Selling Alterable Versions of Star Wars Is Still Infringement, Says Court (arstechnica.com)

A federal court ruled that video-on-demand streaming service, VidAngel, which enables the filtering of objectionable content to make it family friendly, is breaking U.S. copyright law. Ars Technica reports: VidAngel buys movie discs and decrypts and rips them. It then streams versions that allow customers to filter out nudity, profanity, and violence. In doing so, it breached the performance rights of Disney, Lucasfilm, 20th Century Fox, and Warner Brothers, the court ruled. VidAngel purchased a disc for every stream it sold, some 2,500 titles in all. "Star Wars is still Star Wars, even without Princess Leia's bikini scene," the opinion said. Just because objectionable content is removed, that doesn't necessarily transform the content enough to allow this type of behavior under a fair use analysis, the court wrote Thursday. VidAngel also unsuccessfully argued that it was protected under the Family Movie Act (FMA) of 2005. That legislation allows the cracking of encryption to remove objectionable content so long as no fixed copy of the altered version is created. The court didn't agree, however, because VidAngel didn't have the permission in the first place to stream the content.

Comments

Not news

[duke_cheetah2003]

The court didn't agree, however, because VidAngel didn't have the permission in the first place to stream the content.

Which basically means that's what the court ruled on, and videos being altered in this fashion before stream never even came up.

Nothing to see here. No precedent was set regarding the actual act of alterations.

Re:"A federal court ruled..."

[Kjella]

Well, it certainly would make enforcement of copyright impossible. All you'd have to do whenever you were accused is to go out and buy a DVD/BluRay and say "look, here's my legal copy". More importantly, it would create a completely unworkable legal concept of "sameness". Consider things like the Star Wars special edition DVDs, is the digital clean-up, new CGI and alternate shooting scene is that the same movie? What about a director's cut, additional dubs and subtitles, a HDR remaster? Is a remix of a song the same song? Is a Linux port of a Windows game the same game? Is the GOTY version the same as the vanilla version? Is the audio book and eBook the same as the paper book? What would a narrator get paid, if people feel they own the book already? How about a translation, does that have any value or are all translations included too? On the other hand, if you say only exactly the same it's easy to make every version have a new cover.

Owning a copy clearly doesn't give you the right to stream it to anyone else, copyright law is pretty clear on that point. The question is whether you can circumvent that through sale and buyback agreements so that temporarily you're the owner and VidAngel is only providing a service to stream your copy to your screen. Basically it's Netflix's old DVD model made all digital where the discs never ship they just make a really, really long virtual HDMI cable over the Internet. Not sure why that would be illegal, streaming a movie you own from your Dropbox account should be legal even though they don't have a distribution license. But I haven't read the legal reasoning...

Family viewing act

[goombah99]

You are incorrect. To understand this better one needs to actually have read the Family Viewing Act. It contains some rather surprising, and refreshing, exceptions to copyright laws and content delivery restrictions. What Vid Angel and others are doing seems to be highly protected under this law.

The strategy the content companies have taken is the "bring me a rock" strategy where every company before and after vid angel that tries to sell bowlderized films, the company says yes that's all legal if you do it correctly but you are doing it wrong. They then fail to spell out what to them would be doing it right. Just everybody is doing it wrong.

I really enjoyed vid angel's original model because it made is affordable to strip out content of films that I was uncomfortable showing kids in the house (not just my kids). Their later model was much less convenient so I didn't use it.