Posted on 07/08/2006 9:24:52 PM PDT by BenLurkin
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- Sanitizing movies on DVD or VHS tape violates federal copyright laws, and several companies that scrub films must turn over their inventory to Hollywood studios, an appeals judge ruled.
Editing movies to delete objectionable language, sex and violence is an "illegitimate business" that hurts Hollywood studios and directors who own the movie rights, said U.S. District Judge Richard P. Matsch in a decision released Thursday in Denver.
"Their (studios and directors) objective ... 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."
Matsch ordered the companies named in the suit, including CleanFlicks, Play It Clean Video and CleanFilms, to stop "producing, manufacturing, creating" and renting edited movies. The businesses also must turn over their inventory to the movie studios within five days of the ruling.
"We're disappointed," CleanFlicks chief executive Ray Lines said. "This is a typical case of David vs. Goliath, but in this case, Hollywood rewrote the ending. We're going to continue to fight."
CleanFlicks produces and distributes sanitized copies of Hollywood films on DVD by burning edited versions of movies onto blank discs. The scrubbed films are sold over the Internet and to video stores.
As many as 90 video stores nationwide -- about half of them in Utah -- purchase movies from CleanFlicks, Lines said. It's unclear how the ruling may effect those stores.
The controversy began in 1998 when the owners of Sunrise Family Video began deleting scenes from "Titanic" that showed a naked Kate Winselt.
The scrubbing caused an uproar in Hollywood, resulting in several lawsuits and countersuits.
Directors can feel vindicated by the ruling, said Michael Apted, president of the Director's Guild of America.
"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," he said.
It is not being represented or sold as the original. I am knowingly buying "the original" along with editing services being performed on my copy.
That is available already.
See: www.ClearPlay.com
And we can't have two different versions with full disclosure written all over them because people might not read the disclosure, and then they might make the "wrong" decision? So government must protect them from their decisions. I see.
Actually each deletion is a very deliberate decision made by a firm so that their constumers will pay for both the original film and their service. My decision as a consumer to buy the "cleaned" version over the original is also a very deliberate decision.
The real rub is where do you draw the line?
As long as the studio gets their royalty, the consumer should be the one to draw that line and they should be allowed to draw it where ever they choose.
What if all references to "speeding cars" (since cars kill) are erased?
Why shouldn't I be allowed to buy a version without it?
How about a particular word such as Christianity?
If I was as thin skinned as the very small but very vocal minority of secularists here on this forum, I should be allowed to buy just such a service.
The list is endless.
And equally irrelevant. The only issue here is the left's effort to force all of their perverse values on anyone who wishes to buy any of their products. This is no different than GM telling me I can't remove the pin stripe from my Corvette.
Not good enough. They'd have to scrub every scene with Kate and/or Leonardo to make it close to palatable. In fact, everything not involving a boat or iceberg should be scrubbed.
Now that is an interesting thought too.
I've previewed many shows and then fast forwarded thru the innappropriate content.
I definately agree that a lot of Hollywood movies have a perverse liberal agenda behind it. I despise it just like you do. But even when it comes to things like this, we live in a free country that has laws. We would be just as bad as liberals if we wanted them fixed to reflect our own opinions.
Just want to make clear, you're fine with my Passion of the Christ example?
Or editing, say "Toy Story" to add several dozen F-bombs, and selling it as the Dirty version of "Toy Story", without consultation or the permission of the producers of the movie?
Yes, but the original movie is still there at the major rental outlets. So, if they are paid for their copy, how are they harmed? Further, I think that language is edited in movies shown on US airlines. How is that allowed under this ruling?
Slam dunk comment.
I think what Radio Astronomer meant when he said it is an "arbitrary decision" was that it is a decision he would not agree with. He's smart and rational; people who want the filth edited out of the movies they watch are stupid and arbitrary.
You buy the DVD, send it to us, we make a scrubbed copy, and send back both to you. Do as you wish with the original.
Anyone here object to that?
Mark Reutter, Business & Law Editor 217-333-0568; mreutter@uiuc.edu
6/29/05
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — What Hollywood studios call censorship and copyright infringement, software companies call freedom and parental choice. Any wonder that the legal issues raised by new film software is winding up in the courts and before Congress?
The technology that has Hollywood angry allows consumers to skip over scenes and mute words of copyrighted films. The technology comes in several forms. CleanFlicks Media offers more than 700 DVD movies that are digitally edited to remove profanity, nudity, graphic violence and sexual content. CleanFlicks says it complies with copyright law by buying a copy of each video it edits. The edited videos are then rented to consumers by the Utah-based video chain.
On the other end of the software spectrum, ClearPlay licenses what it calls advanced parental control filters on DVD players. The filter skips movie frames based on a menu of options selected by the viewer, deleting scenes containing violence, sexual situations, vain references to God, ethnic slurs and other objectionable content. Unlike CleanFlicks, ClearPlay does not edit the movie; instead it sells software that controls how the movie is displayed on the home screen.
What the two companies share, however, is the contention that Hollywood studios, despite owning the copyrights to movies, “should not dictate what people watch in their own homes,” writes Carrie A. Beyer in the University of Illinois Law Review.
“The studios, on the other hand, claim that third-party editors violate their copyrights by copying or altering the content of their movies,” wrote Beyer, an editor at the law journal. The conflict between the parties is, at its essence, who controls movie content after it leaves the big screen.
Beyer pointed out that there is a long history of editing or censoring books for commercial as well as moral reasons. “Condensed books leave the major storyline intact, but remove words or descriptions that an editor deems superfluous.” Wal-Mart refuses to sell CDs that require the attachment of a parental advisory sticker. “Artists producing explicit music, therefore, must choose between creating a ‘clean’ version for Wal-Mart to sell and simply not selling the music through that particular retailer,” Beyer wrote.
In the world of home-viewed movies, the next step could be changing an image on the screen to match a user’s preference. In one display of the power of emerging technology, a company showed a revised version of the nude-sketch scene in “Titanic,” in which the actress Kate Winslet appeared, not unclothed as in the original, but clad in a computer-generated image of a corset.
Needless to say, litigation is under way. In a pre-emptive move, CleanFlicks sued Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Robert Redford and other prominent directors in Colorado federal court seeking a declaratory judgment that its activities are lawful.
The directors countersued, for what they say are violations of the federal Lanham Act (for false designation of origin) and unfair competition under California law. They have included ClearPlay and other content filterers as counterclaim defendants.
The filmmakers charge that the companies are trading on their names by wrongly circulating versions of their movies that they never approved of. Hollywood studios, meanwhile, allege that the cleaned-up movies are both “second-generation copies” with inferior technical standards and “derivative works” of copyrighted material, thus violate the trademark-dilution provisions of the Lanham Act as well as U.S. copyright laws.
Analyzing the sundry legal arguments, Beyer concluded that copyright laws are elastic and that technology will continue to alter the boundaries of copyright infringement, leaving directors and studios a step behind third-party editors with the latest digital equipment.
“By releasing their own ‘clean’ versions of the films, the studios would meet the demands of consumers while maintaining control over the copyrighted work,” Beyer wrote. “Studios could either produce an entirely separate DVD or include a ‘clean’ version on the same DVD as the original movie.”
By competing in the edited-movie market, she noted, the studios could undercut the fair-use defense of the editing companies and reassert a filmmaker’s right to protect intellectual property. Filmmakers already cut big-screen movies for television programming and for “airline movies.”
In April 2005, Congress clarified aspects of the dispute by passing the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act. The law made it a federal offense to videotape a movie in a movie theater and increased the criminal penalties for pirating material from a film, especially pre-release material.
On the other hand, Congress amended the copyright law to make it lawful for ClearPlay and other companies to distribute filters to a “household for private home viewing from an authorized copy of (a) motion picture.”
The law, however, did not address the Lanham Act arguments against ClearPlay and others for dilution of a movie product, and did not protect film “masking” that adds or substitutes material to a film rather than skips over or mutes objectionable passages.
In short, expect more litigation as well as unforeseen consequences – such as technology that takes the clothes off of actors in G-rated movies.
Beyer’s article is titled “Fighting for Control: Movie Studios and the Battle Over Third-Party Revisions.”
___________________________________________________________
I have no problem with software/hardware that allows one to choose to by-pass certain profanities, gory scenes etc. It is not physically altering the actual disc for rent - just how it is viewed.
But the one that actually makes edited copies I believe is rightfully declared illegal even they do a buy one-edit-rent-edited-copy type of gig.
Even this article presents some of the facts in a murky manner.
Wow, people are remarkably dense on this thread.
The airline and TV edits are done with permission of the copyright holders.
This stuff by the companies in this suit was completely unauthorized.
Comprende?
No kidding. Of course, these same "free speech" morons have no problem with politically correcting "sanitizing" films, tv programs and books to remove the "N" word or references to Christ. Historical accuracy and context = bad. Smut and revised history = good.
ClearPlay has that already.
Apparently, some people feel that the f word is art.
To some, like the ACLU and their 'closet' allies, there is no such thing as filth. The ACLU even fights for the right to Kiddie Porn, and their still in the 'closet' allies will eventually follow the leader.
You know absolutely for a fact that CleanFilms did not have an agreement with the copyright holders? Since I am a member of CleanFilms, I will be waiting to see what they have to say.
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