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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.'''
Parents don't use DVR's to produce commercially sold edited copies of content published by another party.
I think the difference there is that you're not distributing your edited copy to the public.
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
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
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.
It's because the other companies (such as the wal) have enough purchasing power to make the record company release a "clean" version. If the video stores in question were actually a 300 billion dollar chain, they could have just asked the studios nicely for a "clean" version and gotten it.
This is voluntary censorship, though. Suppose I've bought Kill Bill and want to see it, but not the violent bits, I could've sent it to this company. No one would've forced me to, though.
There is nothing wrong with people viewing censored material when they asked for it to be censored for them. This decision is effectively censoring censorship!
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.
Well put, but misplaced. I absolutely care about getting the full version of the film on my DVD, and I care about the producers, directors, etc, getting propper credit for their work.
However, my understanding is that these edited films were well labled as modified and that patrons of these companies had a very good understanding that they weren't getting the theatrical release. Assuming that's the case, then I have a very hard time understanding what the problem is. This ruling is exactly the equivilant of me buying a book, then ripping out some pages I dislike, then reselling the book, clearly labled as missing pages, to a third party. Making that illegal is silly.
Oh, and by the way, what does this say about DJ remixes? People enjoy modified works. As long as the modification is happening on a per-unit basis and eveyone gets properly credited and paid, why are we trying to restrict this.
TW
Funny, I thought it was because they saw the VOLUNTARY editing of your own PERSONAL copy of a movie to be a "fair use" of the purchased content that the content creators wanted to restrict in order to generally reign in fair use.
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.
(To prevent comments from going off on tangents, I offer this disclaimer: I would not watch or buy an edited movie, I like to watch deleted scenes and all that kind of supplementary material; I support a customer's right to do whatever they want with their copy short of distributing or misrepresenting it. Main source for information the "sanitizing" process: Washington Post article)
[command INSERTWITTYQUIP failed: insufficient wit]