I don’t agree with this legislation:
President Bush on Wednesday signed legislation aimed at helping parents keep their children from seeing sex scenes, violence and foul language in movie DVDs.
The bill gives legal protections to the fledgling filtering technology that helps parents automatically skip or mute sections of commercial movie DVDs. Bush signed it privately and without comment, White House press secretary Scott McClellan said.
The legislation came about because Hollywood studios and directors had sued to stop the manufacture and distribution of such electronic devices for DVD players. The movies’ creators had argued that changing the content
Brad R.
Note to Hollywood and other businesses- when you are unreasonable, big government Conservatives will get involved just like big government liberals.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at- can you elaborate on Hollywood being “unreasonable?” Thanks :-)
John Cole
They should have willingly embraced the technology- all it would do is expand the market for their products.
If artists were so worried about the purity oftheir product, they could do it without the financing of the major studios. Hell- recording artists do this already- go buy Cypress Hill at Walmart and tell me what all those funny ass bleeps are in “When the Bleep Goes Down.”
By rtefusing to allow this sort of technology via threats of lawsuits, they gave the panderers and the puritans a perfect opportunity to flex their muscles and insert themselves.
Brad R.
Gotcha. Thanks for clarifying.
space
This seems to me the type of intrusive legislation government should not be getting involved in
Huh? There is hardly an area of the law that Congress should be more involved in. The Constitution expressly provides for copyright law and federal law preempts state law.
It is simply ridiculous to suggest that Congress is “intruding” here. Congress has already intruded. Under the language of the 1976 Copyright Act, the studios are correct. The technology arguably does infringe on the rights of copyright owners.
You may be absolutely correct that in the short-term the studios made a bad business decision by opposing the technology. But I have no doubt that their lawyers looked at the technology and said “We have no idea how this will evolve 5 or 10 years from now. We would be insane to set a precedent that third-parties can modify our copyrighted works without permission or compensation.”
As technology and society evolve, it makes perfect sense that Congress should refine copyright law. Or it at least makes more sense than expecting businesses to voluntarily refrain from exercising their legal rights.
John Cole
Space- INtrusive is probably the wrong word. How about heavy-handed?
I agree with you how important it is for copyright protection, as I am a firm believer in the value and necessity of property rights. I disagree with exemptions here and exemptions there approaches to things, which can infuse politics into somethng that should not be political. Like I said, I would have preferred a non-government solution, but you make some very valid points for the desirability of intervention.
Fledermaus
I’m rather puzzeled by this as well. The best analogy I can think of is suing a sissor maker because I used them to cut out all the naughty bits of Lady Chatterly’s Lover.
This is just an electric pair of sissors.
You can argue that there is no need for federal legislation at this point since no court has heard the case, but what where is one small upstart company going to find funding for an invention of questionable legal standing. Especially when that invention is opposed by some of the biggest companies in the country.
Shavo, this is not.
space
After re-reading your post and the update, I think I better understand what you are saying.
Your argument seems to be that a copyright is like a piece of land and this issue is like a property dispute. Because the studios didn’t act reasonably to their “neighbors” (DVD manufacturers), who wanted to cross a tiny corner of their land, the government stepped in and granted an easement to the neighbors. Now the studios have to suffer the indignity of having their neighbors have a legal right to trample on a corner of their land.
I find this analogy flawed for two reasons. First, copyrights, although called intellectual property, are really more analogous to contracts. In exchange for producing artistic works, the government will grant a limited monopoly to the owners of the works, with the understanding that the government will, from time to time, clarify and/or modify the precise scope of the monopoly.
Second, even if one wanted to analogize copyright to real property, the new law is not like granting an easement. It is more like clarifying a previously unclear law.
For example, imagine during the 19th century it was the law of a state that a person owned the rights to their land, the soil and minerals below it, and all the air above it. All of a sudden, in the 20th C., airplanes are invented. If a state legislature subsequently passed a law that said that a person’s air-rights only extended to 500 feet above their land, in order to permit airplane travel, we wouldn’t really say that the legislature was taking away people’s property. Nor would we say that the property owners were granting an easement to airplane pilots. We would say that the previous law that extended a persons domain to “all the air above” a parcel of property was created without contemplation of high altitude uses.
Similarly, Congress is really just cleaning up language in the copyright statute that would extend copyright owners monopolies to areas that were never contemplated previously. Even though a plain reading of the statute would support the studios’ interpretation.
That is why I don’t see this as intrusive or heavy-handed.
AWJ
Amidst all the rhetoric about “the importance of property rights”, one needs to keep in mind that in the American legal tradition (and under Anglo-Saxon/Common Law jurisprudence in general), copyright IS an unusually limited form of property right which includes numerous inherent exemptions.
Possessing the copyright on a work is not and has never been synonymous with “owning” the work in the sense that one owns land or personal possessions. The most obvious difference is that copyrights expire after a statutorily-defined amount of time, whereas one’s land or possessions do not eventually join the commons of mankind simply because one has already owned them for X number of years.
If you would accuse me of being pedantic about a minor legalism, there are many legal precedents that explicitly affirm and draw their reasoning from this difference between copyright and “regular” property. The first one that springs to mind is the one from a few decades back finding that pirate copies of music recordings were NOT “stolen property”, and thus not subject to the federal law criminalizing interstate transport of such.
The reason this is important to remember is that Hollywood and the rest of what might be called the “copyright industry” (music, publishing, software, etc.) is very prone to using rhetoric that blurs the difference between the limited right that is copyright and the much stronger right that is property in the usual sense.
Think about it a little and you’ll realize that trying to interpret copyright as a quasi-absolute property right leads in directions that defy common sense. For example, you would have to let Hollywood forbid viewers from “altering” movies by pressing the fast-forward or mute button during distateful or boring scenes (which is all this ClearPlay technology really does, albeit automatically) You would have to let publishers forbid readers from reading books back-to-front (if they could think of a way of enforcing it) You would have to give directors the right to dictate what brands of TV and DVD player their movies are allowed to be watched on, lest the fruits of their labors be butchered by inferior hardware. And countless more absurdities, if you accept at face value and in its entirety the argument that “the creator owns his work, ergo he gets to decide how the audience is to enjoy it”
The last example wasn’t entirely hypothetical, by the way. A few years back a software company created and sold an emulator that allowed Sony Playstation games to be played on a Macintosh computer. Sony of course immediately sued this company. One of Sony’s arguments was that since games played on the emulator did not look or play exactly the same as they did on a Playstation (due to technical limitations of the emulator, and due to the difference between controlling a game with a Playstation gamepad and with a computer keyboard) that the act of playing a game on the emulator constituted creating an unauthorized, illegal derivative work of the game! I only bring this up to mention that this argument was soundly rejected by the court.
pennywit
The “filter” technology doesn’t strike me as that pernicious. What would you say, however, about companies that sell cleaned-up versions of movies?
–|PW|–
Tom
Copyrights aren’t property. They’re a temporary and limited monopoly over creative works. Ownership of copyrights isn’t permanent or all-powerful. It’s right there in the constitution.
Even for a libertarian – isn’t it one of the functions of government to prevent the powerful (Hollywood in this case) from trampling all over the constitutional rights of the non-powerful (John Q. Consumer)? These filters are clearly fair use of a DVD you bought and paid for. I never thought protecting individuals rights was “big-government”.
John Cole
Tom- I already said I was wrong (in so many words)- you can’t have my firstborn…
:)
Halffasthero
The filtering technology, so long as it does not alter the DVD or VHS itself, does not scare me. It would, in fact, allow Hollywood to increase its market. As long as te technology is strictly private use and no profits for public display are made, Hollywood has no worries.
AWJ
Don’t feel too bad, John. I agree with you that the way this particular legislation is worded and framed constitutes gross pandering to the special-underwear-wearing Utah set (and to likeminded puritans across America) The fact that it has its figurative heart in the right place (unlike all too much recent copyright legislation) is much more the result of blind coincidence than Congressional wisdom.
I’m sorry to keep correcting you, but Big Pharma would be concerned with patents, not copyrights. While both are lumped under the term “intellectual property” they’re two different things. In many ways patents are even less property-like than copyrights–they’re more like monopolies purchased from the government (especially the recent legal abominations known as “business method patents”…)
John Cole
It’s ok. I know I am an idiot. It is the idiots who are unaware of their malady who are a real danger.
Kimmitt
You have a somewhat confusing typo at the end of this post.
caleb
Now it’s….(paraphrasing)”People should be able to have technology to edit objectionable material out of movies….ie. nudity, violence, language.”
Later, it will be…..(paraphrasing)”People should not be able to have technology to edit out objectionable material of TV shows…….ie. commercials”
The TIVO bill is coming.
Captain Video
If a parent buys a copyrighted book and tears out some pages before giving it to a minor, is the parent violating the copyright? I hope not, but I’m not a lawyer. The filtering technology does the same thing. It gives consumers greater control of a product that they have purchased and therefore own. If the current copyright laws abridged the rights of the owner of their property to do this and to obtain technology to make this possible, they are opressive and do need to be changed.