Bush Signs a New Fair-Use Bill 134
BostonGunNut writes "Today President Bush signed a bill that gives legal protection to companies that provide software that can automatically filter specific content from DVDs for personal use. This bill, called the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, allows companies to provide filtering software without being sued into oblivion by Hollywood. The legislation also allows the Library of Congress to save and protect old movies and home videos that might otherwise be lost."
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Questions, Please (Score:5, Interesting)
allows companies to provide filtering software
So of course this was done to permit commercial entities to provide filtering software to slice out "objectionable" parts of a copyrighted work before it gets passed to a viewer.
Will it protect individual citizens from doing the same thing - that is, providing filtering software - supposing that my criterion for obscenity includes what others call "advertisements"?
nice (Score:2, Interesting)
No blood for oil, right guys?
I totally have no problem posting this, but the crack-abusing mods will mod me down within minutes for daring to suggest that perhaps Bush is, you know, not evil. Anonymous it is, then.
Directors rights and contracts (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder how the courts will view legislation that essentially overrules these clauses; and what the MPAA, Hollywood and the Directors Guild are going to do.
I have - and LIKE - ClearPlay (Score:5, Interesting)
My 2nd biggest complaint with ClearPlay is that you can't see a list of what was removed, i.e. "f*** at 23:20, brief nudity at 25:41" etc. My biggest complaint is that I can't make/modify my own filters, such as removing Hogarth's "guns are bad" speech from The Iron Giant. I love that movie (even though it's more a kids' movie), and I like to watch it with my kids, so I just hit the chapter skip button and poof - no more Hogarth railing about the evils of gun ownership. (And if guns are so bad, why did he take his BB gun with him when he went looking for the giant early in the movie?)
To sum it up, there's nothing wrong with ClearPlay. They're not forcing you to buy it, nor forcing you to use it. Much like proprietary vs. open-source, the issue is choice, or more specifically, do I have a choice at all?
-paul
Odd bedfellows--pro and anti-nudity unite. (Score:3, Interesting)