This morning as I was driving in (and running late since traffic was bad, and the UPS outlet where I was supposed to be able to pick up my monitor wasn’t even open so I went out of my way for nothing and… oh, never mind, I digress) and our local PBS affiliate ran a story about ClearPlay and the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act.

I see the bill as a mixed bag: it increases the penalty for clandestinely using a camcorder in a movie theater. The shocking claim made by the usual talking-head industry type is that such illegal copies cost the movie industry billions. BILLIONS! Get real. Watching one of these DVDs is like watching a kindergarten class do Shakespeare. The existance of a $2 copy of Lord of the Rings does not prevent the sale of a $25 authorized version in anywhere close to the one-to-one ratio that such extravagant claims require. I oppose this only because the penalty is so large in proportion to the actual damage done.

But the other thing that the FECA does is legalize companies like ClearPlay. ClearPlay manufactures a DVD player that downloads “filters” from their website which automatically instruct the DVD player to skip violent or sexual material, thereby making Natural Born Killers appropriate for viewing by your five year old. Some stories have run about this with the rather radical slant that Congress has legalized the censorship of DVD content. This is not censorship. Censorship occurs when someone desires to see material which is made unavailable by another agency. This is the reverse of censorship: I specifically choose not to view some kinds of content, and the player now makes that simple.

Studios don’t seem to like this idea much, and again, their reasoning is puzzling. The existance of such technologies does nothing to decrease the sales of their products: in fact, if anything it should have a positive effect. They instead choose to complain that the “integrity” of the movies they produce will be harmed. Yes, the integrity of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle will be harmed when the references to sex and drugs are dropped. What a pity. Perhaps the sounds of cash registers will help alleviate their inner angst.

Ed Felton has a nice summary on his blog:

The soccer-free version of “Bend It Like Beckham” is speech. The FMA allows that speech to occur, by preventing a copyright owner from suing to block it. And the FMA does this in an ideal way, ensuring that the copyright owner on the original work will be paid for the use of their work. That’s the purpose of the “from an authorized copy” and “no fixed copy” language — to ensure that a valid copy of the original work is needed in order to view the new, modified work.

It isn’t clear to me whether the Family Movie Act (section 201 of the FMA) allows a certain kind of remix to be done. It would be kind of cool to be able to create a media player which allowed you to scramble, augment and annotate an existing DVD. As long as no fixed copy of the DVD content is made, it would seem to be no different in spirit than the modifications made by ClearPlay. The language of the bill does include specifications that such modifications be “limited” and may be only “deletions”, so I’m not sure my interpretation would be legal. Still, interesting…