James Delahunty
20 Apr 2005 20:14
An attachment bill to the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act called the called the Family Movie Act will soon make it legal to alter a motion picture so long as all the sex, profanity, and violence have been edited out. The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act was approved on Tuesday by the house. The Senate has already passed its own version, and the President is expected to sign it. It's a big win for Hollywood as it sharpens penalties for pirates.
On AfterDawn forums, one frequently asked question is how to remove unwanted scenes from DVDs to make them fit for viewing by a younger audience. Some services are available that will do this but Hollywood takes a sceptical look at them. Two such examples are Family Flix and CleanFilms. These companies claim that they are not violating any copyright laws as they purchase a legal copy of a DVD each time they edit one. Hollywood studios are still upset with this action as the companies are essentially profiting from re-distributing their works.
The Director's Guild is very unhappy also as these companies tend to just leave the movies in any state that they want and Directors claim that it ruins what they tried to create in the movie. The directors agree that when someone buys a DVD they should be allowed to edit it for personal use if they want since they legally purchased a copy. However, they disagree with somebody making changes to the DVD and then going ahead and selling their edit, which is precisely what these companies are doing, they claim.
It seems that courts would favour the studios in this battle but companies like CleanPlay may not be so easy to beat. CleanPlay uses a DVD player and a downloadable filter template to cut out the scenes on playback. Therefore they are not actually altering the DVD and re-distributing it at all, just using a template. So in this case, whether or not that can be classed as Copyright Infringement is unknown.
Source:
The Register