MPAA vs movie sanitizers
p2pnet.net News:- Huntsman v Soderbergh pits Family Flicks and Play It Clean Video, which make and distribute copies of movies with sexual and violent content removed, against the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America).
To make the movies squeaky clean, the companies have to make intermediate copies so they can edit out the offending sequences and this, say the studios, isn’t on because it’s copyright infringement.
However, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) doesn’t agree and wants the Colorado Federal District Court to rule that copying an entire movie to a computer to make a new, lawful work is fair use.
It’s an important point because intermediate copies are crucial to the process of creating new copyrighted works, says the EFF, going on:
“A documentary filmmaker, for instance, might need to make temporary intermediate copies of movies in order to get footage for a film. In the software industry, the process of duplicating a copyrighted work to make an original work is known as reverse engineering, and it has been ruled a fair use in several courts.
EFF staff lawyer Jason Schultz says fair use makes new art possible and, “People who make movies should have the same rights software engineers have had for years.”
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See:-
EFF – Digital Artists Deserve the Right to Copy Movies, August 23, 2005
August 25th, 2005 at 10:46 pm
These “movie sanitizers” are opening up new markets for DVDs and yet the MPAA STILL wanks on about copyright infringement. I’m pretty sure these MPAA people are not stupid, but it’s pretty difficult to not come to that conclusion based on their actions.
August 26th, 2005 at 2:59 am
Intermediate copies of something placed on any private computer can be legislated against, but in the end it is unlikely to be enforceable. To get evidence of this infringement through the courts, a copyright holder would have to first prove through some form of evidence that infringement is likely to have occurred, and then get an order for discovery. The evidence can be scrubbed clean before the courts lay a finger on it, and then when the innocence is obvious due to a lack of any evidence backing the claims of the plaintiff, the resulting counter-suit will bite them squarely in the ass. The only way this would actually work is if the defendant was too stupid to clean the evidence away before handing it over.
August 26th, 2005 at 4:20 pm
Aren’t these some of the same people whining that p2p is a venue for porno? Now they are bitching at the people who are editing movies to make them G rated. Of course you will never see this pointed out on the news.