canon and expell them on the 4th of july, they are yours.
Fair use is what i'm talking about, the limited use rights we have for copyrighted works. Taking a copy of a film, chopping out the bits you don't like, and selling it is not fair use at all. It's so far away from fair use it's not even funny. It's not your film, it's your copy of a film. Fair use rights start to fade very quickly once a copy leaves your posession. I could for example quote a segment of a film and call it fair use. *"I'll be back" *"Hasta la vista baby". But I can't copy the entire film and replace "Hasta la vista baby" with "Goodbye Sweetheart, remember to write", and sell it, not without permission. Heck, I can't even take a copy of Terminator, copy it to Betamax, and sell it without permission even if I bundle it with an offical DVD release. Doesn't matter they got a sale they otherwise wouldn't get, it doesn't matter your doing the Betamax community a favor. This is not fair use.
*Quotes from Terminator(1984), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, directed by James Cameron, James Cameron, and Jonathan Mostow.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Using the argument that there is nothing to stop the altered movie from being shown to someone else and thus causing damage to the artists reputation doesn't match with one of your previous points. If someone buys your work and paints a smiley face on it and then hangs it in their office where other people see it, you could claim that it could hurt your reputation when peope look at it, think it looks stupid and then see your name on it. So, you could force them to not display it publicly. So they put it in their living room where guests see it and the same thing can happen to your reputation. I would imagine that someone renting a Cleanflix movie is going to have friends like them who don't want the dirty version either. I have friends that use foul language and do things I don't approve of, and I don't watch movies with them or got to clubs with them. If I do, I know what I am getting myself in for. They know the same thing in the reverse. Personally, I wouldn't care too much about this because I would just figure - good that the studios aren't going to get some sales from people that wouldn't wstch their movies if they're not cleaned up. But, in this case I think they are using it as a stepping stone to assign rights to themselves that will be used later to ask for even more DRM legislation. THAT is what bothers me about this ruling. I think the fact that companies like Cleanflix buy a DVD for each one they sanitize and therefore don't deprive the studios of their money proves their point. When is the last time you heard of a studio taking someone to court that was making them money they otherwise wouldn't have gotten? The fact that they are is proof that there is an underlying agenda that they feel will make them even more money in the long run and that is making DRM more and more restrictive so they can charge you three times for the same thing.
When people get a DVD from Cleanflix, they know it will be different to substantially different from the original movie. Cleanflix doesn't put a list of all the stuff that was cut out of it at the beginning of the movie. It is edited and their customers know that even if they don't know exactly what was taken out or changed.
Cleanflix isn't hiding the fact or misleading people that the movie they send you is the same thing as the original. The customers don't WANT the original and 99% of them would never rent, buy or watch the movie if it weren't edited. I've not viewed one of their movies, but if they are like any other company I would bet that they make sure it is prominently displayed that they edited it so they can get more business.
So.. as I mentioned in another post, why are the studios trying to shut down operations that are actually giving them additional revenue they otherwise would never see? Their willingness to go to all the extra work to make a TV version proves it isn't solely about artistic integrity. To claim that removing 255 F-bombs will damage their reputations is stupid. They simply want to assign more and more rights so they can make DRM more and more restrictive until you can't even watch a recorded movie on a TV different than the one it was recorded on. I think it is HBO that is putting flags on their stuff that won't let you watch something you recorded from them after a certain length of time like a week or a month. They want to make it so you have to pay for the original, pay for new formats - if they decide to support it - pay to see it on your portable player, etc. I had old movies on VHS that I paid for and then DVD came out. Some of them are STILL not available on DVD. So, I got a box that strips the Macrovision protection and copied them to DVD. Whey should I have to pay again or do without just because a format changes? Fair use previously allowed you to make copies for your protection. Anyone with kids know how quickly a video tape or a DVD can be destroyed by a 2 year old. But, the studios put copy protection on everything so you have to buy a new DVD if your 2 year old destroys it. I have a NAS server with over 1TB of disk space and I've ripped all my DVD's to it so if I want to watch one of them, I don't have to go to a media cabinet, search for it, and then go back and put it in the DVD player and hope it hasn't gotten scratched. I simply pull it up on the computer and play it there and I'm done with it. But, they don't want me to do that. They WANT me to buy it multiple times. Well - too bad! I'm not stealing them or reselling them, I'm archiving them in a manner that fits my needs that they don't offer. I WANT to use Linux to handle my media distribution because it means I don't have to buy 4 extra copies of Windows for every computer in the house. This stuff goes way beyond artistic integrity. It goes to iron-clad control even down to which type of computer you can use or not.
I thought of not reacting to it, but here I go after all (thinking it might be usefull for any civil debate):
"That female thing that you typically ignore."
Ermm? Let's be honest: this is a non-argument with strong ad hominem tendencies. If by 'female thing', you mean a woman, your conclusion that I am ignoring women is self-invented and unsubstantiated. The whole matter in moral cases like abortion, is where the rights of one life begins, and the rights of others end. This IS what the endless debate about abortion boils down too, after all. And it's not because people argument another conclusion then yours that it means one ignores the other 'side'. If such a conclusion would be valid, then one could as well say 'that child thing you typically ignore'.
Such remarks don't add anything useful to the debate.
Let alone it would be 'typical' of me. What? Do you know me? Have you telepathic abilities that you can say those things with any certainty? I don't think so, especially seen that remark.
That comment really had no place in the discussion.
"What did she do, eat it?"
I'm not native english, and you understood perfectly well what I meant, so let's not be pedantic.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
I already made an elaborate post on this, but, following Murphies Law, just when I was proof-reading it the last time, my computer went 'wham' - dead in the water. I kid you not. (Managed to restart it, but happend again some hours ago, don't know what's wrong with it, but lukily I have more then one puter).
Anyay, what I'll repeat (in a short version), what I wanted to post 3 days ago:
Kudos to you! I am very appreciative and pleasantly surprised to see that you actually go through with the reasoning, and lead it to its logical conclusion. This is very, very rare. I often see the 'it's only a clump of cells'-argument being used, but rather fully arbitrarily and inconsitently, and while I do not agree with it (because I start with a different premise), it is nice to see finally *someone* saying like it is, when that reasoning is consistently applied.
So, while I do not agree with your conclusion, I really applaud you for remaining logical and consistent. Once you start with the premise that a baby/foetus is only a clump of cells and can be killed, it, indeed, begs the question what makes the difference then - because, in the sense of the development of the baby, killing a baby right before, or right after birth, makes no difference. And in fact, it could be logically argued it's much easier and safer to kill a baby after it has been born, then prodding with metal objects in the womb of the woman.
So, indeed, seen from the 'mentally developed/free-will'-standpoint, your conclusion is very logical and consistent, and if I started with the same premise as you (and most other 'a foetus-is-only-a-clump-of-cells' argumentalists), I would come to the same inevitable conclusion. I'm so tired of hypocrits who argue this line of thought, but then back away when the inherent rationale leads them to the logical conclusion. From the standpoint of consistency, your argumentation is certainly a strong one. As is mine, though from a different standpoint alltogether - which is pretty difficult and annoying to do these days, because the only ones 'pro-life' (misnomer to begin with) seem to be religious nutcases, while I want to argument it purely from secular, logical argumentation. (I am in fact hoovering between agnosticism and atheism; I couldn't care less about religious arguments or 'morality from the bible').
I have discussed this topic with some other poster too; feel free to have a look at my posts in this regard.
Once again: very well done. I only wished more people would apply the same principles of logical reasoning, rational argumentation, and consistency, even when I don't agree with their premise. Keep it up!
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
here you go:
6 91680
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=190727&cid=15
At least that guy remains consistent in his argumentation. And he chooses an argument (communication) which actually makes sense, contrary to 'being attached to the mother'.
In fact, it just occured to me that this would mean the 'clumps of cells' which *aren't* attached to the mother , like in many medical labs these days, couldn't be destroyed (or killed, if you prefer) because they aren't attached to the mother anymore, and it was the attachement you gave as the reason why it could be killed. So, like, a mother that keeps a beginning foetus in a lab can't kill it (morally), but if it's in her womb, she can? This, as you can see, makes no sense at all, and therefor, the 'attachement' on itself can't really be a sensible distinction.
Argumentation with 'being able to communicate', or having a sense of self-awareness, or free will makes more sense in that case, because it goes to the matter of when and what can be considered a defining human trait.
That trait surely is not the physical attachement to a woman.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---